Cocktail Talk: The Dancing Girl
This is another Cocktail Talk found in an older mystery story featured within one of the wonderful British Library Crime Classics collections (you can read more by perusing past British Library Crime Classic Cocktail Talks, a phrase rather fun to say). In this case, the collection is Final Acts: Theatrical Mysteries, so, as you might gather but in case you didn’t, all mysteries circling around the theater in one way or the other, some closer to the stage, so farther away. The collection was put together by the indefatigable writer and editor Martin Edwards, and contains works by lesser-known and widely-known UK authors from the late-1800s, early-1900s. Somewhat in the middle of the “known” ranges falls the writer Anthony Wynne – aka Robert McNair Wilson – who penned both with this penname and under his own a whole bunch of books, while also being a surgeon and politician and probably more things, too. Quite popular I believe in his time, if not as well known today. The beautiful below wine quote (and the inclusion in the British Library Crime Classics collections) will hopefully re-balance his rep.
He raised his glass to his lips and sipped the exquisite wine, which it contained, very slowly. It was white Clos Vouget, the pale sister of the immortal red Burgundy of that name. Golden points of light shone from its clear depths. He set the glass down again and once more turned to Lalette; in some mysterious fashion she resembled the wine. It might even be possible to call her insipid if one had developed a taste for more exuberant gaiety. Men who drank red wine habitually, he reflected, were ignorant as a rule of the profound simplicity of white, that quality which transcends all the vintners’ descriptions.
— Anthony Wynne, “The Dancing Girl:
