I don’t know about all that, but what I do know is that The Cocktail Waitress is worthy of your time and money. It’s the vintage Cain love-death triangle—the stuff that we all know and love him for.
Joan Medford’s worthless drunk of a husband has died in a suspicious car crash. To provide for her son, she takes a job serving drinks and flirting with customers. Two of them pursue her: a rich, but repulsive, old man, and a moronic, but terribly attractive, young man.
The story is told from Joan’s perspective. She claims that she’s recording her tale to “clear my name of the slanders against me, in connection with the job and the marriage it led to and all that came after—always the same charge, the one Ethel flung at me of being a femme fatale who knew ways of killing a husband so slick they couldn’t be proved.”
I found myself teetering back and forth between trusting her and then deciding it was all a pack of lies—then trusting her again. Which is perhaps the genius of the thing: of course it’s a bunch of lies—it’s fiction, but Cain puts you in this spot where you actually care about whether such and such happened or didn’t.
Joan is quite the manipulative storyteller. Always claiming that everything she’s doing is for her son, or, alternately, playing the victim (or both at the same time). Yet I found her likeable—especially when she beat the holy hell out of a customer who thought it would be fun to grope her.
The Cocktail Waitress is a lost novel. Cain wrote it in 1975 at the age of 83, and it’s clear, as the baseball expression goes, that he hadn’t lost anything off the fastball. This is a brisk, gripping story—and why it wasn’t published at the time is a bit of a mystery.
Thankfully, Hard Case Crime Publisher Charles Ardai took the time and effort to unearth all the various manifestations of this manuscript and bring it to the masses. And Ardai’s afterword on the project and Cain’s work in general is worth the price of admission on its own.
Fortunately, it comes after a great novel.
All Due Respect Issue #1 Page 11
