Everything I Need to Know I Learned from Private Eye Novels (First in a Series)

Lesson #1: Cocktails
Fictional private eyes drink the way priests pray. And for them, constant worship is the only way to survive the mean streets with their souls intact. What do dicks drink when they’re on a tough case?

I poured some of the cognac in the champagne glasses and the waiter put champagne on top. There is nothing that gives you a rear like champagne laced with good cognac. Try it some time.
—Karl Craven in Solomon’s Vineyard (1942) by Jonathan Latimer

They don’t know how to make them here. What they call a gimlet is just some lime or lemon juice and gin with a dash of sugar and bitters. A real gimlet is half gin and half Rose’s Lime Juice and nothing else. It beats martinis hollow.
—Terry Lennox in The Long Goodbye (1953) by Raymond Chandler

Three ounces of gin to one ounce Vermouth.
—Nick Charles on the perfect martini in Hammett’s The Thin Man (1941)

But you don’t have to get fancy:

Any beer in the fridge when the beer store’s closed is good beer.
–Robert Parker's Spenser


On Mixing Cocktails and Dames
The Continental Op in Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest (1929) said it best:

I had gotten blind drunk on gin and laudanum with the girl called Dinah Brand. I should have known better than to try that combination.


On Dealing With A Hangover
In the P.I. Bible of Drinking, The Long Goodbye, Philip Marlowe comes to the realization that he’s “looking at life through the mists of a hangover.” What does the toughest dick in L.A. do about it?

I decided to kill the hangover. Ordinarily I was not a morning drinker. The Southern California climate is too soft for it. You don’t metabolize fast enough. But I mixed a tall cold one this time and sat in an easy chair with my shirt open and pecked at a magazine… I was handling the drink carefully, a sip at a time, watching myself.

Jonathan Latimer’s booze-soaked private eye, Bill Crane, had another solution to the problem of hangovers: Never stop drinking long enough to have one.

Tomorrow: Dames!