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The Cocktail Waitress (Hard Case Crime)

3.52 of 5 stars 3.52 · rating details · 320 ratings · 104 reviews

Following her husband's death in a suspicious car accident, beautiful young widow Joan Medford is forced to take a job serving drinks in a cocktail lounge to make ends meet and to have a chance of regaining custody of her young son. At the job she encounters two men who take an interest in her, a handsome young schemer who makes her blood race and a wealthy but unwell olde...more

Hardcover, 270 pages

Published September 18th 2012 by Hard Case Crime

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Dec 02, 2012 Lou rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: arc, noir

If you have read many of his novels you will know of his characters, his femme fatales and women stuck in situations where their other half could do with a killing off for a hefty sum of insurance.
His storytelling is about ordinary people mostly men and women, where the women go to extraordinary lengths to win and get what they want, they wish to get that much more out of the plan of things, manipulation of love and deceit their modus operandi.
He writes with a dynamic plot and narrative drive th...more

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Oct 05, 2012 Mark Drew rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book is not as advertised. It is from Hard Case so one would assume a degree of noir, and it has some buried deep in it's pedigree. However in it's reassembled final persona it would appear to be pages of pure Stella Dallas except this kid is a boy named Tad - but again this is only slightly correct. This is all going to a very different place; way though and beyond the world of Helen Trent and on to a dark plane of dread. What we have here, buried under yards of soap opera text is a true h...more

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Aug 09, 2012 Samantha Glasser rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, pulps

Joan Medford is a widow; her husband died on a drunken binge and crashed a borrowed car. Mrs. Medford is being watched by the suspicious eye of the law, but a friendly officer takes one look at her womanly body and recommends she wait tables at a restaurant and bar called The Garden. She gets the job and makes good immediately, which is good since she has a young son to care for.

But men always get in the way. A young, handsome man name Tom with grabby hands sets his sights on Joan, and in spite...more

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Mar 09, 2013 Alecia rated it 3 of 5 stars

Well, I think the word "lurid" might be an apt one for describing this melodrama imbued with tinges of horror. This was the last unpublished work by James M. Cain. He was supposedly writing this at age 82, suffering from angina, which is what one of the novel's principal male characters, Earl K. White, suffers from. Our narrator is Joan Medford, and the book opens at her husband's funeral. He was an abusive drunk who dies in a car accident, leaving her and and her young son penniless.There is so...more

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Feb 17, 2013 Gloria Feit rated it 5 of 5 stars

This was the last book written, at age 83, by James M. Cain, who died in 1977, the man who penned such classic, unforgettable novels as Mildred Pierce and The Postman Always Rings Twice, and one never before published. And kudos to Hard Case Crime for doing so now, nearly four decades later, for it is a fitting conclusion to the man’s oeuvre. Along with Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, he helped create the noir genre, with this a typical example.

The first-person narrator, Joan Medford, twe...more
This was the last book written, at age 83, by James M. Cain, who died in 1977, the man who penned such classic, unforgettable novels as Mildred Pierce and The Postman Always Rings Twice, and one never before published. And kudos to Hard Case Crime for doing so now, nearly four decades later, for it is a fitting conclusion to the man’s oeuvre. Along with Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, he helped create the noir genre, with this a typical example.

The first-person narrator, Joan Medford, twenty-one years old, is burying her husband on page one of the book. The abusive drunk had crashed into a culvert headwall one night at 70 miles an hour, leaving her with a small boy to raise, alone and penniless. [In those days, there were few resources for a teenage girl who found herself pregnant, and many ‘shotgun weddings’ were the result, of which this had been one.] His family had never liked her, and her husband’s sister, herself unable to have children, covets Tad, Joan’s adorable three-year-old boy, and readily agrees to care for him while Joan attempts to get a job to keep a roof over their heads, and immediately gets one working as a cocktail waitress in a nearby restaurant/tavern/”ginmill” in Hyattsville, Maryland [a better scenario than mowing lawns, her next choice.]

One is quickly orientated to the time frame when a tonic on the rocks ordered by her first customer costs 85 cents. And initially the writing seems dated as well, but once the reader gets into rhythm of the book, its pleasure derives from much more than nostalgia.

