The Long Firm by Jake Arnott

I picked up Arnott’s The Long Firm from a bookshop not long after it was published and was highly impressed by this ambitious first novel which consists of five separate stories, all revolving around a fictional gangster, Harry Starks.


Of the five pieces, the longest, and to my mind the most impressive, follows the last few months of Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie, the man whose murder eventually caused the arrest and conviction of the Kray Twins.

A gun-for-hire for both the Krays and Harry Starks, McVitie is spiralling out of control in London’s underworld. Addicted to amphetamines and drinking heavily, his behaviour is increasingly unreliable and unpredictable. That said, everyone around him is wasted on speed and booze, it’s just McVitie is a hell of a lot worse.

Taken to a nightclub to see Dorothy Squires, Jack notices she’s been at the sauce:

Dorothy’s taking swigs from a bottle between numbers. Pretending it’s water, I suppose. It’s obviously booze. Looks like she’s had a few already. Harry looks a bit concerned. Unprofessional, he’d call it. “She’s pissed Jack,” he says a bit affronted.

Jack’s not exactly sober himself. He goes on to heckle Squires, then perform an impromptu striptease on the stage before getting thrown out of the club.

Arnott colours his book with the ugly side of the 1960s. Jack gets the brush off from Harry, who is going through his own crisis:

Winston Churchill on the gramophone when I go round to see Harry. Bad sign. Empty bottles of Stematol and Napoleon brandy lying around. Anti-depressants with cognac chasers, a desperate attempt to stave off his gloomy madness.

McVitie ought to know about desperation. He turns up at the Kray’s club thoroughly drunk with a badly concealed sawn-off shotgun under his jacket. He’s persuaded to leave:

Push myself off the bar. Nearly tumble over onto the floor. Stumble out.

Jacks’ number is about to come up. On 29 October 1967 he’s lured to a flat in Stoke Newington where the Krays are waiting. The last line in the story goes to Ron Kray: “Do him!”

The Rotters' Club by Jonathan Coe

A child of the '70s, I've always had a bit of a soft spot for the decade, even though I only made my appearance half way through. The Rotters' Club sits itself comfortably in the middle as well, dissecting this turbulent era through the teenage antics of four friends at a Birmingham grammar school.


Booze makes several appearances, including a passing reference to Blue Nun (!) but I’ve selected for the blog that teenage rite-of-passage, namely drinking too much from the drinks cabinet at a party where the parents are away.

Benjamin Trotter can remember consuming three quarters of a bottle of vintage port, and little else after that:

Benjamin awoke, opened his eyes, and noticed some peculiar things. Firstly, opening his eyes had made no difference. He still couldn’t see anything. Secondly, he was in excruciating pain. His back ached and he had cramp in both legs but this was small fry compared to the pulsing, shuddering pain in his temples, which periodically spread out in waves of unmitigated agony, making him feel that his entire skull was enclosed in a slowly contracting vice.

Having woken up in a wardrobe with a girl whose name he can’t recall and a blistering hangover, Benjamin remembers that it’s the first day of the new school year the next day, and as a school prefect, he has to go to drinks that very evening, despite the fact that all he felt capable of doing was having a long and much-needed vomit then crawling into bed to die.

He gets away with his hangover at first, hiding his drinks and doing his best to keep down the food. Trouble starts with the toast at the end:

Now, Mr Nuttall is going to pass around a bottle of the Founder’s Port. In keeping with a tradition going back to the eighteenth century, we shall all declare our loyalty to King William’s, and drink our glasses down in one draught.

The bathroom quickly beckons young Benjamin...

The Reeve's Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer

I’m plundering the vault of my English A-Level again, this time for what is probably the most renowned work in the language. I actually had to learn The Franklin’s Tale, but I’ve picked on this one instead, as there are some nice references to drinking in it. (The text I have used here was adapted to Modern English by D. Laing Purves in the 19th century.)


The Reeve’s Tale is a direct retort to the infamous Miller’s Tale. Put out that in the miller’s story the character of the carpenter is cuckolded and made a fool of, the reeve, himself a carpenter, responds in kind. The yarn he spins is of how a robbing miller is duped by two Cambridge students whom he has originally set out to deceive. The students, knowing full well that the miller is giving short measure for the corn that he’s milling, attempt to catch him in the act of fiddling the sacks, however, the canny old miller lets their horse loose and they spend all day trying to find it. Returning at nightfall, they offer to pay the miller for bed and board. Persuaded by their money, the miller sends out for strong ale at the best, and the miller, his wife and daughter, along with the students, drink themselves into a torpor.

