Greenmantle by John Buchan

A classic adventure story, Greenmantle is a tale of espionage and derring-do in the midst of the First World War on the front between Turkey and Russia in Eastern Anatolia.

Richard Hannay, hero of The Thirty-Nine Steps, is convalescing from wounds sustained at the Battle of Loos when he is asked by military intelligence to go undercover in enemy territory in an effort to discover the truth behind rumours that Germany is plotting to start an uprising that will affect the whole Muslim world. Britain, with its interests in India, Africa and the Middle East would be especially vulnerable.

Arriving in Lisbon disguised as a South African hostile to Britain, Hannay runs into an old friend, a Boer called Peter Pienaar. Together they agree to travel to Germany as soldiers of fortune, hoping to be recruited to the war effort against Britain while secretly making their way to Constantinople. They slip into their parts instantly, going out on the town for a few drinks:

I talked Portuguese fairly well, and Peter spoke it like a Lourenco Marques bar-keeper, with a lot of Shangaan words to fill up. He started on curacao, which I reckoned was a new drink to him, and presently his tongue ran freely. Several neighbours pricked up their ears, and soon we had a small crowd round our table.

Having established that they are up for a ruckus with the Brits, a German agent in Lisbon suggests they take the next morning’s boat to Rotterdam, and from there travel to Germany. Once inside enemy territory, they are recruited by the terrifying Colonel Stumm, a brute of a man who selects Hannay for a special operation in Egypt. Peter has been left behind in Berlin though, and almost blows their cover by getting himself thoroughly pickled:

It was just the sort of thing I might have foreseen. Peter, left alone, had become first bored and then reckless. He had persuaded the lieutenant to take him out to supper at a big Berlin restaurant. There, inspired by the lights and music—novel things for a backveld hunter—and no doubt bored stiff by his company, he had proceeded to get drunk. That had happened in my experience with Peter about once in every three years, and it always happened for the same reason. Peter, bored and solitary in a town, went on the spree. He had a head like a rock, but he got to the required condition by wild mixing. He was quite a gentleman in his cups, and not in the least violent, but he was apt to be very free with his tongue. And that was what occurred at the Franciscana. He had begun by insulting the Emperor, it seemed. He drank his health, but said he reminded him of a wart-hog, and thereby scarified the lieutenant's soul. Then an officer—some tremendous swell at an adjoining table had objected to his talking so loud, and Peter had replied insolently in respectable German. After that things became mixed. There was some kind of a fight, during which Peter calumniated the German army and all its female ancestry. How he wasn't shot or run through I can't imagine, except that the lieutenant loudly proclaimed that he was a crazy Boer. Anyhow the upshot was that Peter was marched off to gaol, and I was left in a pretty pickle.

Needless to say, Hannay gets out of this particular tight-spot, but only by the skin of his teeth, which sets the tone for the rest of the book. Never out of print since it was published in 1916, Greenmantle is a cracking read with resonances even today.

Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh

Waugh’s second novel, the saga of the Bright Young Things in 1930s London, is an experimental and daring piece of writing, documenting the difficult beginnings of that doomed decade. There’s also plenty to drink...

Adam Fenwick-Symes, a penniless writer engaged to be married to Nina Blount, has returned from Paris to London and is staying in Shepherd’s in Mayfair, an Edwardian institution where the game pie is quite black inside and full of beaks and shot and inexplicable vertebrae. He’s greeted at the door by Lottie Crump, who runs the place:

“Well,” she said, “You are a stranger. Come along in. We were just thinking about having a little drink. You’ll find a lot of your friends in here.” She led Adam into the parlour, where they found several men, none of whom Adam had ever seen before. “You all know Lord Thingummy, don’t you?” said Lottie. “Mr Symes,” said Adam... In came the waiter. “Bottle of wine,” said Lottie, “With Judge Thingummy there.” (Unless specified in detail, all drinks are champagne in Lottie’s parlour. There is a also a mysterious game played with dice which always ends up with someone giving a bottle of wine to everyone in the room, but Lottie has an equitable soul and she generally sees to it, in making up the bills, that the richest people pay for everything.)