That new customer, Earl K. White III, is just one of two men Joan meets her first day on the job. He is an older man, a wealthy widower, kind and generous though nearly repulsive to her. The second is a hunky young man who has dreams but no resources. They are both immediately enamored of her, and the descriptions of her seductive appearance in her “uniform” which arouses such reactions are made dramatically, and graphically, clear in the wonderful, and wonderfully evocative, cover art. She is confronted by a choice between love/lust or a chance at a comfortable, respectable life for her and her adored son. There is a hint of sinister events to come, with a cop who is not satisfied with a verdict of accidental death and harbors suspicions of murderous intent. The novel has an ending straight out of the arsenal of this author of Double Indemnity, which the reader won’t see coming. The book is hard to put down, and is recommended.
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Jan 28, 2013 James Thane rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: crime-fiction, hard-case-crime, hard-boiled

James M. Cain is best known for his three classic novels: Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice and Mildred Pierce. The Cocktail Waitress is his last book and was unpublished at the time of his death. Cain was still working on the book, although he had completed several drafts of it, and there is no way of knowing at this point whether he was happy with the work he had done and whether he thought it was ready for publication. The fact that he had not yet submitted it by the time he di...more James M. Cain is best known for his three classic novels: Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice and Mildred Pierce. The Cocktail Waitress is his last book and was unpublished at the time of his death. Cain was still working on the book, although he had completed several drafts of it, and there is no way of knowing at this point whether he was happy with the work he had done and whether he thought it was ready for publication. The fact that he had not yet submitted it by the time he died, would suggest, though, that he was probably not yet ready to send it out into the world.

The manuscript disappeared for a number of years and was later discovered by Charles Ardai, the editor of the Hard Case Crime series. Ardai assembled from Cain's various drafts the version that now appears.

The book contains echoes of Cain's three classics, most notably Mildred Pierce. In both cases, the protagonist is a younger woman, suddenly left alone to fend for herself and her children as best she can. Thankfully, in this case the child in question is not nearly as intolerable as Mildred Pierce's daughter, Veda.

The book opens with the death of a man named Ron Medford. He leaves a widow, Joan, and a young son. Medford was a drunk and an abusive husband and Joan is not going to waste a lot of tears on his passing. She finds herself in trouble, however, because a young, ambitious detective believes that she was somehow complicit in her husband's death, even though he died, drunk, smashing a borrowed car into an abutment.

In addition to being hounded by the police, Joan has no way of supporting herself. Reluctantly, she farms her young son out to her sister and takes a job as a cocktail waitress, wearing suggestive clothing and doing what it takes to survive. Before long, two men are competing for her affections. One is an elderly rich widower; the other is a handsome but penniless schemer. This sets the stage for a great deal of mischief as Joan struggles to make the best of a bad situation and put her life back on the track to happiness. As is usually the case in a novel by James M. Cain, good luck with that.

This is a good read, though it is not nearly the equal of his three classics. But those who have enjoyed Cain's earlier books will certainly want to look for it.

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Jan 26, 2013 William rated it 5 of 5 stars

In Mildred Pierce, James M. Cain’s Depression-era novel, the title character is obsessed with money and status and tries to use her success as a businesswoman to buy the affection of her avaricious, self-centered daughter, Veda; she even embezzles from her own company to shower Veda with gifts.

In The Postman Always Rings Twice, Cain’s character Cora Papadakis engineers the death of her husband so she can take over his business. And in Double Indemnity, Phyllis Nirdlinger, the wife of an oil man...more

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Dec 31, 2012 Ted rated it 3 of 5 stars

This book jumped off the shelf at me at my local country library. Yes Renee, I said library. Remember them?

The flowing cursive and busty femme fatale illustration immediately marks it as 50s pulp fiction. The jacket copy says it's the lost/last novel of Noir master James M. Cain. And the story, like the name, "Cocktail Waitress", is clearly from another time. This is the world of private dicks, double crosses and snappy dialogue. Our heroine, Joan Medford, narrates the story in the familiar voic...more

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Dec 20, 2012 Tony rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction-crime-detection

THE COCKTAIL WAITRESS. (2012). James M. Cain. ***.
According to the publisher’s blurbs on the jacket, this was the last novel that Cain wrote before his death, but only recently found among his papers. Cain was 85-years old when he was working on this book, and was still producing edited copy. The book is complete as issued, but really doesn’t reflect the genius of Cain as demonstrated in his earlier works, such as “Double Indemnity,” or “The Postman Always Rings Twice.” This work harks back to...more THE COCKTAIL WAITRESS. (2012). James M. Cain. ***.
According to the publisher’s blurbs on the jacket, this was the last novel that Cain wrote before his death, but only recently found among his papers. Cain was 85-years old when he was working on this book, and was still producing edited copy. The book is complete as issued, but really doesn’t reflect the genius of Cain as demonstrated in his earlier works, such as “Double Indemnity,” or “The Postman Always Rings Twice.” This work harks back to Cain’s earliest days as a pulp writer, both in plot and characterizations. The principal character is Joan. Joan is a newly created widow. Her husband, after a fight between the two, got into a borrowed car and drove it into a bridge underpass at seventy miles per hour. Joan suddenly faces the fact that she alone is left to support herself and her three-year-old son Tad. On the day of the funeral for her husband, she is put on to a job opportunity by the police who investigated the death. The job is as a cocktail waitress at a local bar/restaurant. She immediately goes down to the bar and applies, and gets the job. One of the requirements for the job is that she has to wear a revealing outfit. She immediately makes friends with the other waitress and the owner. She is a good mingler and meets a couple of men with whom subsequent relationships develop. She is totally naive, and manages to get into several scrapes through these two men and again attracts the attention of the police. She needs the money, though, and continues to work at the bar, amassing significant tips along the way. This goes on for a while until one of the men – an older guy with lots of money – asks her to marry him. The problem is, however, that he has angina and has been warned by his doctor that the sex act would probably do him in. He doesn’t heed the doctor’s orders and he is found dead after marrying Joan. This is a confusing book with a labyrinthine plot. There is not any resolution at the end either. I got the feeling that the ending was not really ‘the end’ in Cain’s mind, but he didn’t have time to fix it. There is even a potential opening for a sequel to this book, involving the drug thalidomide. It’s not over, even when our narrator thinks it’s over. I don’t think that the discovery of this manuscript was a great event for noir literature, but it does give you an idea of what the early Cain was capable of.
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Nov 18, 2012 Rog Pile rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: james-m-cain

One of Cain’s tentative working titles for this novel was American Beauty. The book reads like a romantic melodrama, but for readers over a certain age who will remember the significance of a drug Joan is given by a friend while she’s on honeymoon, the novel takes on an added dimension. This is a horror story.

Most of the details given here come only from the first 11 pages. The story opens at a funeral where twenty-one year-old mother Joan Medford is burying her husband Ron. Joan hasn’t lost mu...more One of Cain’s tentative working titles for this novel was American Beauty. The book reads like a romantic melodrama, but for readers over a certain age who will remember the significance of a drug Joan is given by a friend while she’s on honeymoon, the novel takes on an added dimension. This is a horror story.

Most of the details given here come only from the first 11 pages. The story opens at a funeral where twenty-one year-old mother Joan Medford is burying her husband Ron. Joan hasn’t lost much sleep over Ron’s death; he’d always resented the marriage he felt forced into when Joan became pregnant, and even as his coffin is being lowered into his grave, Joan and Tad are both still recovering from his last beating. The last time he’d come home drunk Joan had sent him packing and he’d driven a borrowed car into a culvert wall at 70mph.

His sister Ethel makes it clear she believes Joan deliberately sent him to his death. Joan has to bite her tongue as she has to depend on Ethel to take care of her small boy Tad, while she looks for work. Ethel is only too pleased to have Tad in her care; she and her husband Jack Lucas are childless, she’s recently had a hysterectomy, and it’s clear she’s going to have a problem letting go of the boy.

Also at the funeral is Tom Barclay who’s standing in for another cab-driver and is strongly taken by a glimpse at the young widow’s legs.

When Joan gets home, she’s visited by Sergeant Young and Private Church, who advise her that someone has been attempting to blacken her name by spreading rumours about her. The officers had previously met Joan when informing her of her husband’s death; now Joan guesses that Ethel is spreading rumours, attempting to have her declared an ‘unfit mother’ for Tad. Learning that she’ll have to seek work, Sergeant Young suggests she try waitressing at The Garden of Roses restaurant.

Joan quickly makes new friends there, and her looks make her popular with the customers. Two of these are Earl K White the III, a wealthy investor in his sixties, and the young and attractive Tom Barclay. Very quickly this develops into a romantic triangle, with Joan having to decide between an elderly and wealthy investor with a heart condition, who physically revolts her, and an attractive but penniless young man.

Whether the story has the same impact on readers will depend largely on whether the reader is familiar with the name of a drug introduced in the late 1950s and banned in the early 1960s. Some won't get it, though many will continued to read James Ardai’s afterword. This has all the elements of a detective story as Ardai reveals how he learned of Cain’s unpublished novel, the search for it, the discovery that it existed in more than one version, and gives some details of what must have been an agonizing editorial process of collating and refining numerous pieces of a literary jig-saw until the novel had (hopefully) reached a state that it’s author would have been satisfied with.

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Nov 03, 2012 Robert Carraher rated it 4 of 5 stars

“James Cain – faugh! Everything he touches smells like a Billy goat. He is every kind of writer I detest, a faux naïf, a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking. Such people are the offal of literature, not because they write about dirty things, but because they do it in a dirty way. Nothing hard and clean and cold and ventilated. A brothel with a smell of cheap scent in the front parlor and a bucket of slops at the back door. Do I...more “James Cain – faugh! Everything he touches smells like a Billy goat. He is every kind of writer I detest, a faux naïf, a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking. Such people are the offal of literature, not because they write about dirty things, but because they do it in a dirty way. Nothing hard and clean and cold and ventilated. A brothel with a smell of cheap scent in the front parlor and a bucket of slops at the back door. Do I, for God’s sake, sound like that?” – Raymond Chandler

And Chandler was right. While Chandler and before him Hammett wrote what became the hard boiled genre, Cain was lumped into that genre and was considered one of its masters. But looking back, Cain’s books and stories were nothing like the hard boiled detective’s of Chandler and Hammett. Chandler wrote protagonists who walked “...down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero; he is everything.” Cain’s protagonists were mean. They were tarnished and often very afraid. They were ordinary people and rarely heroes.

Although Cain vehemently opposed labeling, he is usually associated with the hardboiled school . In actuality he was creating a new genre or subgenre and one that would rise to the top when the hard boiled school was loosing its interest. What Cain did, along with Cornell Woolrich, Dorothy B. Hughes, Jim Thompson, and David Goodis, was create “noir fiction” or as the French labeled it, “roman noir”. Black books. Noir often feature sleazy character instead of untarnished knights in fedora’s, they were often very tarnished, very often despicable and very often consumed by those mean streets. As Charles Ardai says in the Afterword, Cain was a dabbler in sin and scandal, a purveyor of the lurid and low.” Carnal and criminal. Cain was a “hoary old sensation monger” said Time magazine.

And that is exactly what we get with The Cocktail Waitress. Joan Medford is the protagonist of the novel. Recently widowed when her abusive husband drove off in the wee hours of the morning, in a borrowed car, drunk and angry and killed himself. He’s left Joan, just 21 years old, in a house that is heavily mortgaged, the utilities disconnected, and a young son who also suffered abuse at the hands of his father. Joan has no prospects, and no job experience. What’s worse is the police refuse to close the case. They think that there is a distinct possibility that Joan somehow caused the crash.

One sympathetic Sergeant tells Joan that he can get her a job waiting tables at The Garden, and once the owner sees her, she puts her in a skimpy outfit in the cocktail lounge. There Joan meets two men. The first is a young, handsome dreamer with prospects, Tom Barclay. The other is an older gentleman, a pot belly, tall and gangly and not possessing any sex appeal for Joan. But Earl K. White III is rich. He is successful. And he also falls for Joan. But Earl suffers from angina and has been warned by his doctor that having sex would kill him. Still, every night he leaves Joan a $20 tip, that being a tidy sum in the early ‘60s where the novel is set.

The story is told by Joan, as a tape recording, as she puts it, “It’s in the hope of getting it printed to clear my name of the slander against me, in connection with the job and the marriage it led to and all that came after____” . What follows is Joan in an innocent voice, that displays at once naiveté and a conspirators black heart, detailing the events of the next few months. She tries to justify her motives for marrying Earl, in order to provide her young son with a privileged upbringing. And she tries to justify her love affair with Tom.

Where Cain flourished was in being that Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking. And that shines through in the character of Joan. Joan walks a line between greed and ambition. She justifies her actions as being a sacrifice for her son, but even as she tries to justify it, the greed leaks through. Cain achieved this ‘dirty way’ of writing in his earlier books, Postman, Mildred Pierce, Double Indemnity. By the mid fifties his works no longer garnered the commercial and critical success of his writings of the ‘30s and ‘40s. Cocktail Waitress isn’t a rival of that earlier work. Instead, it does display that ability to walk that fine line with his characters. And that part of it is masterful. The story is somewhat original, but don’t look for ground breaking achievements or new twists on this tale of greed and avarice. The character of Joan even bares a resemblance to Mildred Pierce, but this tale is told from her point of view.

