The Writer Prepares (A Nice, Cool Cocktail)

It’s been a brutal summer. Normally, my part of the Northeast — northern New Jersey — rarely gets above the low-80s, and then only for a few weeks late in the season. When I moved up here from Houston years ago, I thought I’d left behind the feeling of breathing through a hot, wet blanket — and the palmetto bugs the size of container ships. The bugs didn’t follow me north, but we've had mid-90s heat and smothering humidity since late June. 

So what does a writer do when she doesn’t have air conditioning in her office? 

What any self-respecting writer does: She drinks.

Okay, not while working. I’ve never believed all those stories about storied writers who were blasted while turning out top-notch prose. So many of them carry the implication that drinking somehow made the writing better, rather than the writing being excellent despite the alcoholism. I know for damned sure alcohol does not improve my writing.

A refreshing summer cocktail, however, can be the perfect end to a sweltering workday. And as we head into August, I thought I’d share a few of my favorites. Among the recipes I had available, I looked for three important characteristics: They had to be intended to be iced; relatively easy to make; and have flavor that popped. No bland or cloying drinks for us. Cool, easy, bracing, refreshing, those are the cocktails for a long, slow, sultry summer evening.

For my final choices, I consulted my über-cool neighbors across the street, who are cocktail enthusiasts (and one is a forensic anthropologist, so I have him on speed-dial for two reasons). They are the ones who introduced me to the work of Tom Richter, a bartender at The Beagle in New York City. My new personal favorite summer cocktail (Saints & Sinners) was passed along from him. [Tom also sells his own tasty tonic for a new twist on that summer staple, the gin & tonic, called Tomr’s Tonic.]   

Before we get started, a note on measurement. Most shot glasses are 2 oz (not 1 oz). You can test that by filling your shot glass with water and pouring the water into a 1/4 measuring cup. If the water fills the cup, it's 2 oz. 

Here are the cocktails my friends and I settled on:

The Dark & Stormy

A writer just has to start here, with that name. This is a Bermudan cocktail created in the early 1900s. Relax and stop worrying about that opening sentence for your book.

Pour over ice in a chilled glass:

3 oz chilled ginger beer (or more if you want to reduce the alcohol ratio)

1 oz dark rum

Stir; garnish with a slice of lime

[Ginger beer is non-alcoholic and available in larger liquor stores and supermarkets.]

The Negroni

Created in the days of silent films (this one's for Kate), this is extra easy to make for more than one person: The proportions are 1-1-1. The shaker also provides a bit of theater if you make this for guests.

The basic recipe for one cocktail (add more ice if you're making a shaker-full):

Place a half-dozen ice cubes in a cocktail shaker. Add:

1 oz good gin

1 oz Campari

1 oz sweet vermouth

Make sure the shaker lid is secure and shake until your hands get icy cold. When they start to hurt, that’s when it’s ready.

Strain into a chilled martini or highball glass (I like mine in a highball glass with ice, but a martini glass — or as in the picture, an old-fashioned champagne "coupe" — makes a nice presentation). Garnish with a twist of lemon or orange. If making a twist is too much trouble (and it can be), forget the garnish. 

Note: You could also muddle (crush) some slices of peeled orange in the shaker before adding the ice for a bit of extra flavor and some light (tasty) pulp in the drink. And a rationalization that you're drinking healthy. 

Saints & Sinners (or Saint & Cynar)

This delectable concoction requires sparkling wine (which won’t keep long in the fridge after opening), so it’s probably best for when you have friends over.

To a tall mixing glass (or a pitcher) with ice cubes, add:

2 oz St. Germaine (which is an elderflower liqueur)

1 oz Cynar

4 oz chilled dry sparkling wine (I recommend Freixenet Cordon Negro Brut; it’s inexpensive and tastes just fine)

Stir to chill well; pour only the liquid into a chilled highball glass with ice cubes in it; garnish with orange slice or orange twist.

