When told of the Graham Greene Cocktail, Gary conjured a “Hemingway-esque image” of his fellow countryman and was spurred to get to the heart of the matter. He found that the Graham Greene Cocktail was born in Vietnam when the novelist spent a lot of time there. Greene first visited Hanoi in 1951, as a correspondent for Paris Match, and later wrote “The Quiet American” (1955) while there. An excellent film version of the novel was released in 2002, and Michael Caine was nominated for an Oscar as Best Actor in a Leading Role.

Getting back to Gary and his quest for enlightenment, our friend was a little disappointed by the recipe the famous writer preferred when tippling at Le Club, the bar of the Sofitel Metropole Hotel in Hanoi. It turns out the Graham Greene Cocktail is a mixture of gin, cassis and dry vermouth. Gary couldn’t fathom why any urbane drinker, especially a world-class one in a pantheon with Hemingway, would add cassis to a martini.

Nonetheless, our friend says “Greene's drink did serve a purpose.” It was enough to stir Gary’s creative juices, seek inspiration from Charles H. Baker Jr.'s 1939 book, "The Gentleman's Companion," and concoct a variation on a recipe for the Pompier Highball found there, with a very pleasant result. As our friend wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle:

The chief difference between the Graham Greene Cocktail and my Pompier variation lies in the ratios of the ingredients. The Hanoi drink is more or less a dry gin martini with a splash of cassis, whereas the Pompier Cocktail calls for the vermouth to be the base, uses a small amount of gin to give the thing a backbone, and gets a fruity note…from not much more than a splash of cassis.