My bad...

I realized after posting yesterday that as Raymond Chandler aged, Philip Marlowe’s attitude toward gin mellowed somewhat.

Terry Lennox of Silver Wraith fame was drunk on gimlets, and he introduced Marlowe to them. He even dictated the recipe: “A real gimlet is half gin and half Rose's Lime Juice and nothing else. It beats martinis hollow."

Well, even at half and half, the Rose’s will peel the enamel off your teeth. A professor at Santa Monica City College who taught a course on detective literature made it 2:1 gin to Rose’s. But it’s a delicate balance—do you prefer to risk disintegrating teeth or deadened brain cells?

The Long Goodbye was written in 1953. Five years later, when Chandler published Playback, Marlowe was drinking Gibsons (martinis with an onion instead of an olive).

I can’t see it myself—but then I’m more of a vodka girl.

There’s a passage from Goodbye, where Lennox describes the comfort to be found in a bar at a certain time: “I like bars just after they open for the evening. When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny and the barkeep is giving himself that last look in the mirror to see if his tie is straight and his hair is smooth. I like the neat bottles on the bar back and the lovely shining glasses and the anticipation. I like to watch the man mix the first one of the evening and put it down on a crisp mat and put the little folded napkin beside it. I like to taste it slowly. The first quiet drink of the evening in a quiet bar.”

Good luck trying to find that sort of respite at any time in any boozery these days, where the techno pop and TVs blare at you from the instant the bartender turns the key in the door to open.

Terry Lennox—and Marlowe—would not be able to sit in a bar for the time it takes to down a single gimlet in this age. They’d take one look at the cosmos and cranberry martinis and beers with limes in the necks being drunk by poseurs who think their quaff is a statement, not a drink; and they’d have just walked out and gone dry.