How Charles Ardai Picked Up a Cocktail Waitress

This past week noir-heads were were thrilled to learn that Hard Case Crime's Charles Ardai had found a lost James M. Cain novel called The Cocktail Waitress, and will be publishing it next fall. I first read about this supposedly "lost" novel in Roy Hoopes's excellent biography Cain, never imagining we'd all have the chance to enjoy it. Ardai, who's clearly the Indiana Jones of pulp fiction, agree to talk about how he tracked the novel down.

Secret Dead Blog: How did you manage to unearth The Cocktail Waitress manuscript? Can you tell me more about the "detective work" involved?

Charles Ardai: A little more than nine years ago, when I first approached Max Allan Collins with the idea of writing for Hard Case Crime (this was a year before we signed the original deal with Dorchester, two years before the first Hard Case Crime book ever got published), we were brainstorming about what authors and books might be a good fit for our new line, and he mentioned that he knew of one last crime novel James M. Cain wrote at the end of his life but never published.  He hadn't actually seen or read the book, all he knew was the title: The Cocktail Waitress. But he knew that it existed. And he suggested that it might make a good addition to the Hard Case Crime list.


So I began the process of trying to find The Cocktail Waitress. Talked to the literary agents who handled the estate – they'd heard of the book but didn't have a copy, didn't know where a copy might be found, discouraged my looking because, well, if it had remained unpublished all this time, how good could it be? I thanked them and went on with my search.  Rare book dealers? Collectors of manuscripts? Fellow Cain devotees? I won't say I talked to everyone, but I talked to a good cross-section, and no one had ever read The Cocktail Waitress. You could get a copy of Willeford's forbidden Grimhaven (and I did); you could get a two-volume samizdat edition of Salinger's uncollected short stories (and I did); but not The Cocktail Waitress. There were 34 boxes of writings archived at the Library of Congress, and if I were a Dan Brown character I would have gone down to D.C. and started hunting through them (and wound up chased at gunpoint through the sewers by a maniacal albino, but I digress), but I didn't – if I had, I would have found it sooner, I now realize, but at the time I assumed what they had was all correspondence, tax returns, and legal papers (most of it is). I did travel a bit, to book shows and conferences, and got the word out about what I was looking for, and none of it did a bit of good. Until one day I was out in Hollywood – Hollywoodland, I suppose I should call it, in deference to the opening of Double Indemnity – and talking with my film and TV agent about the quest, and he said, "You know, I inherited the papers of an old Hollywood agent who used to represent all the big authors when they came out here – Faulkner and Fitzgerald and Chandler and Cain…" And Cain, too?  Yes, Cain.  Could he take a look through the old man's files (I'm not being disrespectful, the man had been 91 when he died) and see if maybe, just maybe, there was some germ of a hint of a clue I might follow up on, some thread I could start tugging to see what unraveled? A few days later, I got a package in the mail, containing the manuscript of The Cocktail Waitress. It really was one of those Spielberg moments, as I told Dave Itzkoff in the Times: You open the box and your eyes go wide as your face is bathed in a golden light from below. The thing itself. It was in my hands at last.

SDB: Forgive the hardcore noir nerd question I'm about to ask, but... it sounds like you're working from Cain's original typescript. What does a typed James M. Cain page look like? Pristine? Lots of crossouts? Do the letters practically bleed onto the page? Did you run your fingertips all over the pages in a slightly-orgasmic frenzy? (I would have.)

CA: It wasn't word-processed, that's for damn sure. Hammered out on a manual typewriter, good old metal-struck letters in nice even rows. Most pages clean, but where he had an idea for something to insert, it's scrawled by hand in the left or bottom margin with an arrow showing where he meant the new sentences to go. Cross-outs when he no longer liked a phrase and wanted it changed. He caught word repetitions and fixed them.  On the other hand, there were two places where a bit of math is required and he got it wrong both times – computing how much tip is left after you pay for a drink with a twenty dollar bill, and (more forgivably) computing compounded interest on an old debt. Cain's handwriting is not easy to read, but you have to remember that the man was in his 80s and had had some health problems by then. But when you decipher it, it's good writing. His editorial instincts were spot on – I don't think there was one case where he made a change and I thought, That's a mistake, I preferred it the way he had it originally. One spot of whimsy: When he got to the last page of the novel, he had a lot of blank space left after typing the last line, and he filled it up by typing "T H E E N D" vertically on a slant. You can almost feel the man's relief and joy at having made it to the end.  He knew he was getting on in years and according to his biographer would talk about his own death a lot; he wasn't sure he still had it in him to write a novel. But man, did he ever.

SDB: Cain seems to be having, as they say, a "moment" (what, with the Mildred Pierce mini-series and snazzy retro Vintage reprints). What is it about his work that keeps it relevant and fresh all of these decades later?

CA: Cain's work draws you in irresistibly, and I've tried over the years to figure out how he does it, but it's hard to say.  Something about the way he inhabits his characters' voices, something about the intimate first-person narration, something about the sense of desperation – you can feel his characters sweating and breathing hard. There's usually an element of sex, of course, and one of economic hunger, and since when have lust and greed ever been boring? There's just something elemental about Cain, like you're reading about men and women stripped bare, the human animal at its most raw.  The emotions aren't subtle. His people are cruel, they're passionate, and when they sin, they go all the way.

SDB: Are there other "holy grails" out there? Or is The Cocktail Waitress the big one?

CA: This is the big one for me – there's nothing else I've been looking for this long. You hear rumors about a last, lost "black" Travis McGee, but I'm 99% sure that just doesn't exist. There's the original pulp version of THE MALTESE FALCON, but you can find that easily enough if you pay a pulp dealer for it, and I don't think the differences between the original and the final book version are huge.  There are great obscure books I'd love to reprint and the authors have so far said no, but that's not the same thing – the books exist, anyone can find a copy if they really want. This is the last great undiscovered manuscript that I know of.

Photo: "Cocktail Lounge in New Union Hall," J.R. Eyerman, 1942. Courtesy Google/LIFE.