Double Jeopardy: A Classic Noir Novel of Crime, Punishment, and Legal Suspense - Paperback

by Martin M. Goldsmith (Author)

Double Jeopardy is Martin M. Goldsmith's first novel, a sharp early noir story built around one brutal question: can a man be punished twice for the same crime? Before Goldsmith wrote Detour, one of the bleakest and most influential works of American noir, he wrote this compact novel of ordinary life crushed beneath impersonal judgment, suspicion, and the machinery of consequence. Contemporary jacket copy for the original Macaulay edition framed the book around the same central premise: whether "enlightened justice" can still visit ruin on a man more than once for the same offence.

First published in 1938, Double Jeopardy belongs naturally in the Black Curtain line because it is not a puzzle mystery or a polite courtroom entertainment. It is a story of pressure: legal, social, psychological, and moral. Goldsmith's subject is not only crime, but the way a damaged system can turn guilt, punishment, fear, and reputation into a trap from which ordinary people cannot easily escape. For readers of classic noir fiction, Depression-era crime novels, legal suspense, early American hardboiled fiction, and the author of Detour, Double Jeopardy is a valuable rediscovery from a writer whose short list of novels left a long noir shadow.