Safety Note: Never use a shaker for this drink. We’re talking about a carbonated beverage here, which can explode if shaken in a closed container. (Think about what happens when you shake a carbonated soft drink.)

Enjoy!  Have a refreshing August!

Sheila York

My Fungi-side

Ah, finally done. 

I've just wrapped up two intense weeks tackling the edited version of the next Lauren Atwill mystery, No Broken Hearts (coming in late spring 2014). So I'll have a social life again, as much I ever have one. As soon as I returned the manuscript, David and I threw a BBQ for a couple of dozen friends. The simple pleasure of eating off a paper plate and not a keyboard. 

When you're up against the return-the-manuscript deadline, you don't get many breaks. But it's important to squeeze some in. They refresh your imagination. 

But sometimes they don't make you feel better. Case in point: I was cruising an entertaining editor’s blog and on her site is a picture of her office. 

I started feeling a bit grumpy, because I always want my office to look like this:

Editor A. Victoria Mixon in the office I dream about

But instead, it looks like this:

Note that I do have the 4 basic food groups for writers (clockwise from far left): Water (glass), coffee (cup), wine (bottle), takeout (box). 

I kept this shot dark on purpose. The dust doesn't like the light.

As I snapped this, I began to think about pictures I've taken that looked (lots) better. And about how most of those pictures are yet to be organized. 


As you can see, organization is not my strong suit. 

So, once I'd sent the edited version of No Broken Hearts back, I began a search through my folders (and folders) of pictures from past vacations, and came across shots I’d taken when David and I hiked in the Finger Lakes region in upstate New York. 

Just looking at them, I felt better. I was outdoors again, not stuck in the office for weeks listening to a neighbor's constantly yapping dog while trying to rework dialog. [My neighbor believes the dog protects her, barking at intruders. But if it barks all the time, how is that protection?]

As I said, I felt better. I love hiking, and over the last couple of years have rarely got to do it, with the demands of the other career and writing two books. 

Okay, this is sort of embarrassing — but we're all friends here. I enjoy taking pictures of, well, fungi. Not the kind that sprouts under your camellias after a week of rain, and looks like a nasty aspic. The kind that surprises with shape, color and its artistic harmony with its surroundings. And in the Finger Lakes, just off the woodland paths, you can see the most wonderful examples. And no one disturbs you. In fact, I've found that when other hikers realize I'm photographing fungi, they move on pretty fast.  Here are just a few shots I found in my folders.

Maybe I should get these printed/framed. 

Just to the left of the pizza box, I have nice blank strip of wall.

I don't know why I'm so attracted to fungi.

Maybe because writers often feel as if they're stuck in the dark among detritus.

At any rate, it might explain the condition of my office.


Sheila York

A Drink with the Hollywood Production Code

Sheila York writes the Lauren Atwill mystery series. Her amateur sleuth is a screenwriter in post-war Hollywood, chasing killers in the last hurrah of the Great Golden Age of Film. Lauren’s latest adventure is Death in Her Face.

---

I’m excited and flattered to have been invited to be a regular player on this team. And maybe a bit nervous. Where to start? How about at the beginning?

I came to crime writing early and late.

I was an extremely shy child, a condition not improved by my family’s frequent moves. My father was a career army officer, and we moved 6 times before I was 10. My solace was books, and I thought the best job in the world would be Writer: independence, recognition and something I could do in solitude. I thought maybe I had some talent for it, too, as I two-fingered my way around my portable Royal, a candy cigarette dangling from my lips because I’d seen a picture of Lillian Hellman in Life magazine.

Sheila York

But unlike Lillian, my instinct was to write crime. For every creative-writing assignment in junior high and high school, I crafted mysteries, often romantic mysteries. But, of course, teachers back then weren’t looking for those. They were looking for feints at literature. This was, after all, ‘college prep’. Along the way, my insecurity and the dissuasion of my instinctive efforts convinced me that whatever skill I possessed must be no more than an average example of students in my town, which at the time had fewer people than the closing credits in The Hobbit.

