THEIR DRINKING LIVES

This piece by Elinore Standard appeared in the Bedford, NY, "Record Review," as one in a series, "My Reading Life."

Mentioned below: "The Big Sleep," by Raymond Chandler, "Fleshmarket Alley," by Ian Rankin; "The Magdalen Martyrs," by Ken Bruen.




                                THEIR DRINKING LIVES

        “I was neat, clean, shaved and sober and I didn’t care who knew it.”
                From “The Big Sleep” by Raymond Chandler



    I like crime novels that feature people who drink. I enjoy before and after: stories of dependency and recovery. Don’t ask me why exactly, I’ll only say that I find drinkers sympathetic, and add that I went to an Ivy League university in the 1950’s where I learned to be quite the good little drinker myself. Alas, as age has advanced, I seem to have lost my chops for it. Two white wines on a lot of ice and I’m smashed.

    Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh police Inspector Rebus, is addicted to alcohol and tobacco. In “Fleshmarket Alley” (Little Brown, 2005) Rebus meets up with someone whom he suspects is a mugger in a dark doorway: “Rebus had a carrier bag in his right hand. There was a bottle of 20-quid malt inside and he was loathe to take a swing unless absolutely necessary.” Any drinker can easily understand this.

     A veteran cop, Rebus is honest and experienced. He’s good at his job but has been sidelined by young, humorless, ambitious and abstemious professionals. Rankin’s excellent writing, smart plots, and colorful descriptions of the changing neighborhoods in Edinburgh make all of the Rebus books well worth reading. Sometimes the cigarette fug and hangovers that hurt to read about intrude on enjoyment. I want Rebus to clean up his flat and order a salad for once. I worry about his liver and I’m certain he’ll develop diabetes. His total lack of any kind of exercise makes him an ideal candidate for a heart attack or a stroke. A reader ought not to have to worry so about a character in a novel, for heaven’s sake.

     That’s real drinkers for you, even in books: everybody worries about them, but they don’t worry about anything other than how early in the day they can, in conscience, have the first drink. The main character in many books by Ken Bruen, an author I’ve mentioned before in this space, may go too far. Although he solves the nastiest crimes, ex-Garda officer, Jack Taylor of Galway, is an alcoholic. He drinks to oblivion, gets into awful fights, and doesn’t remember what happened afterward. He alienates the few friends has left, he often lives in personal squalor, he has long given up on forming any kind of relationship with a woman, and his doctor has told him DT’s are not far in his future. His life seems to have no scope: it is lived from his room to the pub, from the pub to the neighborhood, back to the room with booze in a bag. Of course, he doesn’t own a car because he is always too drunk to drive.

    He tries. He goes on the wagon. He sets little goals, one day at a time. Then something will happen to tick him off, and he’ll cave in and buy a bottle and drink it down. So it goes… Why do I bother with this kind of character in a novel? I am not sure I would have the patience in real life, so maybe I should switch to something a little lighter? Here is why: Jack Taylor reads and he listens to music all the time. His reading is so sophisticated and so advanced, I make lists of books he mentions and then go and read them myself. He is always way ahead of me. Is this redeeming, or what?

    Jack Taylor’s real life is narrow and tormented, so he leads another life in books. In a recent  novel, “The Magdalen Martyrs” (St.Martin’s, 2005), someone he has crossed enters his room and completely destroys everything in it, including all of his books, so carefully collected (and preserved!) over years. His local bookseller, comprehending the loss and taking pity, gathers the starters of a new library and delivers the books.

     “Among the poets were Rilke, Coleridge, Lowell, Yeats. The crime had the foundation of Thompson, Cain, Chandler, Derek Raymond. I didn’t pay much attention to the philosophers,” says Jack, “simply stacked them against the wall. My frame of mind could hardly register titles, let alone content. Biography had a fine mix: Fitzgerald, Graham Greene, Robert Graves, Branson.” Branson was thrown in for devilishness by the book guy. You know I will try to get Derek Raymond, a writer I’ve never heard of before. I’ve already looked him up in the local library system catalogue and find there are two holdings, elsewhere in the county.

     It seems Rebus is also a reader, although Ian Rankin doesn’t give us much idea of what he reads. Mainly, Rebus listens to music from the 1960’s and ‘70’s in his car as he goes from crime to crime and I keep handy a map of Edinburgh so I can shadow him on his way.

     John Rebus and Jack Taylor are not alone. James Sallis, an American, has given us sophisticated, smart novels featuring Lew Griffin, a New Orleans ex-cop recently on the wagon but whose memory of serious drinking emerges hauntingly. Ian Rankin himself has commented on the work of Sallis, saying: “Then there's James Sallis - he's right up there, one of the best of the best.  His series of novels about private eye Lew Griffin is thoughtful, challenging and beautifully written. Sallis, also a poet, is capable of smart phrasing and moments of elegiac energy.”

     Rebus and Taylor and Griffin join a long list of characters from the hardboiled gumshoe genre beginning with Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe (1939) and continuing with dissolute heroes by Mickey Spillane, James Cain, Dashiell Hammett, Ross MacDonald, Colin Dexter and Robert Wilson. Their characters are brave, often reckless, men who can’t get their lives together and who have fruitless relationships. If they are not divorced, they are widowed (always convenient) or looking for somebody who will put up with their lushedness and their dangerous comings and goings. For such drags, they are amazingly picky.

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Elinore Standard is the co-editor of "Bookworms: Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading," (Carroll & Graf, 1997).
ehstandard@gmail.com