mae
09-20-2011, 06:05 AM
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/sep/20/lost-novel-james-m-cain-discovered
"The Holy Grail" for crime fans – a lost novel by The Postman Always Rings Twice author James M Cain – has been discovered, and is set for publication next autumn.
Telling of a beautiful young widow who takes a job in a cocktail bar after her husband dies under "suspicious circumstances", The Cocktail Waitress was the last book written by Cain before his death in 1977, but it was never published. Charles Ardai, the founder of American publisher Hard Case Crime, was alerted to its existence by the author Max Allan Collins, and has spent the last nine years tracking down the original manuscript and securing rights in the novel.
He called his discovery "like finding a lost manuscript by Hemingway or a lost score by Gershwin – that's how big a deal this is". The author of classic crime novels including Mildred Pierce – adapted into the acclaimed HBO miniseries starring Kate Winslet – and Double Indemnity, Cain, together with Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, "is universally considered one of the three greatest writers of noir crime fiction who ever lived," said Ardai. The Cocktail Waitress is "the Holy Grail" for crime fans, he added.
Narrated by the widow Joan Medford, who meets two new men in the cocktail bar where she is working – a "handsome young schemer", and a wealthy older man she marries. "Why am I taping this?" Joan says. "It's in the hope of getting it printed to clear my name of the charges made against me … of being a femme fatale who knew ways of killing a husband so slick they couldn't be proved. Unfortunately, they cannot be disproved either … All I know to do is to tell it and tell it all, including some things no woman would willingly tell … "
Cain himself said in a 1976 interview that "in my stories there's usually stuff that you wouldn't think any human being would tell at all". "I've just finished a book called The Cocktail Waitress, where the girl tells her story, and there's some pretty intimate stuff," the author said. "This girl, like most women, is very reticent about some things – you know, the sex scenes, where she spent the night with a guy. I had her tell enough so that what happened was clear and, at the same time, not go into details. Once she lingered with a sex scene, as if she wanted to tell it."
Cain also mentioned The Cocktail Waitress in an interview with John McAleer, collected in the recently published Packed and Loaded: Conversations with James M Cain, in which he called it "a pretty good lively story" but said he was working through the plot again. "I made a mistake on the story, thinking that my lovers were this woman and her little boy – little three-year-old boy – that figured as her motivation for her job in the cocktail bar that she had to pay for his board, with a sister-in-law that she had, after her husband – this woman's brother – got killed, and it turned out I made a mistake. They were not the real lovers. The real lovers in the story were this man that came in – the very first day a man came in and she fell for him somewhat. And he for her, but … I had her using him as a means to an end. Using him as a means of having a home for this child that she had. Where he was the big emotional fact in her life, and so the story has to be done over. It is half done over already."
Hard Case Crime said that handwritten notes and edits appear in the margins of numerous pages of the manuscript, and that Cain was working on revisions until close to the end of his life. Ardai told the New York Times that he is currently trying to reconcile different versions of the ending left by Cain, and to decipher some of the notes. "He wasn't a doctor, but he wrote like one," said the publisher. "With a magnifying glass, I can figure it out."
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/19/rediscovered-novel-by-mildred-pierce-author-will-be-released/
The news was mixed for “Mildred Pierce” at Sunday’s Primetime Emmy Awards, where that HBO mini-series won awards for Kate Winslet and the supporting actor Guy Pearce, but lost the overall category to the PBS presentation of “Downton Abbey.”
Fans of the novel on which the series is based and of its author, James M. Cain, can take solace in a new development: a recently unearthed and previously unpublished manuscript by Cain, whose novels also include “The Postman Always Rings Twice” and “Double Indemnity,” will be released next year by Hard Case Crime, the imprint said on Monday.
Charles Ardai, the founder and editor of Hard Case Crime, said in a telephone interview that he had been alerted to the existence of the work, “The Cocktail Waitress,” by the mystery writer Max Allan Collins. Mr. Ardai said he found further references to “The Cocktail Waitress” in the writing of Cain, who died in 1977, and in a biography by Roy Hoopes. But he was unable to obtain the manuscript for nearly five years until it turned up in a set of papers that were inherited by Mr. Ardai’s agent from another literary representative who worked with bygone Hollywood writers.
Mr. Ardai said that when he finally received a copy of Cain’s manuscript for “The Cocktail Waitress,” “it was this wonderful moment like out of a Spielberg movie, where you open the chest and the light comes up from inside, and you don’t ask the question, ‘Where is the light coming from?’ ”
The novel, which Cain was working on at the end of his life, was described by Mr. Ardai as a hybrid of themes from “Mildred Pierce” and “The Postman Always Rings Twice.” It chronicles a young widow named Joan Medford, whose husband has died under suspicious circumstances and who is left to rear their child. She takes a job in a cocktail lounge where she falls into a love triangle with a younger, handsome man and an older, wealthier suitor and, as Mr. Ardai put it, “You know that older rich guy is not going to come to a happy end.”
Hard Case Crime, which has released unpublished works by writers like Donald Westlake and Lester Dent, as well as new works of pulp fiction by authors like Stephen King, plans to release “The Cocktail Waitress” next fall.
Among the tasks remaining for Mr. Ardai is to reconcile the different versions of the novel’s ending that Cain left behind, and to decipher some of Cain’s more cryptic handwritten margin notes.
“He wasn’t a doctor,” Mr. Ardai said of Cain, “but he wrote like one. With a magnifying glass, I can figure it out.”
