Capsule Review Archive – The Cocktail Waitress by James M. Cain
This review originally appeared on Goodreads on September 17, 2021.
The Cocktail Waitress
By James M. Cain – Hard Case Crime – September 18, 2012
Review by Robin Marx
Joan Medford is a beautiful 21-year-old with a problem. Her abusive, alcoholic husband just managed to get himself killed in a drunk driving accident. The cops are still poking around the circumstances of his death. She's entrusted the care of her toddler to her sister-in-law while she puts her life back in order, but said sister-in-law is growing increasingly reluctant to return the boy. Joan needs money and fast, so she decides to put her head-turning curves to work at a cocktail bar. Her world-weary coworker clues her in that women with their kind of figures and flexible morals can earn even better money on the side, and the wolfish men in the bar make no attempt to hide their desire for the young widow. Joan's need for financial security sets her on a dangerous path, and not everyone she comes into contact with will survive.
This hard-boiled crime novel is written from the (first-person) perspective of a femme fatale. Or is it? The book reads just as well as the tale of a sympathetic and beleaguered woman in desperate circumstances. This ambiguity is key to the novel's appeal. She could be simply unlucky or a criminal mastermind. Joan runs hot and cold throughout the narrative and does display a ruthless streak when it comes to securing a better life for her and her son, but all of the men in her life are untrustworthy and trying to use her to satisfy their own desires. There's a mean matter-of-factness to the narrative, and sexuality and abuse are presented in a surprisingly frank way for the vaguely 1950s setting. The dialogue is deliciously snappy, in true noir tradition. And even when it looks like the major issues have come to a resolution, Joan's tale ends with one last masterful gut-punch from the author.
The book concludes with a lengthy Afterword by the editor, Charles Ardai, explaining the process by which this book was completed and released decades after James M. Cain's death. While it existed in complete manuscript form, Cain had continued tinkering with it in the years up to his death, and the book as published is a synthesis of multiple drafts left in various states of completion. While many posthumously published works tend to disappoint, this book was most definitely worth the effort to polish up and release. The final product is surprisingly seamless.
Lean, mean, and sexy, this book is an easy recommendation for fans of the hard-boiled crime genre.
★★★★☆
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