The Cocktail Waitress

The Cocktail Waitress is a novel by James M. Cain published posthumously in 2012 by Hard Case Crime press.

The last of Cain's novels, this so-called "lost" work was assembled from a number of undated manuscripts by archivist and novelist Charles Ardai.

The Cocktail Waitress resembles Cain's 1941 novel Mildred Pierce in plot and theme, but, in contrast, employs a first-person point-of-view to tell the tragic story of heroine Joan Medford rather than the third-person narration he used in the earlier work.

Publication history
Upon completing his penultimate novel, The Institute (1976) in 1975, Cain began writing a historical novel story similar in plot and theme to his successful 1941 novel Mildred Pierce. This work would appear 37 years later as The Cocktail Waitress.

Cain, conflicted as to what narrative point-of-view he would employ, began the story using the third-person. Unsatisfied with the effect, Cain “once and for all” committed himself to a first-person confessional narration, rewriting the work in the “lingo” of his female protagonist, Joan Medford.

Cain worked on The Cocktail Waitress throughout 1975. He sent a manuscript to his agent Dorothy Olding. Publisher Orlando Petrocelli requested a rewrite of the ending, and when Cain failed to deliver satisfactory edits, Petrocelli and Olding shelved the novel. The Cocktail Waitress existed in several incomplete and undated drafts when Cain died on October 27, 1977, at age 85.

Novelist and archivist Charles Ardai was alerted to the existence of these manuscripts by Cain biographer Roy Hoopes in 2002. He discovered the “long lost” drafts and assembled The Cocktail Waitress, published in 2012, 35 years after the author's death.

Critical assessment
Critic Len Gurkin on The Cocktail Waitress:

"If even Cain’s best novels were, as Joyce Carol Oates sternly insists in a 1967 essay, a little too trashy to be literature — “there is always something sleazy, something eerily vulgar and disappointing in his work” — his later work fails even to be sleazy. No longer eerily vulgar, these tedious efforts are instead eerily amateurish, even incompetent. Where did the ear go? Where is the vaunted craft? I know of no other major writer who so completely lost his touch. Which brings us to The Cocktail Waitress...”"

Literary critic Michael Connelly on The Cocktail Waitress:

"“... the femme fatale tells her own story, the narration coming direct from Joan in the form of a self-taped statement setting the record straight. The setup leaves the reader to decide whether Joan is telling the truth, or only the truth as she sees it…the plot seams occasionally show or are seen coming far in advance of the denouement. Though narrated by Joan, the story is at times stilted and awkward, as if the author has lost the thread of his character’s voice."