REDISCOVERED NOVEL TO BE RELEASED

 

Joan Crawford as “Mildred Pierce”

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is based and of its author, James M. Cain, can take solace in a new development: a recently unearthed and previously unpublished manuscript by Cain, whose novels also include “The Postman Always Rings Twice” and “Double Indemnity,” will be released next year by Hard Case Crime, the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Hard Case Crime, which has released unpublished works by writers like Donald Westlake and Lester Dent, as well as new works of pulp fiction by authors like Stephen King, plans to release “The Cocktail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.”