Jefferson Chase leafs through a modern classic
American Gary Shteyngart is an author I’m sure a recently departed friend and colleague of ours would have liked – a son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe with a taste for good food and drink, a love of words and a keen eye for life’s ridiculousness.
Shteyngart’s most recent novel Arburdista...
By Jefferson Chase
from Issue 67 published on 01/11/2007
Jefferson Chasedelves into a novel set in Northern Ireland at the height of the Second World War
Maurice Leitch has been called the “grim reaper of Northern Irish fiction,” but he’s a BBC correspondent and a novelist, not a man in a black hood with a scythe.
Leitch has been training his fictional eye on Ulster for more than three decades, and his job as a journalist is evident in his style — k...
By Jefferson Chase
from Issue 66 published on 25/09/2007
Jefferson Chase looks one of America’s notable writers
American author David Sedaris is notable for a lot of reasons, including being one of the few remaining advocates of smoking in a county where cigarette consumers are often considered only slightly less contempt worthy than politicians.
In Naked, his 1997 compilation of essays-cum-short stories abo...
By Jefferson Chase
from Issue 65 published on 20/07/2007
What would you do if you knew you only had one day to live? It’s one of those questions we as a species dubiously blessed with the knowledge of our own mortality can’t help posing from time to time.
It’s also the starting point for David Benioff’s fine 2002 novel The 25th Hour.
Monty Brogan had it...
By Jefferson Chase
from Issue 64 published on 01/06/2007
Jefferson Chase offers us another recent whisky read
The moral of Matt Ruff’s Set This House in Order might be: watch out for the eggnog – especially if you can’t be entirely sure who’s drinking it.
Baffled? You should be. The hero of this complex novel of suspense from 2003 is a so-called “multiple,” an individual whose personality splits into separ...
By Jefferson Chase
from Issue 63 published on 20/04/2007
Jefferson Chase unearths a gem of whisky writing
Strange coincidences. Last autumn I was in London having a drink with an old friend, Michael Jackson, who mentioned an unusual memoir he had read.
The book was called The Tender Bar, Michael remembered, but the writer’s name escaped him.
J.R. Moehringer, it turned out the next day, when I discover...
By Jefferson Chase
from Issue 62 published on 01/03/2007
Jefferson Chase looks at a career defining moment
Zz Packer is an African-American woman whose career took off in 2000 when, as a virtual unknown, she landed her story in no less than New Yorker magazine.
“Opportunities,”my father says after I bail him out of jail.
How’s that for a cracker of an opening sentence? It’s from a short story entitled ...
By Jefferson Chase
from Issue 61 published on 19/01/2007
Jefferson Chase unearths a forgotten gem
Normally when something goes click in your head, it’s good. But not if you’re George Harvey Bone, the protagonist of Patrick Hamilton’s 1941 novel Hangover Square, a persuasive examination of drinking and schizophrenia in pre-World War II London.
Hamilton, who wrote the plays upon which the movies ...
By Jefferson Chase
from Issue 60 published on 10/11/2006
Jefferson Chase on the drinking culture in Georgia
Good travel writing makes you curious about places you'd never want to go to. In Wendell Steavenson’s Stories I Stole, that place is Georgia – a den of lawlessness full of boozing, jesting, musical, gun toting, and not quite likable hillbillies.
Lest there be any misunderstandings, the Georgia we’r...
By Jefferson Chase
from Issue 59 published on 11/10/2006
Jefferson Chase on how drink can bring the animal out
Among the more telling phenomena in the universe – and an argument for humorous, if not intelligent design – is that the more highly developed an organism’s brain, the greater the enthusiasm with which that creature will likely consume alcohol.
A15 per cent solution of spirit suffices to kill almos...
By Jefferson Chase
from Issue 58 published on 30/08/2006
The Last American Hero is an affectionate, whimsical and admiring snapshot of an independent American South. Jefferson Chase reports
Like many readers, I suspect, I greatly enjoyed Jim Leggett’s cover story on moonshining, NASCAR racing and the American South in issue 52. So I was intrigued when I stumbled across an article by Tom Wolfe, originally published in Esquire in March 1965, on the same topic.
