Well, we’ve had a fair amount of Cocktail Talks from Dickens’ classic Barnaby Rudge on the ol’ Spiked Punch and that’s a fact. But I was recently visiting the lovely countryside of England, stopping in at any number of cozy, friendly, tasty, thirst-quenching, delightful country (and city!) pubs. And when doing so, while always recognizing them for their own varied and multitudinous joys, also always was driven to think a moment about the Maypole, the bar some of the book’s action and non-action circles around. Is it the book-bar (meaning, fictional bar from a book) I’d most like to visit? Hmm, perhaps! In honor of it, and in honor of all the dandy actual pubs recently visited, I decided I had to re-post the below quote. It’s such a lovely one (oh, for more on the actual book and more quotes, see all Barnaby Rudge Cocktail Talks, and for that matter, why not view all Dickens Cocktail Talks).
Old John would have it that they must sit in the bar, and nobody objecting, into the bar they went. All bars are snug places, but the Maypole’s was the very snuggest, cosiest, and completest bar, that ever the wit of man devised. Such amazing bottles in old oaken pigeon-holes; such gleaming tankards dangling from pegs at about the same inclination as thirsty men would hold them to their lips; such sturdy little Dutch kegs ranged in rows on shelves; so many lemons hanging in separate nets, and forming the fragrant grove already mentioned in this chronicle, suggestive, with goodly loaves of snowy sugar stowed away hard by, of punch, idealised beyond all mortal knowledge; such closets, such presses, such drawers full of pipes, such places for putting things away in hollow window-seats, all crammed to the throat with eatables, drinkables, or savoury condiments; lastly, and to crown all, as typical of the immense resources of the establishment, and its defiances to all visitors to cut and come again, such a stupendous cheese!
In a past post, I gave a shout out to this particular episode of the original Perry Mason series, and in said post (as, perhaps, in others) I made mention of not being as big a fan of the Perry Mason books by Erle Stanley Gardner as I am of the series. This fact is still true. However! I have come around more to some of the books, and definitely understand their popularity, and have oodles of respect for the writing chops of the author. But, still, I like the show better. And watch it regularly. A lot, to be honest. There’s something about the combo of Raymond Burr (playing Perry naturally) William Talman, Ray Collins, William Hopper, and Barbara Hale (playing DA Hamilton Berger, cuddly Lieutenant Trask, dashing detective Paul Drake, and the lovely Della Street respectively) that just sings. And the black and white filming – chef’s kiss, as they say! So, yeah, I watch Perry Mason bunches. And just rewatched one of my favorite episodes, The Case of the Fancy Figures, about a cad who gets murdered, like in many episodes. But this one has the below quote, which is one of my top bar quotes of all time. Making it well-worthy of another Cocktail Talk.
If you have to wait, there’s nothing like a bar. After a few drinks, it becomes a fairyland. People are so kind and considerate.
We now to come to our last (for now, at least!) Cocktail Talk from the Second Fletcher Flora Mystery Megapack (published by Wildside Press). We’ve had ones from the stories included therein called Kill Me Tomorrow and Hell Hath No Fury and The Tool, all pulp published nuggets from the crime and mystery and more writer once based in Leavenworth, KS (a fitting spot for a crime writer, due to the prison there), and today have a quote from a story called Sounds and Smells. In it, our narrator drinks an Ambrosia Highball, and for the life of me, I can’t discover a drink named that in my booze book library (I haven’t gone through that many books yet, however, between us). I will keep looking! And keep reading Fletcher Flora (who you will learn more about, and read more quotes from, when you go through the past Fletcher Flora Cocktail Talks).
I was sitting at the bar drinking an Ambrosia Highball when Sherry came in. It was not the cocktail lounge of the Café Picardy by any means, but it was a pleasant place, and there was a talented and pretty girl who sat on a little dais and played pretty tunes on a concert harp. Sherry was certainly astonished to see me, and apparently uncertain whether to be happy or otherwise. Anyhow, she sat on a stool beside me.
