Drinkers with Writing Problems

Have a drink with the only troop of wild monkeys in Europe. The Royal Crown colony of Gibraltar remains one of the Old World’s enigmas – a cauldron of cultures and empires simmering together under the low-lit flame of History itself. Gibraltar is also a port where weary sailors, restless soldiers and drifters engaged in espionage have found themselves stranded over time. Episode 9 explores how the contours of this colony intersected with the lives of three drink-loving writers, as well as how the legacy of cider, sherry, spying and warfare connects with their stories that were penned about a high rock over the sea.    

Come along on a hike and pub crawl through the most spell-binding landscape in Britain’s northwest: Writers have been gravitating to the Lake District for generations, their imaginations enthralled by its serene and stunning views, their senses on guard for the blustery, foreboding power of its skies. The district’s dynamism fostered one of Literature’s greatest partnerships; but the restless, drink-loving half of that duo eventually started veering through darker doorways of the human mind.

Season 2 opens with a return to the California Gold Rush and Nevada Silver Strike, exploring how these discoveries in the 19th century lured every kind of drifter and dreamer to America’s lawless edge of the world. Through the dusty violence and ominous mineshaft darkness, three writers emerged to capture a brazen, boom-and-bust spirit of the age. Their own drink-soaked stories – some inspiring, some funny, some tragic – have now seeped into the bones of bars, saloons and hotels that remain from northern California to western Nevada; and into a force we call the Literature of the West. 

Season 1 ends with a sojourn to the southern corners of Iberia, chasing the elusive memory of one of the greatest Spanish writers to ever take up the pen. He was a literary folk hero in the wine-splashed tapas bars from Seville to Granada; and when forces within the Spanish Civil War caused him to disappear, it set the stage for a national haunting as dark as any of his poetry. Travel to the barrios and hill towns that he called home – and to the place where some are still searching for his body to this very day.   

In a place known for dark alleys, dream factories and California sunshine, there are a few bars and hotels that hold the secret to how one city captured the world’s imagination. Take a stroll through those surviving landmarks, the places where a handful of writers watched Los Angeles rumble to life between Prohibition and the 1950s: They were hard-drinking personalities who changed the face of the West Coast – and their typewriters were blazing as they challenged the censors, crystalized the city and worked under the shadow of an ever-entrancing murder.

Welcome to The City that Care Forgot, the place where an exiled teen once returned to study a spilling kaleidoscope of cocktails as he re-vamped gothic literature. In time, his connections to the South’s strangest river port helped trigger a national obsession with the true crime genre. Then, explore how gin-distilling went legit in the birthplace of Jazz – and how it fueled a wordsmith who channeled the lonely beauty of a night in New Orleans. Finally, venture down a rabbit hole in search of the Big Easy’s lost genius of comedy. Born and raised in the city, he haunted drinking dens, wrote a masterpiece and wandered the same streets as a presidential assassin.

When a son of Scotland’s most-medieval city channeled its legacies of vice and bloodshed into popular tales, he took inspiration from the link between its shadowy pub culture and innovations in urban brewing. Following his path through Edinburgh’s old taverns reveals his influence on the city’s growing stable of mystery writers. Further off shore, Scotland’s famed whisky island is holding its own book festival, including inside its legendary distilleries. Between cold winds and drams of Scotch, visitors can see how this Hebridean isolation helped a writer in the 1940s conjure a vision of the future that’s become more haunting with every passing year. 

In Dublin, the story of an I.R.A. insurgent-turned-writer leads to historic watering holes where the city’s oldest whiskeys flow. The man who first declared himself “a drinker with a writing problem” understood what distilled spirits mean to a culture’s identity; but it was his understanding of how to overcome a violent past that makes his words especially relevant. Meanwhile, in Belfast, a small but daring group of crime novelists are using timeless pubs and pints of Guinness to confront decades of real-life killings in their city.