The Last American Hero is ...
By Jefferson Chase
from Issue 57 published on 21/07/2006
American literary journals have kept alive some of the best traditions of independent writing. Jefferson Chase reports
This time round I’d like to pay tribute – and draw attention – to an underappreciated American institution: literary journals.
Subsisting on small budgets, often in affiliation with universities, the quarterlies and reviews of this world have a huge influence in keeping alive non-lucrative genres s...
By Jefferson Chase
from Issue 56 published on 01/06/2006
Jefferson Chase delves in to some under the radar reading material
More often than it should, the best writing is that which flies under the radar screens of self-appointed literary experts. Case in point: paperback-original ‘noir fiction’ in the United States. Reissues by the Black Lizard Press have helped revive interest in writers such as Jim Thompson, David Goo...
By Jefferson Chase
from Issue 55 published on 14/04/2006
Jefferson Chase on an extreme independent novel that rode in through the back door
For the next couple of issues, I thought I’d focus on literature’s equivalent of the small-batch bourbon – books from independent presses. So let’s begin with an excellent and extreme novel, Dan Fante’s Chump Change.
Fante, a recovering alcoholic and the son of author and screenwriter John Fante, o...
By Jefferson Chase
from Issue 54 published on 03/03/2006
After reading this disturbing Scotland-based offering from Christopher Brookmyre you'll never look at school reunions the same way again says Jefferson Chase.
If you’re looking for an inventive excuse not to attend your next class reunion, then Christopher Brookmyre’s One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night is your source. A winner of the Critics’ First Blood Award and a Macallan Short Story Dagger, the Glasgow native crammed his 1999 novel with dead anim...
By Jefferson Chase
from Issue 53 published on 12/01/2006
Truman Capote’s A Christmas Memory recalls a fond seasonal ritual. Jefferson Chase reports
Originally this column was going to be about Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a fine drinking novel that’s considerably darker and more down-to-earth than the Audrey Hepburn film.
But among the shorter pieces included as throw-ins in my paperback version of Truman Capote’s society yarn, I found something be...
By Jefferson Chase
from Issue 52 published on 30/11/2005
This issue Jefferson Chase on Terence Blacker's bleak novel 'Kill your Darlings'
Literature, as anyone involved with the production side knows, is a nasty business. The act of writing encourages an unsavoury mix of insecurity, solipsism, arrogance and obsession that sends many a scribe reaching regularly for a bottle. And the act of profiting from writing yields a host of charac...
By Jefferson Chase
from Issue 51 published on 07/10/2005
This issue Jefferson Chase looks at Michael Chabon's comic inspired novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s… a couple of Jewish guys. That’s one way to describe Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize winner novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, from 2000. Another would be to say it’s a 600-page yarn about the golden age of the comic-book superhero ...
By Jefferson Chase
from Issue 50 published on 09/09/2005
Jefferson Chase discovers the contradictions of Savannah, Georgia, in John Berendt’s modern classic Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
The ambiguity starts with the title.
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil – the product of a protracted love affair between New York journalist John Berendt and the city of Savannah, Georgia – tiptoes between genres like a curious yet reverent visitor to a cemetery in the middle of the night.
I...
By Jefferson Chase
from Issue 49 published on 15/07/2005
In Brokeback Mountain, Annie Proulx’ view of cowboys is unconventional and controversial. Jefferson Chase reports
There are authors who write about what they know and those who write about what they’ve learned.
Close Range, Annie Proulx’ 1999 collection of short stories, is a case of the latter. Proulx, a long-time journalist who only began writing fiction in her 50s, is a native New Englander. But Close Range...
By Jefferson Chase
from Issue 48 published on 10/06/2005
Saturday Night, Sunday Morning is a grainy reflection of working class life as it used to be in the British Midlands. Jefferson Chase looks at the role alcohol plays in this classic
One of the things about being male is that there are so many different ways of getting in trouble.
