What is it with dead American writers? Years after they’ve popped their clogs, some of the biggest names in crime fiction continue to produce novels from beyond the grave. Mario Puzo has been sleeping with the fishes since 1999, but that hasn’t stopped him clanking out Omertà (2000) and The Family (2001), the latter of which was based on an unfinished manuscript posthumously completed by his longterm girlfriend.
Michael Crichton died in 2008. A year later, his fans were able to enjoy Pirate Latitudes, a novel based — once again — on an incomplete manuscript found among Crichton’s papers. Yet both men have been slouches in comparison to Robert Ludlum. The creator of Jason Bourne didn’t live to see Matt Damon’s incarnation of the character. Nevertheless, Ludlum has been busily tapping away at the great typewriter in the sky, producing no fewer than 17 novels since his death in 2001. As Puzo’s Michael Corleone might have put it: ‘Publishing isn’t personal. It’s strictly business.’
Three of the biggest beasts in the hard-boiled jungle are now getting in on the act. The Cocktail Waitress is billed as ‘the lost final novel’ of James M. Cain, the creator of Mildred Pierce, Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice. (Historical note: postmen don’t even bother ringing any more. They just leave a card saying you were out.) Cain died in 1977. His literary executor, Charles Ardai, assembled The Cocktail Waitress from dozens of unfinished drafts and fragments found scattered across the United States.
‘None of the manuscripts was dated,’ Ardai writes in an afterword. ‘Many contained the same scenes, only arranged in a different order; some had the same scenes, only written slightly differently.’ Character names changed from version to version, as did the title (at one point, Cain experimented with American Beauty).
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