At times the plot wanders, and it’s no wonder when you consider that Charles Ardai used numerous manuscripts, notes and other writings to finally present the story to the public. The words are Cain’s but whether he would have put it together this way is something we may never know. At times the narrator seems to change her voice but it soon comes back to the point at hand. You can almost feel two different versions of the tale being welded together in places. What the reader is left with is a story that differs from most of Cain’s work. It’s not tight, flint-edged and arrow straight. Still, it is vintage Cain and won’t disappoint in the least. And, as if to prove he still had the masters hand, Cain writes an ending that the reader will never see coming. It’s as if that car driven by that drunk, abusive husband was meant to run the reader down. Stephen King called the book a reader’s novel. It is that, and one that fans of noir or hard boiled books will have to have on their shelf. It’s also a novel for the casual fan as the book may just be pedestrian Cain, but it’s still a tale from James M. Cain and a lot of writers today would like to duplicate even pedestrian Cain.

Article first published as Book Review : The Cocktail Waitress by James M. Cain on Blogcritics.

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Oct 09, 2012 Jaylia3 rated it 4 of 5 stars

I know James M. Cain from old movies adapted from his novels, not the books themselves, so as I was reading The Cocktail Waitress I saw the action playing out in shadowy black and white scenes, a fitting way to experience this dark but seductive story. Told in the first person, Joan Medford is a young woman working as a hot-pants clad cocktail waitress so she can earn enough money to bring her son back home. As the book opens her abusive husband has just died in a car accident, her electricity,...more

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Jan 04, 2013 M.R. Dowsing rated it 3 of 5 stars

A bit of a mixed bag, this. Cain's last novel, published here for the first time, apparently existed in a number of complete drafts but not in a definitive final version. The editor has clearly done his best under the circumstances, but it's likely that Cain would have polished it more if he had had the chance.

Although written in 1975, the book raeds more like a story set in the '50s, although the precise time period is never made clear. What's most interesting about the book is the point of vie...more

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Dec 30, 2012 Jeff rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: hardboiled_crime_fiction_read

Once, years ago, while buying a couple of Black Lizard editions of James M. Cain books, the cashier looked at the books, frowned slightly and said, "You know, he only wrote three good novels. The rest are crap." I was as much surprised by this opinion of Cain's oeuvre as I was at finding a bookstore cashier who had actually read all of Cain's novels.

With every subsequent book I've read of Cain's since The Postman Always Rings Twice, Mildred Pierce and Double Indemnity, I've begun to fear that th...more

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Aug 11, 2012 Benjamin Thomas rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: advanced-reading-copy, pulp-era-and-pulp-like, mystery-hard-boiled-crime

James M. Cain is often mentioned, along with Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler, as one of the Big Three of the original hard boiled crime genre from the 30s, 40s and 50s. His most famous works were undoubtedly The Postman Always Rings Twice, Mildred Pierce, and Double Indemnity, all of which were published in the first half of his career. And now, 35 years after his death, we are treated to a lost book, written in his final years...that 'one last book that he had in him' as it were. Accordi...more James M. Cain is often mentioned, along with Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler, as one of the Big Three of the original hard boiled crime genre from the 30s, 40s and 50s. His most famous works were undoubtedly The Postman Always Rings Twice, Mildred Pierce, and Double Indemnity, all of which were published in the first half of his career. And now, 35 years after his death, we are treated to a lost book, written in his final years...that 'one last book that he had in him' as it were. According to the afterword in this book, written by editor Charles Ardai, there were quite a few draft manuscripts uncovered, and so we owe quite a lot to Mr Ardai for his editorial process in piecing together this tale.

As for the story itself, if you have never read a Cain novel, this would be a nice introduction to his style. It fits well with Cain's earlier popular work, still just as hard-boiled and guttural as always. He was known in his day for pushing the boundaries and it's easy, as a reader today, to put yourself back in that time and imagine the shock value of what is on the pages here. In fact there are parts that are a bit uncomfortable even by today's standards. It's been said that after reading one of his novels, you may want to shower, and I suppose that could still hold true. The intriguing thing about this novel is that we read the story from the main character's first person point-of-view, the femme fatale of the piece, Joan Medford. While Joan truthfully explains every action that she takes during the story, in an honest and logical manner, her victimhood contains a subtle subtext. Is she telling us everything? It's like hearing from your best friend about a murder or three that she was involved in...would she be totally honest with you or only tell you the parts that make her look innocent? This works well and leads to a very nice page-turning story right up until the end. It's hard to say much more without spoilers so suffice it to say that I am very happy that the good folks at Hard Case Crime brought this novel to us.
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Apr 25, 2013 Julie Barrett rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: mysteries, finished-2013

I HAD to read this just because it is Cain's final, unpublished novel. Cain is one of my favorite pulp fiction writers - I only love Frederic Brown, Cornell Woolrich & Jim Thompson more. Cain died in 1977 and the editor of this novel wasn't totally clear in the afterward as to when Cain worked on the story - throughout the seventies was what I inferred. All of his other books I have read were written in the 30s, 40s, and 50s - it was a bit weird reading a more modern - for him - story.