Fletcher Flora is a last-century pulp/pocket book/noir/mystery/etc. writer who perhaps in my humble opinion (or imho, as they say) hasn’t always gotten his due as being in the upper echelon of such writers. He has, in his best work, an individual style (I have a hard time pinning it down in words. I read it called “off-beat” and that’s not a bad description, character-forward, wry in a way, you just have to read them), and he’s from KS, as I was, both of which drew me to him. Until recently, there weren’t a lot of reprints of his novels, and the stories were – like so many stories pubbed in the pulps – entirely impossible to get unless you were lucky enough to inherit a stack of said mags or the money to track them down. However! As with Day Keene and a few others, more recent years have provided a boon to those of us who enjoy a good yarn in the genres, as reprinting tech has been made easier, making it possible to rediscover more of the words written by worthy authors like Flora and Keene (very different writers in style, by the way). We’ve had a few Fletcher Flora Cocktail Talks in the past as I’ve managed to score more books, and then recently I found on the Amazon a wonderful collection called The Second Fletcher Flora Mystery Megapack – funny enough, the First Fletcher Flora Mystery Megapack wasn’t available when I was shopping, so I started with the second, though I’ll remedy that asap. The megapack (from Wildside Press – thanks by the way Wildside) has an assortment of stories from Mr. Flora, ranging in length, and while all slide into the crime and mystery shelf, the set-ups and characters and driving forces change enough to make it a swell read. They aren’t all of the same high quality as his best – he had to make a living and the pulps didn’t pay phenomenally well, so quantity mattered, too – but they’re all close enough that I was amazingly happy to get the collection, and to round out my Flora-fiction. I can’t wait to read more in the first megapack, if I can wrangle it! With all that preamble, I should say that there was lots of Cocktail Talking in the stories, so expect to hear more in the coming weeks. To start, a quote from a story called “Hell Hath No Fury.” In it, we step into a little dive bar, which Mr. Flora describes perfectly in a few short sentences, and then heads for the rye.
On Fifteenth, just off Wamego, The Peanut was a dismal, little bar which, like all bars in the morning, somehow gave the impression of having a hangover. In the shadowy interior, behind the peanut bowls, a bartender looked at me as if he wished he didn’t have to. Opposite the bar lining the wall, there was a string of booths, each with its own peanut bowl, and private remote-control box for the juke box in the rear. In the last booth, where the shadows were deepest, I caught a glimmer of platinum, the white movement of a lifted hand.
I told the bartender to bring me a shot of rye and went back to the booth and sat down.
I’ve had a fair number of Charles Williford Cocktail Talks on the ol’ Spiked Punch in the past, and I suggest you go read all of them to learn more about this interesting writer, who became more widely famous when he started a series about a Miami detective named Hoke Mosely (though his other books are well worth tracking down in the main – you’ll catch a few of them and a few Hoke’s in the past Cocktail Talking). Hoke featured in four books, and I sure wish there were more, as he’s quite a character. The Way We Die Now is the last of the four novels featuring him, and was published early in 1988, the same year Williford sadly died. It’s a dark book at times, as a warning, but funny, too, and great, I think, in many ways. One of which is Larry’s Hideaway, featured in the below quote.
Hoke was well pleased by the interrogation. It had gone more smoothly than he had thought it would. Before returning to the station, Hoke stopped at Larry’s Hideaway for a shot of Early Times and a beer. Sergeant Armando Quevedo was sitting at the bar, and staring glumly into a seventeen-ounce strawberry Margarita. A large strawberry floated on top of the drink. Hoke sat on the stool next to him and ordered a shot of Early Times and a Michelob draft.
“When did you start drinking that shit, Armando?” Hoke said.
Quevedo turned and grimaced. “It’s pretty awful, but the doc said I’d have to give up boilermakers. So I figured if I stuck to this belly wash, I wouldn’t overdo it. It’s sweeter than hell. Are you off today?”
“No, I’m working. I just stopped off for a quickie.”
I’ve had only one other Magdalen Nabb Cocktail Talk, even though I’ve now read four of her books starring Marshal Guarnaccia, a persistent marshal in the Carabinieri (the second police force in Italy, one that grew out of the military and has a sometimes helpful, sometimes less relationship with the Polizia di Stato). The books take place in Florence, a city I’ve visited and loved lots, so I should really have a few more of Cocktail Talks from said books – here’s hoping the future leads to that very occurrence, especially as I find myself very fond of the Marshal, whose steady, non-flashy, neighborhood cop-y sense and regular Italian sensibility are very enticing in a way. Not to mention that he interacts with barmen serving Campari, which I always like to read about.
“Let’s hope not. I don’t want any shoot-outs with terrorists taking place in my bar, thanks.”
And he, too, began to scan the innocent-looking tourists.
“Rubbish! That sort of thing only happens in Rome . . .”
