Cocktail Talk: Who Is Elissa Sheldon?
I have to imagine there are people who miss the cold war. Old spies, counterfeit passport makers, marketers of microfiche. But most of us are probably pretty good with the cold war being far enough in the past that people under 20 probably don’t really know what the phrase means. However, you can still (if you are a you that looks for things like this) uncover books that fall into the cold-war literary genre. Not a big genre, but the one that Who Is Elissa Sheldon? by David Montross fits into. It’s a book where everyone is a double agent, many characters have multiple names, and “the Reds” is a phrase that doesn’t refer to a baseball team in Cincinnati. Not the best read, but fun in its double-dealing way. And, one of things that defined the cold war was fairly straight-ahead drinking, usually an Old Fashioned like in the below quote:
‘No, I waited for you.’ She didn’t look well, her eyes were heavy and her mouth dropped. ‘I’ll have an Old Fashioned if they can make it. That’s what she used to drink.’ Adam ordered for the girl and refused anything for himself. Then he sat back and studied her. The blue suit was wrinkled, and her blouse was wilted and greyish. There was a certain pathos in her, but his involuntary concern hardened because there was no remorse in her. The worse she looked, the better he liked it.
– Who Is Elissa Sheldon?, David Montross