Yet f...more I HAD to read this just because it is Cain's final, unpublished novel. Cain is one of my favorite pulp fiction writers - I only love Frederic Brown, Cornell Woolrich & Jim Thompson more. Cain died in 1977 and the editor of this novel wasn't totally clear in the afterward as to when Cain worked on the story - throughout the seventies was what I inferred. All of his other books I have read were written in the 30s, 40s, and 50s - it was a bit weird reading a more modern - for him - story.

Yet for all the talk of hot pants and colored tvs, the story still seemed to be set in the 40s or 50s. I guess Cain was a bit out of touch with the current times of the seventies since he was born in 1892. The story didn't seem to fit in any time period, it was like a hodgepodge of characteristics from many decades. Compared to other crime stories I've read that were written in the seventies - Donald Goines, Lawrence Block, even PD James - this book seemed really dated.

The part that got to me the most was Cain choosing to tell the story of a Russ Meyer-esque 21 yr old cocktail waitress in the first person. It just didn't ring true. Now I'm not saying a man can't write from a woman's perspective or vice versa; there are plenty of novels that I have no issue with the writer being one gender and the protagonist another. But in this case, nope, no way is a man in his 80's able to create a believable character of a 21 yr old woman. All I could picture when reading this book was some voluptuous sex kitten from Beyond the Valley of the Dolls or Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! with the personality of an elderly man.

As for the crime itself, it was pretty weak. Subplots were brought up and discarded. Characters appeared only to vanish and never appear again. It wasn't so much red herrings the author throws out to distract you from the main story. Rather it just felt unfinished and not totally thought out. I wasn't shocked or surprised at the ending - more like "huh , uh, that's it?" I could see the glimmer of an interesting story but it just wasn't there.

There were several "uh...what" moments for me in the book. My favorite by far is when the main character is arrested and at jail she can't wear a bra because none of them are big enough for her - what??? Since I have not ever been arrested I don't know if women get to keep their own bras or have to wear jail issued bras. Assuming the jail issues the bras, I find it impossible to believe there wouldn't be larger bras. It was just such a weird bit of the book. I guess to Cain that was super sexy sexy - a woman going braless. Wearing a prison uniform. Oooh la la, so hot! He also had a really long aside all about the character's waitress uniform. He went on and on about her pantyhose and silky panties and velour hot pants....and no bra there either. I found it funny. Another bit I loved was that the main character's son was named Tab. Haha -oh my God, it is such a funny dated name. Maybe she's supposed to be a big Tab Hunter fan?

If this had not been written by Cain I would have given it a two star rating -and that mainly for all the funny bits rather than the plot itself. But since it is James Cain - albiet as a dirty old man - the book gets 3 stars from me.(less)

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Oct 21, 2012 Jennifer rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: mysteries-thrillers

This is the book that Cain was working on at the time of his death, and the book seemed to vanish with him. A chance remark led to the editor's nine-year search for it.

The book was far from done when it was rediscovered, and it shows. The editor found some drafts of the novel in some boxes of old papers of a dead agent, and some other drafts in the manuscript division of the Library of Congress. None of them were clearly labeled apart from the original draft, and there was a huge amount of varia...more

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Apr 30, 2013 Sallee rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: mystery

I found this an interesting book. It was labeled a mystery and it had a mystery element but it could also pass as a novel. This is the story of Joan Medford who is going to the funeral of her husband who was killed in a car accident when he hit a culvert. He was drunk and had stormed out of the house after an abusive argument. Joan is left without means and has to let her sister-in-law take care of her small son, Tad. Ethel, who can't have children is desparate to keep Tad as her own and tries t...more

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May 09, 2013 Lesley Lodge rated it 4 of 5 stars

An extraordinary book. I love James M Cain's style and nearly all his previous books but this one was drafted in 1975, when he was 83 (there's an afterword in the book by Charles Ardai which explains all this) and was unpublished when he died. This book has been put together from different versions of different section he'd left behind. It has the Cain style, the sense of hurtling towards some fate because the protagonist's life has been dominated by very strong emotional motives. It's not perfe...more

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Sep 12, 2012 Shellie (Layers of Thought) rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: noir fiction & Cain lovers

Recommended to Shellie (Layers of Thought) by: Titan Books

Shelves: element-strong-or-dark-female-chara, genre-mystery-thriller-true-crime, read-in-2012, favorites

4.5 stars actually!

