Cocktail Talk: Red Harvest (Again)
I was sipping on a Martini with orange bitters added (a classic style of martini-ing) the other night, and while sipping was wracking my brain because I knew I’d read a quote in a classic pulpy book where a couple characters did just that, and it took for until the second cocktail to remember that it was Red Harvest! By legendary Dashiell Hammett! And the Continental Op (one of Hammett’s mainstay detectives) was one of the characters doing said sipping! It’s a grand book, one that any lover of last-century detective-etc. fiction should read, probably while drinking one of these. And while I’ve had the below quote on the Spiked Punch before, well, after the above moments, I decided it should be on here again.
When I came back she was mixing gin, vermouth and orange bitters in a quart shaker, not leaving a lot of space for them to move around in.
“Did you see anything?” she asked.
I sneered at her in a friendly way. We carried the cocktails into the dining room and played bottoms-up while the meal cooked. The drinks cheered her a lot. By the time we sat down to the food she had almost forgotten her fright. She wasn’t a very good cook, but we ate as if she were.
We put a couple of gin-gingerales in on top of the dinner.
—Red Harvest, Dashiell Hammett
