James M. Cain
(Hardcover)
Hard Case Crime, September 2012
ISBN: 978-1-78116-0329
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, secretly takes out an accidental death insurance policy
so she can profit from murdering him.
The pattern is clear: Cain’s femmes fatale are consumed by their desire for wealth and will
commit crimes – even murder – to obtain
it.
It comes as no surprise, then, that Joan Medford, the newly single protagonist of Cain’s last novel, The Cocktail Waitress, wears his acquisitive
femme fatale archetype as snugly as the
short shorts she dons to peddle drinks after
her abusive alcoholic husband dies in a car crash some think she deliberately
arranged.
Joan is more like Mildred than Cora or Phyllis in the reason
she wants the loot. Like Pierce, to Joan it’s a family affair: she needs money
to get permanent custody of her son, who is temporarily in the care of her
sister-in-law, Ethel, one of the main proponents of the theory Joan bumped off her
husband, and she is determined to wrest control of the child from his mother.
But that’s where the parallel ends. Unlike Pierce, Joan is, to
quote one minor character, “a goddamn good-looking gold digger” who uses her
sexual allure to win the financial stability she needs to be together with her
son.
What’s more, Joan is the only one of Cain’s women who speaks
directly to readers without a narrative intermediary. Mildred Pierce’s sad tale
of unrequited mother love unreels in classic narrative style, through the eyes
of an unnamed omniscient third person observer. In Double Indemnity, Phyllis
Nirdlinger’s duplicity and viciousness is revealed through the first person
account of her insurance broker accomplice, Walter Huff. And Cora Papadakis’s
maneuverings in Postman are related in first person by the drifter who becomes
her paramour and crime partner, Frank Chambers.
Joan Medford makes it clear to readers in the very first
chapter that she is telling her story to them in her own words “in the hope of
getting it printed to clear my name of the slanders against me . . . All I know
to do is tell it and tell it all, including some things no woman would
willingly tell.”
Complicating Joan’s story is the fact that the impoverished widow
has two rivals competing for her hand almost before her dead husband is
underground: Tom Barclay, a lustful but penniless stud who is equally full of testosterone
and misdirected ambition, and Earl K. White III, a wealthy stockbroker with a bum
ticker that will need more than an application of tape if he manages to work
his way between Joan’s well-shaped thighs.
You can easily guess
which one Joan targets.
As soon as White pops the question, Joan makes it clear to
the reader where she is going:
“What I really felt . . . was pure exultation, that I’d put
it over at last, this gigantic plan I’d had, that would give my [son] to me, on
a lawn that he could play on, in a house we both could live in, as part of a
world that we could be proud of.”
From the perspective of middle-class morality, Joan is
unquestionably a hustler well worthy of her sister-in-law’s contempt: she is
open – at least with her closest friend – about her reasons for trying to snare
the wealthy but infirm White, and equally open about her lust for the youthful
but feckless Barclay. As she tells the reader on several occasions, she has a
short fuse and is quick to violence when crossed. We even see an example of her
barely concealed rage when Barclay, who has been drinking heavily, puts his
hand on her leg while she is waiting on his party at the bar. She furiously
attacks him and hammers him to the floor before she is dragged off by others.
But nobody is without blame in this bleak noir; almost without exception, the
characters that appear in The Cocktail Waitress are amoral and twisted: Joan’s
best friend, Liz, is little more than a hooker who uses her waitressing job to
line up sexual “dates” for money; her lover, Tom Barclay not only sexually
assaults Joan on two separate occasions, but also inadvertently steers her into
offering her house as surety for a politician pal who has been arrested for
corruption; Barclay’s chum immediately jumps bail, putting one of Joan’s few
assets at risk.
And the elderly White, despite his initially saintly
demeanor, turns out to be obsessed with getting into Joan’s skin-tight pants,
even at the risk of triggering an angina attack that would make an orgasm
fatal. Despite his illness and advanced
years, White, too, attempts to take Joan by force – and, when he is foiled, he
turns to prostitutes in an effort to satisfy his libido.
The Cocktail Waitress is peopled with as black-hearted a
group of villains as Cain has ever created. And front and center among them is
our “heroine,” Joan Medford.
Before the 254-page novel is done, Joan is not only
suspected of killing her first husband, but also of slaying two other men. And
in a twist ending befitting our twisted protagonist, Cain sets her up for a particularly horrific type of cosmic justice. No
spoilers here, except to say that the way Joan begins to relieve her stress late
in the book foreshadows a development that isn’t even hinted at until the very
last page of the novel – with a deliciously ironic conclusion that I, for one,
found remarkably effective.
Cain started The Cocktail Waitress in 1975 and
worked on it until his death in 1977 without ever quite polishing the
manuscript sufficiently for publication. He showed versions to acquaintances
and his agent, but never managed to pull together a final, comprehensive draft.
It was kicking around in a variety of more-or-less finished versions for years,
but didn’t come together in publishable form until long-time Cain enthusiast Charles
Ardai (Little Girl Lost, Fifty-to-One) pieced it together
from Cain’s extensive notes and the various fragments he tracked down.
Last September, a final version of the book edited by Ardai
finally saw publication under his Hard Case Crime imprint, and the finished
product is simply sensational: The
Cocktail Waitress boasts the Cain
universe’s signature blend of figures from high and low society: the
priggish and the sex-obsessed. It also features the violent undercurrent of
passion that seems to throb like a runaway pulse just under the surface of most
of Cain’s novels.
I have always loved Cain for his use of language – not the
poetic phrasing of a Keats or Shelly, but the terse, hard-boiled argot of the
petty grifter, the criminal, the hustler on the make. Here you will find
exactly that deft use of dialog, in which the high-born and low-born each have
their own unique diction and vocabularies, but the words they use can’t mask
the base nature of their motivation. The Cocktail Waitress is true to
this fundamental Cain tradition, in which bourgeois manners shroud greed,
vanity and sexual desire with only the sheerest veil of civilization.
As Cain himself put it in the notes that Ardai consulted
while editing the novel: “[The] whole book should turn on the hot, close,
sweaty female smell of the cocktail bar . . . Joan’s setting the theme – her
walk, her attachments, the contours of her legs, her smell . . .”
For a novel that has been in limbo nearly 36 years, the
novel is as sweet a read today as if Cain had finished it last week. In every
respect, The Cocktail Waitress is a five-noose keeper!