Original review posted at Layers of Thought.

A page-turning posthumous noire novel, by crime fiction master James M. Cain. Told from the first person perspective of the gorgeous Joan Medford – who, the reader is left to decide, is either a victim or a murderer.

About: Joan Medford is a “knock out” - leggy, curvy and smart too; some of the characteristics of a quintessential femme-fatale. However, looks and brains have not stopped her from making mistakes, like her accidental pre...more

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Oct 17, 2012 Melissa rated it 3 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Apr 23, 2013 Jason Bucky Roberts rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Yes

This is a formidable book. Written in the noir style, it has the length and heft of the best books in the genre, books like Chandler's "The Long Goodbye."

Its first person perspective is intriguing. Young widow Joan Medford is broke. She's forced to leave her child with hostile in-laws angling to keep him permanently. She's eyed suspiciously by police in her husband's auto-wreck death. Now she must make her way. And she does it by becoming a cocktail waitress, whose scanty clothes and abilityto t...more This is a formidable book. Written in the noir style, it has the length and heft of the best books in the genre, books like Chandler's "The Long Goodbye."

Its first person perspective is intriguing. Young widow Joan Medford is broke. She's forced to leave her child with hostile in-laws angling to keep him permanently. She's eyed suspiciously by police in her husband's auto-wreck death. Now she must make her way. And she does it by becoming a cocktail waitress, whose scanty clothes and abilityto tease - or not just tease - men are tools she must use to make money.

She rapidly gets entangled with her customers, first a wealthy older man, and then a wild younger one.

She seems on the level as she tells her story, but her actions can be differently construed. Is she hiding something?

There are some anachronism problems with this book. When it takes place isn't clear but the period references drift. Cain's television references are from the 1950s (Howdy Doody, Dinah Shore). Joan buying a cabinet style color television would locate it in the mid 1960s. The hot pants and topless-bar reference puts it in the late 1960s at the earliest and maybe even the 1970s. A certain drug reference narrows it to around 1960. I'm guessing the scantily-clad cocktail waitress theme was inspired by the Playboy Club, which would put this broadly (heh) in the 1960s.

The language, though, often betrays the aging Cain's sensibilities from an earlier time, the heyday of the hard-boiled genre starting in the 1920s. That's when folks talked about someone else getting "sore" about something. People Joan's age in, say, the 1960s, probably wouldn't have used the term. I always found the diction just a bit off. Joan thinks she's positively feasting if a restaurant serves her roast beef, mashed potatoes, peas and salad; food references would ring truer in a Depression-era setting than in 1960s America.

And the aridity of the peoplescape - a lonely protagonist, surrounded by strangers on the make in a world where everyone's understood to be out for themselves - doesn't square as well, particularly for someone Joan's age, with the era Cain puts her in. Youth by the mid-1960s were inundated by rock and roll, the Beatles, civil rights, the Kennedys, pot and Vietnam, a whole cultural revolution of new choices youth were beginning to make. Yet Joan seems to have no awareness of it.

Cain has taken a 1940s world and plunked it down several decades later, and like Dorothy's house plunked down in Oz, it doesn't always fit.

Some problems may have been unavoidable. An afterword notes Cain wrote several different versions of the story, working on it on and off until his death, but never finalized it. Editor Charles Ardai had to make choices about characters' names, steps in the plot and even the ending, because Cain's different versions varied widely. He effectively pieced several versions together.(I caught one error the editor didn't: when Joan is interviewed by one of two police investigators on her case, the interview begins with it being the one and ends with it being the other.)

Still, there's a lot of merit here. Cain was one of the masters of the genre and that definitely shows. (less)

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Apr 15, 2013 Jay Rubenstein rated it 4 of 5 stars

A good, sleazy book, and my favorite genre of mystery: hardboiled crime fiction with an unreliable narrator. A great twist at the ending, but unless you're ten years older than I am, you'll probably have to read the afterword to understand what the twist is. But don't read the afterword first, because it will spoil the surprise -- if that makes any sense. It's not a perfect book. As you'll learn from the afterword, it's not just a posthumous publication, but a posthumous publication assembled fr...more

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Aug 11, 2012 Kipp Poe rated it 5 of 5 stars

Femme Fatale point of view

I was so excited the day this book arrived in the mail and I was not disappointed one bit.The lost novel by James M. Cain and i'm so glad Hard Case Crime found it.

