Book Review: Agatha Whiskey
By Richard Thomas
Although I do make cocktails at home, I am not endowed with a well-equipped bar cart of all the odds and ends to truly call one’s self a home mixologist. However, what I am is a fan of the eternal queen of the whodunnit, Agatha Christie. I am such a sucker for her work that even though I have been disappointed by Kenneth Brannagh’s takes of Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile, I am very much looking forward to seeing Haunting in Venice after the SAG-AFTRA strike concludes. I used to own the complete set of DVDs for David Suchet’s Poirot, which I lost in my divorce.
So, much like Bar Noir, I find the idea of a cocktail guide paired with an entertainment genre I greatly enjoy something worthwhile. This is even moreso because Christie’s detectives, like Poirot and Marple, were known to have a taste for a well-made cocktail. In fact, it’s a fair description to say alcohol infuses Christie’s work on a level similar to Ian Fleming’s Bond novels.
This is a whiskey website, so I perused the cocktail pairings for the whiskey cocktails and opportunities to use them. The Artist in Residence looks awesome, but I can’t go there for a while because the lady I’d like to share Five Little Pigs is celiac, and the recipe calls for wheat beer.
But Evil Under The Sun is a huge favorite of mine, in both the Suchet and Ustinov versions, so much so that I dream of staying at the Burgh Island Hotel one day. So next time I watch some version of that tale, with whatever company or lack thereof I have, I am absolutely going to make the Arlena’s Revenge, which looks like a very fruity riff on a single malt Manhattan.
Best of all, most recipes have a mocktail version. So, I can even bend this book to movie murder nights with my son.
Agatha Whiskey is a fun theme book for anyone who loves whodunnits and cocktails. I’m going to go thumb it before watching any Agatha Christie going forward. In fact, I wish I had it a few weeks ago, when I was watching the most recent production of And Then There Were None with my aforementioned little boy.
