April 19, 2016
Our second Cocktail Talk from the collection Miss Darkness: The Great Short Crime Fiction of Fredric Brown comes from the story “The Jabberwocky Murders,” which does indeed have a Lewis Carroll strain running all the way through it – just as you’d expect from a literary yarn spinner. Be sure to check out Part I of our little boozy run through the book. Here, not a specific drink, but a great line about drinking and reading:
But with a bottle in my pocket and good company waiting for me there, my old tried-and-true friends in the bookcase. Reading a book is almost like listening to the man who wrote it talk. Except that you don’t have to be polite. You can take your shoes off and put your feet up on the table and drink and forget who you are.
–Fredric Brown, Miss Darkness
April 12, 2016
I recently received the book Miss Darkness: The Great Short Crime Fiction of Fredric Brown. I hadn’t had any experience with Mr. Brown before, which is a shame as he’s pretty darn good – smart, funny, able to write both super short stories and longer pieces, obsessed a bit with chess and Shakespeare and a few other choices things, like drinks. He also made a name for himself as a sci-fi writer (maybe even moreso) and I believe had a few movies made from his work. This collection is a monster of sorts, just in that it’s 726 pages, so hard to read on the bus (but not impossible!). A worthy monster to attack though, as it’s jam-packed with crime-noir-y goodness. And if you like circus sideshows, well, don’t miss it. I’m going to run a couple Cocktail Talk quotes from it, because Mr. Brown also enjoyed the tipples, as I’ve said. This one’s from the story “Good Night, Good Knight,” and has cocktail and bartending and acting and blackmail fun.
He got the haircut, which he needed, and the shave, which he didn’t really need — he’d shaved this morning. He bought a new white shirt and had his shoes shined and his suit pressed. He had his soul lifted with three Manhattans in a respectable bar — three, sipped slowly, and no more. And he ate — the three cherries from the Manhattans.
The back-bar mirror wasn’t smeary. It was blue glass, though, and it made him look sinister. He smiled a sinister smile at his reflection. He thought, Blackmailer. The role; play it to the hilt, throw yourself into it. And someday you’ll play Macbeth.
Should he try it on the bartender? No. He’d tried it on bartenders before.
The blue reflection in the back-bar mirror smiled at him.
–Fredric Brown, Miss Darkness
March 8, 2016
Well, here’s a first I believe – a Jane Austen Cocktail Talk. Not weird, really, since I love some Jane, and I was also recently in Bath, where I trod the streets she walked (so to speak), and had fun doing it. However, weird in the fact that there’s not a ton of drinking it up in Jane, so the quotes applicable to the Cocktail Talking are fairly few and far between. However, I was re-reading Northanger Abbey recently, cause of the Bath-ing that goes on in and my recent visit, and came across a pretty swell, boastfully funny, bit about drinking at Oxford:
“Lord help you! — You women are always thinking of men’s being in liquor. Why, you do not suppose a man is overset by a bottle? I am sure of this — that if everybody was to drink their bottle a-day, there would not be half the disorders in the world there are now. It would be a famous good thing for us all.”
“I cannot believe it.”
“Oh! lord, it would be the saving of thousands. There is not the hundredth part of the wine consumed in this kingdom that there ought to be. Our foggy climate wants help.”
“And yet I have heard that there is a great deal of wine drunk in Oxford.”
“Oxford! There is no drinking at Oxford now, I assure you. Nobody drinks there. You would hardly meet with a man who goes beyond his four pints at the utmost. Now, for instance, it was reckoned a remarkable thing, at the last party in my rooms, that upon an average we cleared about five pints a head. It was looked upon as something out of the common way. Mine is famous good stuff, to be sure. You would not often meet with anything like it in Oxford — and that may account for it. But this will just give you a notion of the general rate of drinking there.”
— Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
March 1, 2016
I know many of the Cocktail Talk posts here (at least 89.6%) follow along one or two lines. Either a pulp-hardboiled-detective-murderous-noir selection, or a Trollope selection, with the occasionally Dickens thrown in for good measure. Sure, there are some others, but I usually run my routes with precision. But once in awhile, we need to shake things up. Combine that with the fact that I was doing an event not long ago and about half of the folks there had never had absinthe, and, well, we end up with the below quote which I love from the famous politician, historian, and journalist:
One’s emotions in Rome were one’s private affair, like one’s glass of absinthe before dinner in the Palais Royal.
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams
February 16, 2016
I’ve had a number of Cocktail Talk posts here from Day Keene, from his novels and short stories. Most of the latter I’ve read in the series from Ramble House, which does a fairly fine job of reprinting all of his stories that appeared in pulp mags in the 40s – and there were a lot of them! He was ridiculously prolific, and kept the quality bar really high while doing it. I just picket up the third volume, called Death March of the Dancing Dolls, which has seven longish stories, including one called A Minor Matter of Murder, which is where this post’s quote comes from. It also contained one of my favorite non-boozy lines in a while: “to hell with that heifer dust!” Drop that in your next meeting.
I guided her on into the bar and one of the wall tables. “There’s been some trouble at the office. But if you faint, I’ll fire you.” I ordered two double ryes and waited until they were served to tell her than young Schermerhorn was dead.
–Day Keene, A Minor Matter of Murder
January 26, 2016
I don’t know much about pulp-y early-and-mid-1900s author Horace McCoy, best known probably for a book called They Shoot Horse, Don’t They?, and a few other hits. It’s always nice to delve into a new noir-y legend though – just opens up more lovely hours of reading. I started with his shorter book, I Should Have Stayed Home, which was maybe less noir-y then the title made me think, but a really good look at Hollywood from the less-bright-lights side in the 1930s-ish time frame. It made me excited for more McCoy’s, and the below made me thirsty.
She had coffee and brandy in the living room and she poured Cointreau for me. It was sweet and pleasant. She taught me how to drink this too. She was patient and quiet and very nice. I couldn’t believe this was the same woman who had been so wild that afternoon in Mona’s bungalow, that time with Lally.
–Horace McCoy, I Should Have Stayed Home
January 19, 2016
If you love the sound of my voice as much as I do (hahaha, I kid, I kid), and missed me on Seattle’s jolly Happy Hour radio right before the holidays, then you’re in luck! It’s still available for your listening pleasure – so tune in, metaphorically, to hear me on Happy Hour radio (you’ll also be able to hear about some swell local wine from the W-A), and the dulcet tones of host Christopher Chan.
December 22, 2015
If you live in WA State, you should be excited – for about 10,000 reasons, though here I’m talking about our explosion of interesting, tasty, and fun distilleries. Hopefully you’re already drinking drinks utilizing the bottles put out by our worthy distilleries. If not, then check out a piece I recently wrote for the stalwart Seattle magazine, 7 Must-Have Bottles for Stocking Your At-Home Bar. If you don’t live in the W-A, well, come visit, so you can also stock your home bar in a manner that’ll make you feel all sorts of happy.
