The wine was already poured when you got there. That's the kind of night this is.
Every so often, something called Literature & Libations gets a handful of dead writers and a few living wines in a room together and lets them work it out. This time it's noir: Hammett, Chandler, Fleming, and Dorothy B. Hughes. The one the other three still get quietly measured against.
You don't need to have read any of it. Nobody checks papers at the door.
Here's how it lays out. A Cabernet for Hammett, because the man was a real Pinkerton before he was anybody's idea of a writer, and it shows;no wasted words, no wasted wine. A Chardonnay, oily and warm, for the hothouse where Chandler's rich men do their dying. And last, a Zinfandel that tastes exactly like a bad decision. which is what you'll be having by the time a spy falls for the wrong woman and a killer starts explaining himself, calm as you like, in the first person.
Running the whole operation is Christopher Hoppe, who's spent about as long studying the men who write murder as the ones who commit it on paper: Gothic literature scholar, detective fiction scholar, and the kind of wine educator who picks a Zinfandel because it tastes like regret.
Nobody in this story can be trusted. That's not a warning. That's the invitation.
Sunday, September 27 · 5:00 PM · Q.E.D. Astoria
Hammett · Chandler · Fleming · Hughes
Hosted by Christopher Hoppe, Gothic & Detective Fiction Scholar
Bring an alibi.
