(no subject)
It always astounded me how the hard-boiled protagonist in 30's detective fiction would drink gin as a stimulant. The example that stands out to me is Hammett's Red Harvest. Obviously we now know that alcohol is a CNS depressant. I would guess that, in the era of Prohibition, lack of personal experience with alcohol coupled with its association of the bon vivant behavior of the flapper subculture might make alcohol as a stimulant plausible to the reader. Of course, I don't know if that guess is justified, as the effects of alcohol should have been well known fact by then.