Curiously enough, most of these disasters seem to occur in conjunction with alcohol, at precisely those moments when we feel most confident in the essential goodness of our intentions, i.e. our abilit...
By Jefferson Chase
from Issue 47 published on 05/04/2005
Jefferson Chase takes a nostalgic trawl through Robert Penn Warren’s political classic
Struggling to maintain my sanity amidst all the sensationalist soundbites, proxy mudslinging and media manipulation of the 2004 American Presidential election, I turned to Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men a book over half a century old that could hardly be more topical.
Based on the life of ...
By Jefferson Chase
from Issue 46 published on 10/3/2005
Jefferson Chase gets in to frontier territory with hard-boiled crime writer James Crumley
Think hard-boiled crime fiction, and probably one of the last settings you’d imagine is Montana. Big Sky Country is usually more of a place for logging boots than gumshoes, but wherever there’s a frontier, there’s liquor, lawlessness and loose women – three main ingredients of the noire genre.
Jame...
By James Crumley
from Issue 45 published on 21/1/2005
Andrew Jefford’s Peat Smoke and Spirit is the best whisky book published this year. In this extract, he writes about trhe constitution of peat itself
So what are they exactly, these dark sods which Norrie has been cutting for 44 years, and his Uncle John Campbell cut for a lifetime before that, and which Islay’s farmers have been cutting to keep themselves warm and cook food with for the last 5,000 years?
Dead plants. Not just any plants, though...
By Andrew Jefford
from Issue 44 published on 25/11/2004
Time’s Arrow is a lifetime journey in reverse. And of course,anything so perverse is food and drink to Jefferson Chase
To put the cart before the horse, I must confess I’ve never been a big fan of Martin Amis, son of Lucky Jim author and Macallan aficionado Kingsley Amis. Despite his polished style and sharp eye for human weakness, I always found Amis fille’s proficiency somewhat cloying, as if
he were less concerne...
By Jefferson Chase
from Issue 44 published on 25/11/2004
Jefferson Chase on Richard Ford’s bizarre hunting short story, Calling
I was stopped short by Richard Ford’s short-story collection AMultitude of Sins in a bookshop in Coastal Maine when, flipping through its pages, I found the name of my home town, Pemaquid. Intrigued, I read Ford’s description and had the uncanny experience of being in the same place twice at the sam...
By Jefferson Chase
from Issue 43 published on 23/10/2004
Patrick McCabe’s disturbed protagonist McNab first appeared in The Butcher Boy; Jefferson Chase sees how he’s grown
The great dilemma faced by today’s generation of gifted Irish writers is all the other gifted Irish writers from past generations who have, as we Americans say, “been there, done that.” Call it James Joyce Fatigue Syndrome.
Everybody loves Irish literature for its shear delight in language and wry ...
By Jefferson Chase
from Issue 42 published on 3/9/2004
Jefferson Chase stops for a drink at Carson McCullers’ Sad Café
When Carson McCullers wrote The Ballad of the Sad Café in 1941, she was 24 and had already seen enough of life’s hard knocks to know whereof she wrote.
Born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia, McCullers had already suffered the first of a series of strokes that would keep her semi-paralyzed and...
By Jefferson Chase
from Issue 41 published on 16/7/2004
Guttered is a decadent and bawdy drinking romp. Perfect terrain for Jefferson Chase, then
The problem with a title that stops bookshop browsers in their tracks is that the entire work has to match the expectations raised by the cover. Tom Morton almost pulls off this feat in his 1999 novel Guttered.
Morton – a journalist who makes his home in the Shetland Islands and hosts a weekly musi...
By Jefferson Chase
from Issue 40 published on 4/6/2004
Ian Rankin’s celebrated detective John Rebus is a hard talking whisky man. Jefferson Chase introduces him to a new audience
British readers won’t need much of an introduction to Ian Rankin and his alter ego detective chief inspector John Rebus. The Rebus series is not only afixture in the bestseller lists; several installments have also been filmed for television dramas.
But the Rankin bandwagon is only just starting to...
