Essays

The Last Great Drinkers

Detectives and rock stars linger—grizzled, undaunted, and occasionally crossing paths professionally—as the last great drinkers. The rest of us have begun to abide by the rules, limiting ourselves out of vanity or medical necessity, but not these people. Whether cops, private investigators, or unlucky but bull-headed citizens, they spend their days delving into depravity and violence, faced with lies and venality on every side. Their stresses are greater, their view of humanity crueler, their need for numbness stronger. I don't know what the rock stars' excuse is.

But even the detectives have begun to scale back. Everyone knows the glory days of the genre were gin-soaked and smoky, but apparently so was America. Now in popular mysteries most detectives start their days with a quick three-mile jog instead of a belt. Thank god the heart of the detective hero remains a weary, if healthier, muscle: our hero is still a loner, still alienated by particular ghosts, still rolling into bed with the occasional willing partner who understands the needs of The Job. They're haunted by something, almost invariably, by loss, regret, or rage. Private investigator V.I. Warshawski lost the refined Italian mother who forced her to reach beyond a working class Chicago neighborhood. Rogue Scottish cop John Rebus neglected his family in favor of police work, and now the wife is long gone and the daughter in a wheelchair (yes, it is his fault). For L.A. detective Harry Bosch, the image of a dead girl's empty, reaching hands is the reminder of the unsolved murders accumulated over twenty years of police work. Readers expect a mystery to plague every hero, something to explain how they crossed the line from regular joe to fearless searcher. Hence the endless slew of murdered wives, swimming forever lithe and beautiful through the male heroes' dreams. (Not nearly as many angelic, sexy male corpses litter the landscape.) The murdered wives are such a type that there may in fact have only been a single one in the whole history, reincarnated and killed over and over—maybe the reeling husbands just can't quite recall if her eyes were green or blue, her hair blonde or bewitching brunette. It doesn't matter. The dead wives are not created to matter; they're usually created solely to explain why our heroes have stripped their lives to the bare minimum of work, melancholy, and meals and booze.

With the exception of true drinkers like the Scottish Rebus, whose drinking would once have been a norm of the genre but is now clearly a problem, most are social drinkers with casual standards befitting their outcast status. Lee Child's drifter Jack Reacher, a former Army MP, is just delighted to get some good coffee and a slice of pie between bus rides. Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch usually ponders cases at home over a simple bottle of beer, but in classic cop fashion he does enjoy the occasional martini at a steakhouse. Kinsey Millhone, an antisocial but best-selling investigator, owns one all-purpose black dress which she carries stuffed in her purse and limits her devotion to a handful of people and to her boxes of sweet pink wine. (She drinks it with peanut butter sandwiches.) Lew Fonesca is a former D.A.'s investigator who's ended up asking questions here and there for small amounts of cash. He lives in a rented Florida office above a Dairy Queen after the death of The Wife, but still clings to a couple pleasures: fast food, old movies, and a moderate amount of cold beer. One exception, as befits a detective specializing in financial crime, is Warshawski, whose taste runs more toward good scotch and Italian wine drunk from her long-dead mother's treasured Venetian wine glasses.

Other books can go 200 pages with only passing references to being thirsty or hungry but no detail at all. Yet a detective novel that doesn't tell you what the investigator is eating and drinking is simply not doing its job. How most of them get away with sharing the daily parade of sandwiches and beverages without boring the reader silly is a mystery of its own, but I've come to think the gustatory details have a specialized literary role. Bury the reader in the daily minutiae of booze and meals, and then the salient points don't stand out. Somewhere between the eggs and the Polish sausage on a roll, the delicious first hot sip of coffee and the last cool belt of Macallan, the imperative clue appeared, but readers like me, wondering if there's wine in the fridge or a kielbasa joint nearby, have missed it.

A drink also serves the detective in more ways than a buzz. The pint at The Ox in Edinburgh is one of Rebus's few social outlets. Bosch's time on his deck overlooking the Los Angeles valleys over a cold one is usually at least a step on the path to a breakthrough. V.I. spends so much time muddy and bedraggled that her occasional Barolo is a necessity, a link to her family's past and to the civilized world. The drink is a small shelter, a point of pleasure, prickly alcoholic warmth, and meditative concentration in the middle of chaos. If it comes with a price, then most things do.

In many ways, detectives haven't changed that much. The investigator is still designed to elicit a mix of admiration and bafflement, even superiority. They make logical leaps we never could, brave situations we would flee, sardonic in the face of danger and cool in the face of lust. But they rarely have a good 401(k). Their lives seem deeply lonely, though the detectives rarely allow themselves to realize it, and their ruined bodies are cross-hatched with scars and bruises. Whereas fifty years ago the detective's alcoholic tolerance demonstrated his steely superiority, now their beverage leanings make them human, smaller and as prone to minor pleasures as the rest of us. Who can begrudge them the tenth Heineken, the down-market sweet wine, or the third martini with the porterhouse? Our heroes have so little else.