The Cocktail Waitress (31 page)

And so on. Not only did Cain try out multiple variations of key scenes, he went back and forth with regard to his choices, with

All of this leaves an editor in the somewhat odd position of having to choose the version of each scene—where there are multiples— that works best in and of itself and also fits best into the overall architecture of the plot. And that means deciding what pieces to leave out, a painful set of decisions. Editing the book was difficult for other reasons as well. Some lines and paragraphs needed to be excised or altered for consistency (are Mr. White’s stepchildren two men and a woman or two women and a man? did his first wife die one year ago or six years?) or for pacing and focus (a digression about Maryland architecture went, as did one about Maryland weather). Some vestigial bits from the earliest drafts, when the book had more of a political dimension, needed to go as they no longer made sense in the final version. On the other hand, a few excellent scenes Cain wrote in his first draft inexplicably didn’t make it into the later drafts and I took the opportunity to fit them back in. And some sections throughout had to be carefully and respectfully edited to ensure that the story flowed logically and effectively from one end to the other, and that the various seeds Cain took such pains to plant early in the book were able to bear the fruit they were meant to by the end.

To be fair, this sort of editing is no more or less than I’ve done with the manuscripts of numerous living authors who have written novels for Hard Case Crime—as any of them could confirm, I am a believer in the old-fashioned role of the editor, in which he doesn’t just acquire a book and toss it out onto store shelves to sink or swim but works closely with the text and with the author to hone every chapter, every line. But this is obviously harder when an author is deceased, doubly so when there are no relatives or friends of the author alive to consult (as there were, for instance, when I edited posthumous work by Roger Zelazny and Donald E. Westlake and Lester Dent and David Dodge).

That said, it’s an editor’s duty to do the best he can by any book he publishes, and it was a privilege to do so in this case. I gave particular care to the sections Cain worked over the most himself, aided by the notes he left behind, which ranged from details of setting (“Does girl launder, or have laundered, any part of uniform? … Does she serve from tray, or carry drinks by hand? … What is normal attitude of owner toward passes &c being made at girls?”) to chapter-by-chapter breakdowns of events and motivations (“Her effort to deal with the $50,000—Purchase of house across the street—Purchase of car— However, if she quits job, means just hasn’t enough—if she keeps job + employs sitter, Harriet will take her to court”) and notes on atmosphere (“Whole book should turn on the hot, close, sweaty, female smell of the cocktail bar … Joan’s setting the theme—her walk, her attachments, the contours of her legs, her smell …”). It almost felt —almost—like having Cain sitting there with me at the keyboard, watching over my shoulder, keeping me on the straight and narrow.

When I finished editing the book and read it over from end to end, I was reminded of why I fell in love with Cain’s writing in the first place. When I was 18 and cracked the slim spine of that first Cain volume I’d found, he stirred something inside me—enough so that I felt compelled to track down and read every word the man ever wrote. That voice, reaching out to me across half a century, grabbed me by the lapels, or perhaps by the throat, and it hasn’t let go yet. If it weren’t for Cain, there would be no Hard Case Crime. There would be no
Little Girl Lost
or
Songs of Innocence,
the two books I’ve written about tormented characters wrestling with their own grim circumstances of desperation and despair. There might, it’s true, be less dirt on bookstore and library shelves, and less sweat, less blood—but also less honesty, less art, and we’d all be the poorer for it.

The brilliant, exquisitely talented Raymond Chandler, Cain’s contemporary and peer (and incidentally the co-author of the
Oscar-nominated screenplay for
Double Indemnity),
was one of those who loathed Cain. He wrote, with characteristic eloquence and pungency, “He is every kind of writer I detest … a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking.” But Chandler had it wrong. He thought this description of Cain was a condemnation, when in fact it was a badge of honor. And everyone was looking.

One last note, a historical one, on the subject of Thalidomide.

For anyone who lived through the 1950s, 60s, 70s, no introduction to this drug is needed—the horrors of children born with truncated arms and legs, or no arms or legs, or other terrible deformities, to mothers who had taken Thalidomide as a sedative or a treatment for morning sickness will be burned irrevocably into their memory. But many readers today may not even know the name.

In 1975, when Cain began writing
The Cocktail Waitress,
readers would have known. The drug was introduced in the late 1950s and became known as a “wonder drug,” until being banned in the early 1960s after thousands of children who had been exposed to the drug
in utero
were born with birth defects. Thalidomide was never approved for sale in the U.S., but millions of tablets were distributed to U.S. doctors as part of a clinical trial. In England, the drug was approved.

Today, Thalidomide is used to treat leprosy.

__________________

*
Readers of
Mildred Pierce
will remember that Cain quotes this same passage in the funeral service in Chapter VIII of that book. Echoes of his earlier work abound here. But it’s not mere repetition—the funerals that begin and end
The Cocktail Waitress
serve a very different function from the one in
Mildred Pierce.
apparently later drafts sometimes reverting to match earlier ones, undoing changes introduced in drafts that appear to come in between.