By Jefferson Chase
from Issue 39 published on 1/5/2004
Jefferson Chase takes Drew Barrymore’s advice (really!) and buys a cheap copy of Tim Sandlin’s Sorrow Floats
I bought Tim Sandlin’s Sorrow Floats from my local used bookshop for two reasons. I was intrigued by the idea of an apparently successful novelist from Wyoming, who previously worked as an elk skinner, an ice cream man and a dishwasher in a Chinese restaurant.
But mainly I was struck by the endorse...
By Jefferson Chase
from Issue 38 published on 7/4/2004
Jefferson Chase trawls through another downbeat bar. This time courtesy of Raymond Carver
When director Robert Altman adapted several of Raymond Carver’s short stories for the silver screen in 1993, he called his film Short Cuts. A better title would have been Drinking Stories.
Born in Clatskanie, Oregon in 1938, Carver devoted the majority of his life to a prolonged bender, before quit...
By Jefferson Chase
from Issue 37 published on 23/2/2004
Jefferson Chase writes about The Winter Father by Andre Dubus Snr.
Watching the leaves fall off the trees in Central Europe this autumn, I was reminded that one of the consolations of winter is that
it provides a perfect excuse to stay inside with a good drink and a good book.
And I was reminded, too, of a short story by Andre Dubus Snr called The Winter Father,...
By Jefferson Chase
from Issue 36 published on 28/12/2003
Jim Thompson died unknown and poor. But his 1952 novel The Killer Inside Me is now regarded as a masterpiece. Jefferson Chase turns its whisky-drenched pages
Jim Thompson is the James Joyce of hard-boiled American fiction. Born in Oklahoma in 1906, his first job was at a seedy Texas hotel during Prohibition, where he was well-regarded for his ability to scare up a pint of whiskey at all hours.
Broke and dependent on the stuff he used to procure for gues...
By Jefferson Chase
from Issue 35 published on 17/11/2003
Whisky is a central part of the main character in Graham Greene’s The Human Factor says Jefferson Chase
Think Graham Greene and whisky, and the title that automatically pops to mind is The Power and the Glory. But The Human Factor, Greene’s 1978 tale of an inter-racial couple caught between the fronts in the Cold War, equals that work in both the quality of the writing and the obsession with booze.
G...
By Jefferson Chase
from Issue 34 published on 5/10/2003
Jefferson Chase looks at John Barth’s The Floating Opera and a day in the life of a would-be suicide case
Born on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in 1930, John Barth is one of contemporary American fiction’s most influential, if not most well-known
writers, a forerunner of postmodern novelists like Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. And what, you might well want to ask, is postmodernism?
To quote Barth himself, ...
By Jefferson Chase
from Issue 33 published on 25/9/2003
Jefferson Chase examines Ian McEwan’s use of whisky as emotional crutch in his novel The Child in Time
Ian McEwan is not only one of Britain’s most highly-lauded contemporary writers, but the one most fascinated by horrific, perverse scenarios. So I can’t help imagining that he was listening to The Clash’s London Calling, specifically the song Lost in the Supermarket, when he came up with the idea fo...
By Jefferson Chase
from Issue 32 published on 13/7/2003
Hunter S. Thompson’s Wild Turkey intake is legendary: and ‘wild’ is definitely the word
In 1970, the now defunct Scanlon’s Monthly sent a young journalist named Hunter S. Thompson to his hometown of Louisville to do a piece on
America’s premier horse race, the Kentucky Derby. Thompson wasn’t the icon he is today. Although he had published his first book on the Hell’s Angels in 1966, he...
By Hunter S. Thompson's
from Issue 31 published on 9/6/2003
Jefferson Chase on Roald Dahl’s unexpected endings, and how whisky featured in the work of a man famous for his children’s books
Roald Dahl lived a life of twists and turns. Born in Wales in 1916 to Norwegian parents, Dahl began working for the Shell Oil Company in
East Africa at the age of eighteen. With the outbreak of World War II, he joined the RAF as a fighter pilot, crashing on his first flight and sustaining injuries ...
