Forgotten Books: The Embezzler - James M. Cain

This post originally appeared on November 20, 2007.

James M. Cain is one of those authors whose work I haven’t sampled extensively, nor do I know all that much about him and his career. More than a quarter of a century ago I read his novels THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE and SERENADE and liked them both, especially POSTMAN, which is still one of my favorite noir novels. I have Roy Hoopes’ massive biography of Cain but haven’t read it yet.

I decided to try another of his novels, and when I looked around I realized I had THE EMBEZZLER in three different editions: its original appearance in the hardback omnibus THREE OF A KIND, the Avon paperback reprint shown here, and the excellent Gorman and Greenberg anthology PULP MASTERS, which is where I actually read it.

THE EMBEZZLER is narrated by Dave Bennett, a likable and bright-but-not-too-bright former college football star who’s the vice-president of a California bank. He falls in love with the wife of the head teller who works for him, and it just so happens that said teller has been steadily embezzling money from the bank. Dave and the sexy Sheila set out to deal with both of those problems, and you just know things aren’t going to work out the way they intend. Sure enough, every twist of the plot just makes things worse for them, until things get desperate enough for gunplay and a considerable amount of slam-bang action.

This is a short novel in the best sense of the term, with plenty of plot and character but not an ounce of padding. Cain moves the story right along and never lets the reader’s interest flag. I saw the major plot twist coming before it got there, but the ending took me a little by surprise. I thought it worked really well, though. I don’t know how this book ranks in the general consensus of Cain’s body of work, but I really enjoyed it and Ed Gorman’s intro to it in PULP MASTERS makes it clear that he did, too. I’ll be reading more of Cain’s novels, and I hope it won’t be another twenty-five years before I get to the next one.

UPDATE: Well, it wasn't twenty-five years -- I read Cain's novel SINFUL WOMAN a while back. I still haven't read that Hoopes biography of him, but I still have a copy of it (a different one, since this post comes from before the fire) and I will one of these days. I have quite a few of Cain's novels on my shelves, too, and hope to get around to them eventually.

James M. Cain Update

Integral works by James M. Cain, now available as ebooks

James M. Cain has been called one of the most important writers of American crime fiction. As one of the founding father of the hardboiled and noir genres, Cain’s influential novels inspired countless writers, filmmakers, and readers around the world.

MysteriousPress.com and Open Road Media are proud to announce the ebook release of twelve of Cain’s later works.

Similar to Cain’s earlier works, The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, these later stories are filled with greed, regret, lust and murder, and his characters are portrayed with the same complexity and desperation.

About the Books: The Moth is a sweeping tale of love, loss, and the pursuit of beauty during the Great Depression. The Magician’s Wife is about a love triangle that turns fatal when a life insurance policy holds the promise of financial freedom. Past All Dishonor is the story of a Confederate spy that risks his life to win the heart of a fallen woman.

Other ebooks include:

·      Sinful Woman

·      Root of His Evil

·      Galatea

·      Mignon

·      Jealous Woman

·      Rainbow’s End

·      The Institute

·      Cloud Nine

·      The Enchanted Isle

These ebooks, available for the first time digitally, now make it possible for American crime fiction fans to read the entire collection of the influential author’s work.

(I've read some of these, but not all, so I'll probably be picking up the others. All the details are here.)

The Cover for the Lost James M. Cain Novel

Here's the cover for the Hard Case Crime edition of THE COCKTAIL WAITRESS, James M. Cain's final novel that will be published later this year. I haven't read a lot of Cain's work yet, but I've liked everything I've read and I'll definitely read this one. That's a mighty nice cover, too.

Big News From Hard Case Crime

Hard Case Crime Discovers Lost Novel by

Author of Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce,
and The Postman Always Rings Twice

James M. Cain’s Final, Unpublished Crime Novel,
THE COCKTAIL WAITRESS, Scheduled for 2012 Release

New York, NY; London, UK (September 19, 2011) – Hard Case Crime, the award-winning line of mystery novels published by Titan Books, today announced the discovery of a lost crime novel written by James M. Cain, author of such classics as Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, and The Postman Always Rings Twice.  The new novel, The Cocktail Waitress, has never before been published.  Hard Case Crime will bring the book out in Fall 2012.

The Cocktail Waitress was the final book written by Cain, who died in 1977.  He was working on revisions to the novel until close to the end of his life; handwritten notes and edits appear in the margins of numerous pages.  Charles Ardai, founder and editor of Hard Case Crime, first learned of the book’s existence from Max Allan Collins, author of Road to Perdition, and has spent more than nine years tracking down the author’s original manuscript and arranging to get the rights to publish the book.  