As the drink starts flowing, Adam comes into some money, a thousand pounds to be precise. Easy come, easy go, however; he gives the whole lot to a drunken major to put on a horse in the November Handicap. Drunken shenanigans seem to be the order of the day at Shepherd’s. After a particularly wild night out (the party ends up at No. 10 Downing Street and the government falls the next day...) Adam returns to find the place crawling with the constabulary who are investigating an incident in the Judge’s room:

Downstairs, as Lottie had said, everything was upside down. That is to say that there were policemen and reporters teeming in every corner of the hotel, each with a bottle of champagne and a glass. Lottie, Doge, Judge Skimp, the Inspector, four plain-clothes men and the body were in Judge Skimp’s suite. “What is not clear to me, sir,” said the Inspector, “Is what prompted the young lady to swing on the chandelier. Not wishing to cause offence, sir, and begging your pardon, was she...?” “Yes,” said Judge Skimp, “She was.”

Adam’s fortunes rise and fall with the chapters of the book and his engagement with Nina is an increasingly on/off affair. Driving to a race meeting with friends, he finally runs into the drunken major who had kept his word and planked the thousand pounds on Indian Runner, leaving Adam with a nice little packet of thirty-five thou. should he condescend to collect it:

“Good heavens... look here, have a drink, won’t you?” “That’s a thing I never refuse.” “Archie, lend me some money until I get this fortune.” “How much?” “Enough to buy five bottles of champagne.”

Unfortunately, the major disappears and Adam is left boracic again. Still, the day isn’t without its entertainments. The man they have come to see race has dropped out halfway round and their friend Agatha Runcible takes over as second driver. Adam is slightly concerned that she might be over the limit, so to speak:

“I say, Archie, is it all right being tight in a car, if it’s on a race course? They won’t run her in or anything?” “No, no, that’s all right. All tight on the race course.” “Sure?” “Sure.” “All of them?” “Absolutely everyone – tight as houses.”

As the day finishes, the drink wears off:

Adam and Miles and Archie Schwert did not talk much. The effects of their drinks had now entered on that secondary stage, vividly described in temperance hand-books, when the momentary illusion of well-being and exhilaration gives place to melancholy, indigestion and moral decay.

Sounds like a suitable metaphor for the 1930s... The book finishes with war declared and Adam finally finding the drunken major, now a general, walking across no-mans-land. While the guns start up again, they share a case of champagne in an abandoned Daimler...

Polo by Jilly Cooper

Partly as a reaction to a surfeit of what I like to call ‘worthy fiction’ and partly on the strength of an article in the Graun detailing her as one of reading’s great guilty pleasures, I recently picked up a copy of Jilly Cooper’s Polo. I will confess that I had mixed expectations but Cooper when she’s at her best is a hoot, and Polo is a fun, exhilarating and sometimes exhausting read. Bit like a polo match, I suppose...

It would be futile to try and list the cast in a single blog post. Cooper stretches it out to five pages; (...Kevin Coley: A petfood billionaire and polo patron of Doggie Dins. Enid Coley: His awful wife...) and the plot meanders over another seven hundred. In short: Perdita, the spoilt but precociously talented teenage daughter of Daisy McLeod, has fallen for Ricky Francis-Lynch, the brooding but magnificent polo player with a nine goal handicap. Unfortunately, Ricky’s life has just disintegrated into disaster after his wife Chessie leaves him. The night it happens he has just won an important match and is celebrating:

After drinking at least a bottle and a half of champagne after the French Championship, Ricky tried to ring home, but the telephone was dead – probably been cut off. Suddenly, missing Chessie like hell, he decided to accept Victor Kaputnik’s offer of a lift back to the Tigers’ yard in Newbury... Victor’s helicopter seated eight, so the drinking continued on the flight, and Sukey, who didn’t drink, drove Drew and Ricky back to Rutshire, so they were able to carry on boozing, reliving every chukka.

Ricky comes back to an empty house and a note from Chessie to say that she’s left with their son, Will. Ricky finds out that the new man is his polo patron, super-rich American Bart Alderton. He sets of in his Beamer:

It was a warm night. The clouds had rolled back leaving brilliant stars and a rising moon. As Ricky couldn’t find the top of the whisky bottle, he wedged it in the side pocket, taking repeated slugs as he drove. He covered twenty miles in as many minutes, overtaking two cars at once on the narrow roads, shooting crossroads.