The story is told in first person in the voice of Joan a widow with a child trying to make ends meet. She gets a job as a cocktail waitress but then finds the seedy side of the job. Does she go with what would be best for her and her child or does she fall under the spell of desire?

The book is a very intriguin...more

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Mar 01, 2013 Mary rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is a story told in the first person about a young woman, Joan Medford, down on her luck, alcoholic husband killed in a drunk driving accident, and she takes a job in a cocktail lounge to make ends meet. At the lounge she meets an older man who becomes entranced with her, although she says to herself that she wishes that she liked him more, also a young man who sweeps her off her feet - I've stated it politely, as she in fact lusts after him, despite the fact that he is a classic ne'er do we...more

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Jan 10, 2013 Susie Kelly rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: reviewed

As a huge fan of James Cain – Mildred Pierce and The Postman Always Rings Twice are two of my favourite books – I enjoyed The Cocktail Waitress, but not quite as much as I wanted to.

There's something about Joan that I couldn't like. She's had a tough time; her drunken husband has been killed and one particularly diligent police officer is convinced that she is responsible. She's penniless and friendless, and she's trying to get her child back from her sister-in-law. She takes a job earning money...more

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Oct 03, 2012 Jenn Ravey rated it 4 of 5 stars

If you've mourned the loss of truly good pulp fiction, I've got good news for you: James M. Cain's previously lost final novel, The Cocktail Waitress, doesn't shortchange in atmosphere, story, or a sensual femme fatale. Joan Medford opens her novel - and indeed it is her story - with the recollection of her first husband's funeral. Abusive and alcoholic, Ron Medford pounded on his small son one last time before leaving and crashing his car into a culvert. A rookie cop has it in his head that Joa...more

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Feb 20, 2013 JoAnne Pulcino rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: adult-fiction, noir, adult-mystery

THE COCKTAIL WAITRESS

James M. Cain

How wonderful to reenter the world of noir fiction.

Mr. Cain died before this book could be published, so we don't know how he would feel about the book, but hope he would be happy to be back in the public eye again.

This is certainly not one of his blockbuster classics (MILDRED PIERCE, DOUBLE INDEMNITY or THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE), but it has all the necessary ingredients. A beautiful wife and mother is the main suspect in her abusive husbands death. In o...more

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Jan 06, 2013 Dan R rated it 5 of 5 stars

To find a completed, unpublished novel by Mr. Cain some 35 years after his death is amazing. That he wrote this book when he was in his 80s (and that it contains the same hard-edged prose and damaged characters that inhabit many of his novels) is totally amazing. My hat is off to the editor, Charles Ardai at Hard Case Crime Novels, for spending the 9 years it took to track down the multiple manuscripts of this masterpiece and then editing them into a cohesive book that undoubtedly is Mr. Cain's...more

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Oct 09, 2012 Casee Marie rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012, favorites

My full review on Literary Inklings

The Cocktail Waitress is a fantastic, edge-of-your-seat thrill ride courted by all the elements of a classic crime noir. With his final novel Cain proved that his prowess for writing a brilliantly suspenseful crime novel was still thriving. The protagonist, Joan, narrates the book (recording it, as she says, in order to clear her name of initially unspecified crimes). Her voice effortlessly carries the sordid story, her character so strong and vivid that the re...more

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Pulp Fiction: Lost and found	1	15	Nov 16, 2012 11:48pm
Pulp Fiction: The Cocktail Waitress	12	39	Oct 03, 2012 04:52am
The Indie Exchang...: Win The Cocktail Waitress by James M. Cain (ends 10/6)	2	73	Sep 29, 2012 02:02pm
Pulp Fiction: Win The Cocktail Waitress by the Legendary James M. Cain!	1	11	Sep 28, 2012 08:31am
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About James M. Cain

James Mallahan Cain was an American journalist and novelist. Although Cain himself vehemently opposed labelling, he is usually associated with the hardboiled school of American crime fiction and seen as one of the creators of the 'roman noir'.
He was born into an Irish Catholic family in Annapolis, Maryland, the son of a prominent educator and an opera singer. He inherited his love for music from h...more

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Books by James M. Cain

The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce and Selected Stories

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