The Cocktail Waitress by James M Cain ***

“Joan White…formerly Joan Medford…formerly Joan Woods…you are under arrest, for the crime of murder…” 

Joan tells her side of this story in The Cocktail Waitress by James M Cain. Both Joan’s husbands and her lover are dead with the causes of death left in question. Beyond these unsolved mysteries, when Joan’s story ends, she is pregnant with a second child. Joan prays this child will be spared all the cruelties she and her first child endured. Unfortunately, Joan had been taking Thalidomide to help her through her difficult pregnancy. The story ends before the Thalidomide mystery is resolved.

I am old enough to remember Thalidomide: its sale to mothers for morning sickness and the massive birth defects this caused. Cain wrote this book in the 1970s long after the Thalidomide scandal broke and it was taken off the market, so this sets the story in the 1950s or 1960s. However, the cocktail waitresses wore hot pants which Mary Quant invented in the mid-1960s. Unfortunately for the timeline and the narrative, the UK banned Thalidomide in the early-1960s, and the US never approved the drug at all.

In addition to the unresolved deaths, and the unrealistic introduction of Thalidomide, I found Joan an unbelievable character. Sometimes she is a ruthless gold-digger and other times she is deeply concerned with ethics and justice. Sometimes she is naïve and gullible, while at other time she is worldly-wise and scheming. This is one of the few (only) Cain books with a female POV character and for good reason.

This book was lost after Cain’s death in 1977. Through detective work and editing, it was published in 2012. Unless you are a dedicated Cain fan, I recommend you stick with the New York Times review: “It certainly entertains, but it also disappoints.”

Check out https://amazon.com/shop/influencer-20171115075 for book recommendations.