Frederic Brown's characters drink enough (and in most cases, with enough believable quiet desperation) that I end up worrying about the author's own life. At least Doc Stoeger in Night of the Jabberwock has an unlikely tolerance for the stuff -- I went back and counted how many drinks he had over the course of the novel's 24-hour timeline, and concluded that he must be some kind of alcohol-powered android who only *believes* himself to be a 52-year-old small-town newspaper editor.