MANILA, Philippines — The Holy Grail” for crime fans – a lost novel by The Postman Always Rings Twice author James M Cain – has been discovered, and is set for publication next year.

Telling of a beautiful young widow who takes a job in a cocktail bar after her husband dies under “suspicious circumstances”, The Cocktail Waitress was the last book written by Cain before his death in 1977, but it was never published.

Charles Ardai, the founder of American publisher Hard Case Crime, was alerted to its existence by the author Max Allan Collins, and has spent the last nine years tracking down the original manuscript and securing rights in the novel.

He called his discovery “like finding a lost manuscript by Hemingway or a lost score by Gershwin – that’s how big a deal this is”.

Holy Grail

The author of classic crime novels including Mildred Pierce – adapted into the acclaimed HBO miniseries starring Kate Winslet – and Double Indemnity, Cain, together with Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, “is universally considered one of the three greatest writers of noir crime fiction who ever lived,” said Ardai. The Cocktail Waitress is “the Holy Grail” for crime fans, he added.

Cain himself said in a 1976 interview that “in my stories there’s usually stuff that you wouldn’t think any human being would tell at all”. “I’ve just finished a book called The Cocktail Waitress, where the girl tells her story, and there’s some pretty intimate stuff,” the author said.

“This girl, like most women, is very reticent about some things – you know, the sex scenes, where she spent the night with a guy. I had her tell enough so that what happened was clear and, at the same time, not go into details. Once she lingered with a sex scene, as if she wanted to tell it.”

Hard Case Crime said that handwritten notes and edits appear in the margins of numerous pages of the manuscript, and that Cain was working on revisions until close to the end of his life.

Ardai told the New York Times that he is currently trying to reconcile different versions of the ending left by Cain, and to decipher some of the notes. “He wasn’t a doctor, but he wrote like one,” said the publisher. “With a magnifying glass, I can figure it out.”