Lillian
Hellman

It took a few decades before I finally asked, “If not now, when?” Then with the determination only possible in someone clueless about publishing, I decided to set a mystery in 1940s Los Angeles. Even after people warned me it was risky territory, I persevered. If there’s a characteristic I share most deeply with my heroine, Lauren, it’s stubbornness.

From the beginning, there was never any doubt in my mind that my sleuth would be an amateur and a woman, that she would meet a private detective with a troubled past, that he would be the love of her life. And she would be the one who ultimately caught the killers. But how does a woman in the 1940s find scandal, corruption, betrayal, greed, sex, and murder?

No brainer. She had to work in Hollywood.

And I love movies. From all decades, but I’m a particular fan of the 1940s, when some of the best films ever made were produced. Part of what I admire about them is the ability to tell a good tale while navigating the severe restrictions of the Production Code, the set of rules that controlled the morals of American movie content from 1934 till 1968 when the Code was replaced by an early version of our ratings system. The studios agreed to be ruled by the Code in part to pacify local censor boards and religious groups who found films of the silent era and the early 1930s too sexual and violent, a threat to family life, and a bad influence on youth.

Every script and every film’s final cut had to be approved by the PCA (the Production Code Administration). Its primary rule was “No picture shall be produced which will lower the moral standards of those who see it.”

Wow, how exactly do you assure that? By adopting the most conservative values in America.

Today, I thought I’d share a bit about three things I know well: The Production Code, movies and drinking. Okay, that didn’t come out right. The Production Code, movies and drinking in the movies. Although, full disclosure, I’m quite fond of a glass — or two or three — of wine. (You can always find the hotel bar at a writers convention. Just follow the game trail in the lobby carpet.)

The Code spends most of its efforts on sex and crime — and ensuring neither one looks appealing — but it also makes clear how studios should treat booze. “The use of liquor in American life, when not required by the plot or for proper characterization, will not be shown.”

This makes it kind of hard to throw a party. Or run a bar.

So let’s visit briefly the most famous bar in the movies: Rick’s Café Américain in Casablanca, which does a fine business for a place where alcohol is rarely actually consumed. In a movie that takes place almost entirely in bars, drinks are constantly ordered, poured, carried, deposited, picked up, held and raised to the lips, but you can count on your fingers and toes the number of times characters swallow. Let’s see how many swallows make a movie.

His heart breaking after seeing his lost love again, Rick (Humphrey Bogart) sits alone in the darkened club getting drunk, a nearly empty bottle beside him, and delivers one of the most quoted lines in movie history — “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine”. How much does he drink in his misery? Three swallows. Three. In that whole classic, world-famous scene.

Earlier, when Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) and underground hero Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) first come to Rick’s, four rounds of drinks are ordered, three at their table and one when Victor goes to the bar to meet a contact. Glasses move to lips, but how many swallows do you see? One, and that’s a paltry sip.

In Death in Her Face, when a sultry starlet with a mysterious past vanishes and her gangster boyfriend turns up dead, my sleuth, Lauren, is hired to rewrite the script for another actress should the starlet turn out to be a killer in more than looks. (Of course, Lauren is neck deep in the investigation within 24 hours.)

Besides prohibitions on liquor, here are just a few of the rules Lauren has to keep in mind:

• The guilty must be punished. Don’t create sympathy for criminals.
• Keep marriage sacred. Adultery should not be excused or justified (Casablanca also slips around this one very neatly).
• No mocking of religion or those who minister in it (who also can never be villains unless they are historical characters).
• No prostitutes (women who plied the trade in novels ended up as taxi dancers in the film version).
• And my personal favorite: No representation of anything that would look like advice to criminals. A thief couldn’t tell another, “Hey, put some gloves on before you touch that.”

The next time you’re watching a film from the Great Golden Age, you might think a little about these restrictions and the creative artistry required to tackle adult themes and occasionally make magic.

Sheila York