By Jefferson Chase
from Issue 30 published on 7/4/2003
Jefferson Chase on a sharp-penned Canadian who both writes and drinks whisky – Mordecai Richler
In 1899 a man named Robert Barr wrote an essay arguing that Canadians couldn’t write literature because they drank too much whisky. Ninety-nine years later, Jewish-Canadian author Mordecai Richler published a book that refutes Barr’s assertion on both counts.
Barney’s Version is the fictional memoi...
By Jefferson Chase
from Issue 29 published on 24/3/2003
Jefferson Chase on William Kennedy’s early novel about the struggle for survival in Depression-era New York
You can usually tell from a novel’s first scene whether it is going to be any good. Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Irish- American author William Kennedy starts with a game of bowling, played for money in Depression-era Albany, New York. The eponymous hero has 11 strikes...
By Jefferson Chase
from Issue 28 published on 16/1/2003
Jefferson Chase looks at a female writer and renowned wit not scared of a drop of more of the hard stuff: Dorothy Parker
The pantheon of female whisky writers isn’t large, a fact attributable less to Y chromosomes than to socialisation. Dorothy Parker is the witty
exception. Born in 1893 in New Jersey to Scottish-Jewish parents, Dorothy Rothschild was expelled from Catholic school for insisting that the Immaculate Con...
By Jefferson Chase
from Issue 27 published on 16/11/2002
Jefferson Chase examines the love of drinking and 'cultivated comic sarcasm' expressed in the work of an ex-teacher for drunkenness-Evelyn Waugh
Evelyn Waugh is required reading for fans of drinking and cultivated comic sarcasm. Born in 1903 to a literary family, Waugh by his own
admission wasted an Oxford education and was pitched out of an early job as a private school teacher for drunkenness. He went on to become one of England's greatest...
By Jefferson Chase
from Issue 26 published on 16/10/2002
Jefferson Chase guides us down through the murky and mysterious world of Japanese author Haruki Murakami
Haruki Murakami, born in 1949 in Kyoto, is Japan's answer to David Lynch and Don DeLillo, a novelist who takes readers into a fantastic world behind the humdrum surface of everyday reality. His 1995 novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle starts with an unemployed house-husband, Toru Okada, searching for h...
By Jefferson Chase
from Issue 25 published on 16/8/2002
Jefferson Chase explores the hard-drinking author Jack London's relationship wiht 'John Barleycorn' both in and out of literature
Jack London is arguably the English language’s greatest adventure writer. Born in 1876 in San Francisco, London shipped out to sea on a seal hunting schooner at the age of seventeen, travelled half the globe and wrote a staggering fifty books in last two decades of his life. He was a man who loved t...
By Jefferson Chase
from Issue 24 published on 16/7/2002
William Faulkner may not have made many positive references to whisky in his work, but he was a great lover of Tennessee's finest. Jerrerson Chase finds out
William Faulkner was probably the biggest drunk ever to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, a Jack Daniels and George Dickel man who often wrote in a state of extreme intoxication. It’s surprising, then, that Faulkner’s works don’t have many good things to say about whiskey. From his cause célèbre, ...
By Jefferson Chase
from Issue 21 published on 16/2/2002
Brian Hennigan examines the positive and often negative relationship between writers, their work and the water of life.
Often Daddy sat up very late working on a case of Scotch.” American humorist Robert Benchley – father of Jaws author Peter – is one of the many who could see the connection between writing and Scotland’s national drink.
The relationship between writing and whisky is, in most respects, an easy and ...
By Brian Hennigan
from Issue 20 published on 16/12/2001
When a blonde walks into a sleuth's office the first thing he does is reach for the whisky bottle. Jeff Siegel dons trenchcoat and fedora and heads for the mean streets of detective fiction
Dalziel examined the tray with distaste and beckoned the waiter close. For an incredulous moment Pascoe thought he was going to refuse the drinks on the grounds that police officers must be seen to be above all favour.''From Mr. Fletcher, eh?'' said Dalziel. ''Well, listen, lad, he wouldn't be pleas...
By Jeff Siegel
from Issue 4 published on 13/6/1999