"The Holy Grail" for crime fans – a lost novel by The Postman Always Rings Twice author James M Cain – has been discovered, and is set for publication next autumn.
Telling of a beautiful young widow who takes a job in a cocktail bar after her husband dies under "suspicious circumstances", The Cocktail Waitress was the last book written by Cain before his death in 1977, but it was never published. Charles Ardai, the founder of American publisher Hard Case Crime, was alerted to its existence by the author Max Allan Collins, and has spent the last nine years tracking down the original manuscript and securing rights in the novel.
He called his discovery "like finding a lost manuscript by Hemingway or a lost score by Gershwin – that's how big a deal this is". The author of classic crime novels including Mildred Pierce – adapted into the acclaimed HBO miniseries starring Kate Winslet – and Double Indemnity, Cain, together with Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, "is universally considered one of the three greatest writers of noir crime fiction who ever lived," said Ardai. The Cocktail Waitress is "the Holy Grail" for crime fans, he added.
Narrated by the widow Joan Medford, who meets two new men in the cocktail bar where she is working – a "handsome young schemer", and a wealthy older man she marries. "Why am I taping this?" Joan says. "It's in the hope of getting it printed to clear my name of the charges made against me … of being a femme fatale who knew ways of killing a husband so slick they couldn't be proved. Unfortunately, they cannot be disproved either … All I know to do is to tell it and tell it all, including some things no woman would willingly tell … "
Cain himself said in a 1976 interview that "in my stories there's usually stuff that you wouldn't think any human being would tell at all". "I've just finished a book called The Cocktail Waitress, where the girl tells her story, and there's some pretty intimate stuff," the author said. "This girl, like most women, is very reticent about some things – you know, the sex scenes, where she spent the night with a guy. I had her tell enough so that what happened was clear and, at the same time, not go into details. Once she lingered with a sex scene, as if she wanted to tell it."
Cain also mentioned The Cocktail Waitress in an interview with John McAleer, collected in the recently published Packed and Loaded: Conversations with James M Cain, in which he called it "a pretty good lively story" but said he was working through the plot again. "I made a mistake on the story, thinking that my lovers were this woman and her little boy – little three-year-old boy – that figured as her motivation for her job in the cocktail bar that she had to pay for his board, with a sister-in-law that she had, after her husband – this woman's brother – got killed, and it turned out I made a mistake. They were not the real lovers. The real lovers in the story were this man that came in – the very first day a man came in and she fell for him somewhat. And he for her, but … I had her using him as a means to an end. Using him as a means of having a home for this child that she had. Where he was the big emotional fact in her life, and so the story has to be done over. It is half done over already."
Hard Case Crime said that handwritten notes and edits appear in the margins of numerous pages of the manuscript, and that Cain was working on revisions until close to the end of his life. Ardai told the New York Times that he is currently trying to reconcile different versions of the ending left by Cain, and to decipher some of the notes. "He wasn't a doctor, but he wrote like one," said the publisher. "With a magnifying glass, I can figure it out."
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/19/rediscovered-novel-by-mildred-pierce-author-will-be-released/
The news was mixed for “Mildred Pierce” at Sunday’s Primetime Emmy Awards, where that HBO mini-series won awards for Kate Winslet and the supporting actor Guy Pearce, but lost the overall category to the PBS presentation of “Downton Abbey.”
Fans of the novel on which the series is based and of its author, James M. Cain, can take solace in a new development: a recently unearthed and previously unpublished manuscript by Cain, whose novels also include “The Postman Always Rings Twice” and “Double Indemnity,” will be released next year by Hard Case Crime, the imprint said on Monday.
Charles Ardai, the founder and editor of Hard Case Crime, said in a telephone interview that he had been alerted to the existence of the work, “The Cocktail Waitress,” by the mystery writer Max Allan Collins. Mr. Ardai said he found further references to “The Cocktail Waitress” in the writing of Cain, who died in 1977, and in a biography by Roy Hoopes. But he was unable to obtain the manuscript for nearly five years until it turned up in a set of papers that were inherited by Mr. Ardai’s agent from another literary representative who worked with bygone Hollywood writers.
Mr. Ardai said that when he finally received a copy of Cain’s manuscript for “The Cocktail Waitress,” “it was this wonderful moment like out of a Spielberg movie, where you open the chest and the light comes up from inside, and you don’t ask the question, ‘Where is the light coming from?’ ”
The novel, which Cain was working on at the end of his life, was described by Mr. Ardai as a hybrid of themes from “Mildred Pierce” and “The Postman Always Rings Twice.” It chronicles a young widow named Joan Medford, whose husband has died under suspicious circumstances and who is left to rear their child. She takes a job in a cocktail lounge where she falls into a love triangle with a younger, handsome man and an older, wealthier suitor and, as Mr. Ardai put it, “You know that older rich guy is not going to come to a happy end.”
Hard Case Crime, which has released unpublished works by writers like Donald Westlake and Lester Dent, as well as new works of pulp fiction by authors like Stephen King, plans to release “The Cocktail Waitress” next fall.
Among the tasks remaining for Mr. Ardai is to reconcile the different versions of the novel’s ending that Cain left behind, and to decipher some of Cain’s more cryptic handwritten margin notes.
“He wasn’t a doctor,” Mr. Ardai said of Cain, “but he wrote like one. With a magnifying glass, I can figure it out.”