Chessie jokes that she’ll take him back, if he achieves a hat-trick of Herculean horsey tasks, culminating in being made a ten goal handicap, the first British polo player to rise to that level since the Second World War. Ricky snatches up their son and drives off, but tragedy strikes as his car leaves the road. Ricky is badly injured. Will is killed outright.

Ricky at least has the sense to stay off the sauce (after he gets out of prison, that is) but the rest of the cast are pie eyed for most of the novel. Daisy is perpetually topping herself up with vodka and orange, except for one dreadful Christmas with her mother-in-law when ...upstairs in her bedroom, with a bottle of Benedictine, she started frantically cocooning presents with Sellotape.

Even the horses, themselves fully drawn characters in this book, are partial to a drink:

“Can you wait somewhere else”? snapped Phil. “I’m sorry, but we’ve got a critically sick horse here.” “Sick, my eye,” thundered Miss Lodsworth, “That horse isn’t sick, it’s dead drunk. It’s just eaten all my cider apples.” There was a long pause. Crouching down, Phil sniffed Wayne’s breath. “I do believe you’re right. How many apples d’you think he ate?” “Close on a hundred.”

It all ends happily, at least for the nice people. Daisy gets a new man, and Perdita finally grows up and gets herself a suitable feller as well. On the way Cooper’s cast shift enough drink to float a battleship, indulge in some fairly fruity extra-marital sex and take part in some truly exciting polo; (her descriptions of the matches are breathtaking). It’s unashamed escapism, and all the better for it.

Cold Granite by Stuart MacBride

I was recommended this on the strength of its descriptions of Aberdeen, and some rather fanciful depictions of the local paper aside, it paints a realistic sounding picture of the Granite City, a conurbation of pubs, churches and rain. Three things Aberdeen had in abundance.

DS Logan is back at work after a year off sick. His first case is the body of a missing child, found mutilated and badly decomposed. As the weather gets steadily worse the body count starts to rise. Grampian Police are overstretched and unable to make a breakthrough. Sometimes, it seems, when the going gets tough, the tough have to slip out to the pub after work:

Archibald Simpson’s had started life as a bank, the large banking floor transformed into the main bar. The ornate ceiling roses and high cornices were blurred above a fug of cigarette smoke, but the crowd were more interested in the cheap drinks than the architectural details.

Naturally, they’re there to talk shop:

They’d spent the first third of the evening talking in serious tones about the dead and missing children. The second third had been spent bitching about the Professional Standards investigation into the leaking of information to the press. Changing their name from Complaints and Discipline hadn’t made them any more popular. And the last third getting seriously drunk. One of the PCs – Logan couldn’t remember his name – lurched back to the table with another round of beers. The constable was entering that stage of drunkenness when everything seemed very funny, giggling as half a pint of lager went all over the table and down the leg of a bearded CID man.

Logan, with no intention of being the responsible adult that night, gets himself thoroughly pickled, a situation not exactly assisted by the painkillers he’s still taking; one four times a day, not to be taken with alcohol. The evening gets messy, the morning after is worse:

Six o’clock and the alarm’s insistent bleeping dragged Logan out of his bed and into a blistering hangover. He slumped at the side of the bed, holding his head in his hands, feeling the contents swell and throb. His stomach was gurgling and churning with lurching certainty. He was going to be sick. With a grunt he staggered to the bedroom door and out into the hall, making for the toilet.

If that’s not bad enough, he seems to have several coppers wandering around his flat in a state of hungover bewilderment:

“Mornin’, sir. Good party last night. Thanks for putting us up.” “Er... Don’t mention it.” Party?

Still, at least he gets a bacon sandwich for breakfast:

Logan sat back from the table, chewing on his bacon buttie, trying to remember what the hell happened last night. He couldn’t remember any party. Everything was pretty much a blank after the pub. And some of the stuff before that was none too clear either. But apparently he’d had a party and some of the search team had crashed at his place. That made sense. His flat was on Marischal Street: two minutes’ walk from Queen Street and Grampian Police Headquarters. But he still couldn’t remember anything after they were chucked out of the pub. The PC currently throwing up in his toilet – Steve – had stuck Queen’s ‘A Kinda Magic’ on the jukebox and promptly taken off all his clothes. It couldn’t be called a striptease. There was no teasing and too much staggering round like a drunken lunatic. The bar staff had kindly asked them to leave.

With this crack team on the case, the rest of the investigation will be a breeze.