Well had this miller varnished his head;
Full pale he was, fordrunken, and nought red.
He yoxed, and he spake thorough the nose,
As he were in the quakke, or in the pose.

His wife is also pissed:

As any jay she light was and jolife,
So was her jolly whistle well y-wet.

The whole lot take to their beds, the miller snoring from both ends:

This miller had, so wisly bibbed ale,
That as a horse he snorted in his sleep,
Nor of his tail behind he took no keep.

The bawdy finale to the story involves the students managing to bed both wife and daughter and knocking seven bells out of the miller. Thus, concludes the reeve, have I quit the Miller in my tale.

Dombey And Son by Charles Dickens

I have to confess that this is the only Dickens that I have read in its entirety, and that was during a fevered four day reading session when it appeared as an A-Level text. A while back, then....


Dickens, by all accounts, used to keep a well stocked cellar, but I can only recall one particularly boozy episode in Dombey And Son, the second marriage of Paul Dombey to the widowed Edith Granger. The staff at the wedding party start early:

One of the very tall young men already smells of sherry, and his eyes have a tendency to become fixed in his head, and to stare at objects without seeing them. The very tall young man is conscious of this failing in himself; and informs his comrade that it's his 'exciseman.' The very tall young man would say excitement, but his speech is hazy.

And continue in a similar fashion after the nuptials:

All the servants in the meantime, have been breakfasting below. Champagne has grown too common among them to be mentioned...

As is the way of these things, the party is over all too quickly. The bride and groom depart for their honeymoon, and normality must return downstairs. The hangovers are in the post already.

Giddiness prevails below stairs too. The very tall young man whose excitement came on so soon, appears to have his head glued to the table in the pantry, and cannot be detached from it... Mr Towlinson has a singing in his ears and a large wheel going round and round inside his head. The housemaid wishes it wasn't wicked to wish that one was dead.

Alas, the marriage ends in disaster and Dombey is ruined! However, with typical Dickensian plotting, somewhere around the 900th page, Dombey is reunited with his estranged daughter and happiness prevails.

Fitzrovia: London's Bohemia by Michael Bakewell

The lure of biography is hard to resist and I’ve returned to the genre with a short set of ‘character sketches’ published by the National Portrait Gallery on London’s Fitzrovia set.


West of the Tottenham Court Road and north of Oxford Street, Fitzrovia was London’s bohemian enclave in the first half of the Twentieth Century. It was also chock full of bars and drinking clubs. As Bakewell puts it in his introduction:

It was essentially a pub culture, fuelled by drink and conversation...

He also points out:

Much of the story of Fitzrovia is of talent blighted, promise unfulfilled and premature death through drink.

I’ve picked on two of the book’s characters for this entry; Dylan Thomas and Aleister Crowley. Although it was his lungs that killed him in the end, Thomas put back an astonishing amount of sauce in his time – he referred to his drinking sprees up in London from Wales as ‘capital punishment’ – and for a long time it was thought that the booze was to blame for his death at 39. He was employed by the BBC after the second world war, something they might later have had cause to regret:

As his reputation as a poet grew the talk and the drink steadily took hold and the poems grew fewer and fewer. He became increasingly unreliable, taking advances for projects that were never fulfilled. The BBC were bombarded with increasingly desperate demands: ‘ADVANCE IMMEDIATELY... I owe every tradesman in town.’

Edward Alexander ‘Aleister’ Crowley, the self-styled ‘Great Beast’ and ‘Baphomet’ was an occultist, magician and fraud. A sinister character, the Fitzrovians didn’t really know what to make of him. He ended his days in Hastings, and his funeral in Brighton was a blasphemous spectacular that shocked the Corporation into an edict of ‘never again’.

He employed alcohol, sex and all manner of drugs as gateways to his excursions into the astral plane. Inevitably he left behind him a trail of destruction, disciples, wives and the ‘scarlet women’ who assisted him in his conjurations were likely to end up insane or alcoholic or both.

I feel I shall be visiting this fascinating group of people again...

Tom Brown’s School Days byThomas Hughes

The ultimate public school novel, Tom Brown’s School Days follows Thomas Hughes’s eponymous hero through his education in the 1830s, much of it taking place at Rugby School under Doctor Arnold.


