Excerpted from "Drinking for Thrills," a piece by Gavin Lyall, found in The Compleat Imbiber, No. 7 (1964). Lyall had just received a letter from his American publisher telling him that the hero in his manuscript had "an awesome whisky capacity." His response:
"As the average reader can easily imagine I leapt to the defense of my hero's thirst, pointing out that a careful count showed that he had drunk no more than 17 Scotches (two of them loaded with knock-out drops), 6 schnappses, 6 glasses of liqueur, a bottle of hock and a beer. And no more than nine of those Scotches had been taken on the day when he was about to pilot his own aeroplane off on a Dangerous Mission. Why, (I wrote) if anything, I feared that he had shown too much restraint for a true thriller hero."
Stolen from Gary Regan's Ardent Spirits.
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