“Together with Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain is universally considered one of the three greatest writers of noir crime fiction who ever lived, “ said Ardai, “and for fans of the genre, The Cocktail Waitress is the Holy Grail.  It’s like finding a lost manuscript by Hemingway or a lost score by Gershwin – that’s how big a deal this is.”  

Combining themes from Mildred Pierce and The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Cocktail Waitress tells the story of a beautiful young widow, Joan Medford, whose husband died under suspicious circumstances.  Desperate to make ends meet after his death, she takes a job as a waitress in a cocktail lounge, where he meets two new men: a handsome young schemer she falls in love with, and a wealthy older man she marries.

“Why am I taping this?” Joan narrates.  “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…”

“At his best, Cain was an astonishingly strong writer, not just of great crime novels but of great novels, period,” Ardai said.  Cain’s work is taught in literature programs at numerous major universities and was also the basis of classic films such as Billy Wilder’s adaptation of Double Indemnity, which boasted a screenplay by Raymond Chandler and was nominated for seven Academy Awards including Best Picture.  The Postman Always Rings Twice was adapted as a 1946 film starring Lana Turner and then again in 1981 with Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange and a screenplay by David Mamet.  Mildred Pierce was adapted earlier this year into a critically acclaimed miniseries on HBO for which stars Kate Winslet and Guy Pearce both won Emmy Awards.

The Cocktail Waitress will be released initially in hardcover and e-book editions, with a paperback edition to follow in 2013.  Like all of Hard Case Crime’s titles, the book will feature a new cover painting in the classic pulp style.

About Hard Case Crime

Called “the best new American publisher to appear in the last decade” by Neal Pollack in The Stranger, Hard Case Crime has been nominated for or won numerous awards since its inception including the Edgar, the Shamus, the Anthony, the Barry, and the Spinetingler Award.  The series’ best-selling title of all time, The Colorado Kid by Stephen King, was the basis for the current SyFy television series Haven, while Max Allan Collins’ Hard Case Crime novel The Last Quarry inspired the feature film The Last Lullaby, starring Tom Sizemore. Universal Pictures has features in development based on two Hard Case Crime titles, Little Girl Lost and Songs of Innocence by Richard Aleas. 

Founded in 2004 by Edgar and Shamus Award-winning crime novelist Charles Ardai, Hard Case Crime is published through a collaboration between Ardai’s media company, Winterfall LLC, and Titan Publishing Group.

About Titan Publishing Group

Titan Publishing Group is an independently owned publishing company, established in 1981, comprising three divisions: Titan Books, Titan Magazines/Comics and Titan Merchandise.  Titan Books' rapidly growing fiction list encompasses original fiction and reissues, primarily in the areas of science fiction, fantasy, horror, steampunk and crime. 2012 crime fiction highlights will include Mickey Spillane & Max Allan Collins’ all-new Mike Hammer Novels, and books by Lawrence Block, Donald Westlake, Joseph Koenig, and more.  Titan Books also has an extensive line of media and pop culture-related non-fiction, graphic novels, art and music books. The company is based at offices in London, but operates worldwide, with sales and distribution in the US & Canada being handled by Random House.

Forgotten Books: Sinful Woman - James M. Cain

SINFUL WOMAN is regarded as one of James M. Cain’s lesser novels, but let’s face it, when you’re the author of THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE and DOUBLE INDEMNITY, most of your other novels are going to be regarded as lesser. SINFUL WOMAN may not be anywhere near the level of those two novels, but it’s still a pretty entertaining yarn.


Set in Reno, Nevada, the story concerns beautiful actress Sylvia Shoreham, who’s there to get a divorce from her husband, a formerly penniless European baron turned movie producer. Sylvia meets the local sheriff, Parker Lucas, and they fall for each other immediately, but things are complicated by the arrival in town of the baron, his somewhat shady partner in the movie studio that has Sylvia under contract, and some colorful hangers-on. Throw in a casino owner, Sylvia’s troublesome sister, some insurance guys (Cain must have loved the insurance business, as often as it turns up in his books), and it shouldn’t come as a surprise that somebody winds up dead and Sheriff Lucas has a mess on his hands trying to untangle everything and save Sylvia from a murder charge . . . that is, unless she’s really guilty.

This is one of those books where a lot happens in a span of about twelve hours, and the plot gets pretty complicated. I think it all makes sense in the end, but I’m not sure. My only real complaint is that Cain goes overboard on the dialect in places. But I like the characters, especially the sheriff, and the book is pretty funny in places. The back cover copy on the edition I read refers to it as “a zany soap opera”, and that’s a good description. It’s definitely in the screwball vein.


If you’ve never read Cain’s work before, SINFUL WOMAN is not the book you should start with, since it’s not really that typical of his other books. But if you like the others, you’ll probably enjoy this one, too, despite its oddball nature. I thought it was fun.