But both them touched the metal edge of the counter to ward off evil, and the barman, dropping ice-cubes into three Camparis for an outside table, kept an eye on the Marshal’s broad back.
Have we had enough Cocktail Talking from the Dickens’ classic Barnaby Rudge? I doubt it! But we are going to turn the last page – or have the last quote – for now, calling last call with the below (be sure to learn more about the book, as well as enjoy more Barnaby Rudge Cocktail Talks by reading Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV! And why not read all the Charles Dickens Cocktail Talks? There is no good answer to that question). This snippet takes us back to the Maypole, the bar parts of the book revolve around, and is such a dandy description of the place, I wish I could dive right into the page and be there (the bar, that is, not the page). What a spot! And, what a book.
Old John would have it that they must sit in the bar, and nobody objecting, into the bar they went. All bars are snug places, but the Maypole’s was the very snuggest, cosiest, and completest bar, that ever the wit of man devised. Such amazing bottles in old oaken pigeon-holes; such gleaming tankards dangling from pegs at about the same inclination as thirsty men would hold them to their lips; such sturdy little Dutch kegs ranged in rows on shelves; so many lemons hanging in separate nets, and forming the fragrant grove already mentioned in this chronicle, suggestive, with goodly loaves of snowy sugar stowed away hard by, of punch, idealised beyond all mortal knowledge; such closets, such presses, such drawers full of pipes, such places for putting things away in hollow window-seats, all crammed to the throat with eatables, drinkables, or savoury condiments; lastly, and to crown all, as typical of the immense resources of the establishment, and its defiances to all visitors to cut and come again, such a stupendous cheese!
I’ve had a goodly amount of Charles Dickens Cocktail Talk posts here on the Spiked Punch blog (started in the 1800s in honor of Dickens naturally), but never one from the underrated and underread book Barnaby Rudge, a situation which I’m going to remedy over the next few weeks, as I’ve recently re-read it, and so am primed for Cocktail Talks from it. You can learn more about the book from scholars more learned than I, but I will give you this: it has one of the finest, or most well-imagined, fictional pubs ever, The Maypole, in which some of the action centers. Also, it’s a book (like so much of Dickens) that while taking place in the past is finely attuned to the present, in this case as the sort-of second part of the book takes place around the actual London anti-Catholic (in theory, at least) riots, driven by Lord George Gordon, and the “politics” and demagoguery and players around such mirror a lot of what we see today. Sad, in a way. But the Maypole is nice! Until the . . . well, I won’t give too much more away. But I will start out at the Maypole, when one of the book’s main characters (out of a full and varied cast, as Dickens does), locksmith Gabriel Vaden, arrives at the pub on a stormy night.
When he got to the Maypole, however, and Joe, responding to his well-known hail, came running out to the horse’s head, leaving the door open behind him, and disclosing a delicious perspective of warmth and brightness – when the ruddy gleam of the fire, streaming through the old red curtains of the common room, seemed to bring with it, as part of itself, a pleasant hum of voices, and a fragrant odour of steaming grog and rare tobacco, all steeped as it were in the cheerful glow – when the shadows, flitting across the curtain, showed that those inside had risen from their snug seats, and were making room in the snuggest corner (how well he knew that corner!) for the honest locksmith, and a broad glare, suddenly streaming up, bespoke the goodness of the crackling log from which a brilliant train of sparks was doubtless at that moment whirling up the chimney in honour of his coming – when, superadded to these enticements, there stole upon him from the distant kitchen a gentle sound of frying, with a musical clatter of plates and dishes, and a savoury smell that made even the boisterous wind a perfume – Gabriel felt his firmness oozing rapidly away. He tried to look stoically at the tavern, but his features would relax into a look of fondness. He turned his head the other way, and the cold black country seemed to frown him off, and drive him for a refuge into its hospitable arms.
‘The merciful man, Joe,’ said the locksmith, ‘is merciful to his beast. I’ll get out for a little while.’
And how natural it was to get out! And how unnatural it seemed for a sober man to be plodding wearily along through miry roads, encountering the rude buffets of the wind and pelting of the rain, when there was a clean floor covered with crisp white sand, a well swept hearth, a blazing fire, a table decorated with white cloth, bright pewter flagons, and other tempting preparations for a well-cooked meal – when there were these things, and company disposed to make the most of them, all ready to his hand, and entreating him to enjoyment!
