The Cocktail Waitress - James M. Cain

James M Cain's was still working through drafts of his final novel The Cocktail Waitress when he died in 1977. The book remained unpublished until Hard Case Crime went looking for this lost book. It was well worth the effort, as the book has a lot of the classic characteristics and features of Cain's greatest works, The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, featuring a femme fatale who is married to a man she doesn't love, who takes up with a younger lover. Joan Medford in The Cocktail Waitress in fact seems to be particularly careless when it comes to husbands and that's something that relentless police are aware of and won't let it go.

Joan’s husband has recently been killed in a road accident after a drunken episode at home. She seems to be incapable also of looking after her 3 year old son Tad, who is left in the care of her sister-in-law. Se is intent on keeping the child for herself and attempts to blacken Jean's reputation with suspicions that it might have been murder. To pick herself up from the mess and debts that Ron had left them in, Joan takes up an offer to work as a waitress at 'The Garden of Roses'. She's a good looking dame, still young at 21, with legs to die for. Dames like that get tips, and sometimes get asked to do a little extra to earn a bit more. When a wealthy stockbroker, widowed Earl K White the Third starts to show an interest and leave large tips, Joanie sees a potential way out of her predicament and a way to get her son back.

There’s just one complication; Tom Barclay, a young man who has been infatuated with Joanie since he chauffeured her at her husband’s funeral. Joanie feels more of an obvious attraction for the younger man and finds herself drawn closer to him when she foolishly puts her house (paid for with White’s money) up as bail bond for one of his friends. By the time she gets to her honeymoon with Earl in London, Joanie knows she’s made a mistake, and it’s not just in marrying a rich man with a heart condition who can’t make love to her and even risks his life just getting excited. She's pregnant and that’s going to put a cramp on her plans.

Part of the attraction of any James M. Cain or indeed many pulp noir crime fiction works, is in its depiction of women. They may appear to be ruthless femme fatales, but you nonetheless have some sympathy for them, as women in these worlds rarely have much in the way of freedom or opportunities. There is a certain ambiguity in this however, Joanie accepting or at least tolerating her lot, uncomplaining about a life that reduces her to marrying a wife-beater and then having to wear revealing outfits working for tips as a cocktail waitress. Cain could even be accused to indulge in lingering over the humiliation of Joan being ogled, groped and stripped by men, arguably for effect and purpose, but it's obviously controversial.

Working in the 1970s and in his eighties at the time of writing The Cocktail Waitress, Cain certainly pushes certain aspects of sleaze and sex further and more explicitly than he would have been able to do in earlier. There is however an unusual twist here involving a controversial medical drug that made headlines around this time which give it very much a contemporary edge, but deep down this is still classic noir; utterly dark, ruthless and thrilling.