Simpson's-in-the-Strand - in Film and Literature

In Film and Literature

In film, one of the restaurant's most famous mentions is in The Guns of Navarone, when David Niven's character leans over his wounded companion and tells him that he will recover in no time, and they will return to London and go straight to Simpson's and have roast beef. In E. M. Forster's Howards End, Henry Wilcox is a devotee of Simpson's. P. G. Wodehouse devoted several paragraphs of Something New to the restaurant, and in his novel Psmith in the City, his two heroes dine there: "Psmith waited for Mike while he changed, and carried him off in a cab to Simpson's, a restaurant which, as he justly observed, offered two great advantages, namely, that you need not dress, and, secondly, that you paid your half-crown, and were then at liberty to eat till you were helpless, if you felt so disposed, without extra charge." Simpson's is also featured in Wodehouse's "Cocktail Time" as the restaurant that one of the characters, Cosmo Wisdom, chooses to lunch at after leaving Prison. Simpson's also features in the Sherlock Holmes stories. Watson joins Holmes there during the story "The Illustrious Client"; the detective is sitting "looking down at the rushing stream of life in the Strand".