So far all very worthy, and not too much about drink, although flicking through the book, I was amused to see the boys drinking beer. Probably of the ‘small’ variety. Anyway, it’s Flashy the school bully and his exploits I was looking for. Later resurrected by George MacDonald Fraser for an excellent series of novels, Flashman is a toady and a creep who after persecuting Tom Brown and his chum ‘Scud’ East all term, finally goes to far and ‘roasts’ young Brown over a fire. (Boo, hiss!)

Flashy is first encountered on the rugger field, playing the game in a most ungentlemanly fashion. Later at supper, the head of the winning team stands up on the table to make a truly gushing speech, firstly about how well the team played (hurrah!) then to impart a word of warning about the vices available in the local boozer.

Then there's fuddling about in the public-house, and drinking bad spirits, and punch, and such rot-gut stuff. That won't make good drop-kicks or chargers of you, take my word for it. You get plenty of good beer here, and that's enough for you; and drinking isn't fine or manly, whatever some of you may think of it.

Flashy, as is well known, comes to a bad end. After scorching Tom Brown, he eventually finds himself thrown out for drunkenness:

One fine summer evening Flashman had been regaling himself on gin-punch, at Brownsover; and, having exceeded his usual limits, started home uproarious. He fell in with a friend or two coming back from bathing, proposed a glass of beer, to which they assented, the weather being hot, and they thirsty souls, and unaware of the quantity of drink which Flashman had already on board. The short result was, that Flashy became beastly drunk.

Doctor Arnold, who had long had his eye on Flashman, arranged for his withdrawal next morning, and he exits the novel in disgrace. The book is frankly the poorer for that.

Spilling The Beans by Clarissa Dickson Wright

I first came across Clarissa Dickson Wright as one half of the cookery show Two Fat Ladies, but she has led a far more diverse life than that. She was the youngest woman ever to be called the bar and she is now a campaigner for the British countryside. Her appearance here, however, is because a long period of her life was lost to alcohol; an entry to be filed under ‘the perils’.


Until she finally sought help and found sobriety through the AA, Clarissa Dickson Wright put away a formidable amount of drink and managed to squander a generous inheritance along with a highly promising career in law. Her first encounter with strong drink, as a child in Singapore, is described with poignancy:

On the dining room sideboard stood a decanter of bright green liquid which when I tried it had a delicious peppermint taste; it was of course crème de menthe and my first taste of alcohol. Every day I took just a little which made me feel happy and dreamy...

However, it was the deaths of her mother and her beloved Clive that sent her over the edge into a decade of oblivion, which left her homeless, broke and missing several years of her life to a black void.

I asked for a large whiskey, poured myself four fingers and as I gulped it down the white light faded. Here, I suddenly realised, was the answer to everything, the key to the universe, the abatement of pain.

The writing in Spilling the Beans is tremendous, as well as painfully honest. It’s a great read that finishes on a happy note: Clarissa Dickson Wright is today happy, sober and something of a British institution. It also contains a note of caution, which I feel I must end with:

All great fun but let me give you an indication of what drink does in excess. For the start of the eighties we had a party, to which thirty people came: of those thirty ten are dead, ten are in recovery and where the others are I do not know.

Casino Royale by Ian Fleming

I spotted this in the Shoe Lane library the other day and with the blog in mind I thought I’d give it a go. I’d never read any of the 007 novels before and rather enjoyed it, although I’d probably not disagree too much with the theory that the novel goes downhill a bit after the Baccarat game.


Published in 1953, Casino Royale seems very much of its time; Bond is a hard living womaniser with a faint whiff of prejudice about him... There’s an amusing moment with Fleming notes as an aside that he has just lit his seventieth cigarette of the day. Naturally, a man who refuses to do anything by halves will have a corresponding appetite for drinking as well. There’s certainly a panache about how he asks for a martini:

Bond insisted on ordering Leiter’s Haig-and-Haig ‘on the rocks’ and then he looked carefully at the barman. “A dry martini,” he said. “One. In a deep champagne goblet. Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel. Got it?”

Bond is, of course, a complete professional. He’s doing this for his country and knows when it’s time to stop:

He called for the bill and took a last mouthful of champagne. It tasted bitter, as the first glass too many always does.

Almost makes we want to dig out my dinner jacket...