Category: Clever

Three Stations by Martin Cruz read by Ron McClarty

Arkady, the permanently grim, dejected, despondent Moscow cop wants another autopsy done on the body of a prostitute and finds his old friend Willie at the morgue, having moved in.

Immense and unshaven, Willie Pezenko shuffled around the morgue like a wooly mammoth in an operating gown. A cigarette hung from his lips, a glass of antiseptic alcohol from his hand. At school he had been called Belmondo after the French actor for his style with a cigarette. Arkady had been his classmate but now Willie looked 20 years older…. “I can’t do it. I’m not up to it. Doctor’s orders.”

“You could do it with  your eyes closed, ” Arkady said.

Willie waved a glass at the cadavers…”Don’t you think I would like to dive in? Some of the work that comes out of this place you wouldn’t believe. Butcher’s work at a butcher’s pace. A real abattoir. They dig out the heart and lungs, slit the throat, pull out the esophagus. No finesse, no analysis. Run a saw around the skull, pop the brains, dig out the organs, bag them, weigh them, dump them, tween the knees, and finish in less time than it takes to dress a rabbit….”

“I’m retired. On the sidelines. … Friends come by. Some of them alive, some of them dead. And when I drop there’ll be no need for an ambulance. Cause I’m here…”

Twelve Rooms With A View by Theresa Rebeck read by Marguerite Gavin

What begins as a story about a girly James Dean with two wicked sisters and a  drunk mother becomes a story about a CPW apartment building and its history, its doorman, its neighbors.

Tina Finn is outrageous and outraged, at everyone with a bank account  or a stable identity, at her sister with the crackberry, at her other sister with the perfect husband, at grown ups. But in a Jacuzzi surrounded by gay men she becomes another Doris Day …. relaxed, bubbly, verbal.    The twelve room apartment gathers around itself a seraglio of children, thieves and lovers, and delivers an ending both righteous and happy.

Promises To Keep by Jane Green read by Cassandra Campbell

There is something beautiful and more than beautiful about these women who enjoy their kitchens, who love  all the rooms of domesticity.   Jane gives us wives, book club ladies and hostesses, in Manhattan or Westchester, well groomed and well mannered and well off, obedient to husbands or mothers in law or schedules. Some are jolly and educated New Englanders, old and odd, wealthy and artsy and irrepressible.  The plot? It is as comforting as warm bread,  about women organizing people and things; themselves and each other. One woman most of all: Callie Perry, who has always been the happy center of many friendships.

Jane Green, The Beach House read by Cassandra Campbell

Nan localizes Nantucket. Charmed, beautiful, slightly eccentric, she is at that age  where she can get away with mostly anything:   trespassing or swimming naked or wearing scarlet lipstick everywhere.

Nan lives in a huge old house where she has decided to run a bed and breakfast for summer guests. It is this  house which  brings together a handful of curious, complicated personalities: Michael, Nan’s son, Bea and Daniel (a soon to be divorced couple), Daphne (a divorced real estate agent) and her hormonal and horrible daughter.

Nan eases and re-invents the lives which assemble around her; she couples, amuses, and converts her guests, into friends, into family.

The Taken by Inger Ash Wolf, read by Bernadette Dunne

We find the troublesome, 62 year old Detective Inspector in bed after a back operation, popping Percocets and abusing the hospitality of her ex-husband’s new wife. Within a week she is thigh deep in a case of abduction, with a scene of crime and a bloody victim being broadcast live on line to her desktop. Within 2 weeks her wry, dry, black personality has generated several joyless encounters.

Consider Officer Childress from Toronto:

“Are you crazy!!? You don’t send the chief of the biggest division in Toronto a human hand to his desk!” (Hazel: “Where does he like to take delivery of such things??”)

Or Supervisor Ilunga: “Now he was looking at her as if trying to decide what part of her to rip off first.”

I told you to go home… …We investigated this death. You arrived here with a foregone conclusion. What I’m doing is standing my ground against the devil, who appears before us in the form of an intuition. Every time someone walks in here with a feeling i want to reach for my gun. You know how much a hunch costs? A SOCO team with a vehicle big enough to get that boat and its oars back to a clean room, the hours to rephotograph the goddamn thing, the spectroscope, the refingerprinting of latents now 3 years old, I’ll start at $30,000 but I’m being optimistic. “(Hazel: “So its the cost that bothers you, or the revelation that you accepted a suicide wrap because its good for business?…”)

Or Sunderland, the editor of the Westmuir Record, hair plastered flat on his forehead by weather and stress:

Ah! Here she is: Shiva the Destroyer. And look! Here is her handiwork! …You are feckless, power-hungry, thoughtless, arrogant and foolish… You think strong arming anyone you care to into doing your will is the way to run the Port Dundass PD…!? ” (Hazel: How was Atlanta? …If you’re thinking of ruining me you better get in line; you have competitors.”)

By the end the whole affair has cost 30 grand plus one helicopter, but life in the Canadian provinces is back to normal, the “weekly B & E, the biweekly domestic, the monthly car theft.” (“It was so regular that the older cops joked they should have sign up sheets for perps to fill in before they committed the  quota of small time offences” they were delegated in the county.)

A Murder is Announced by Agatha Christie

There are very few perfect beginnings to a story. Beginnings which move through images at the same rate as they move through text, rolling into a plot detectibly, sensibly, unhurriedly. A boy, for example, making the rounds on his bicycle, delivering the daily papers:

…At Colonel and Mrs Easterbrook’s, he delivered The Times and the Daily Graphic. At Mrs Sweatenham’s he left The Times and The Daily Worker. At Miss Hingecliff’s and Miss Murgatroyd’s he left The Daily Telegraph and The News Chronicle. At Miss Blacklocke’s, he left The Telegraph, The Times and The Daily Mail. At all these houses, and indeed in practically every house in Chipping Cleghorn, he delivered every Friday, a copy of the North Benom News and The Chipping Cleghorn Gazette, known simply as The Gazette. Thus on Friday mornings, after a hurried glance at the headlines in the daily paper…. most of the inhabitants of Chipping Cleghorn eagerly opened the Gazette and plunged into the local news. After a cursory glance at correspondence, in which the passionate hates and feuds of rural life found full play, most of the subscribers then turned to the local column.

We can easily sketch in our mind a series of houses, in front of which stand assorted sizes of mailbox, and in which kitchens sit the inhabitants of this happy English village, eating their singular English breakfasts, reading the headlines, the correspondence, the local news, and then, more likely than not, the Classifieds, in which are published up to the minute or almost up to the minute ads, as relevant and localizable as Tweets. Agatha Christie's A MURDER IS ANNOUNCED

Agatha Christie The Hollow read by Hugh Fraser

Have a bit of Christie as social chronicler, as drawing room critic of a leisure class which presents itself as a platform of unemployment. It is 1946 and the Angkatells are gathered togethered, after the murder. Lucy, the mistress of cognitive deviations, Henrietta, clever, independent and detached, Midge, dark, square shaped, and poor, David, a spoiled, sour intellectual, and Edward, the reluctant, bony, undeserving heir.

It is quite obvious that the notion of work is odd, uncertain, and turning: the way milk turns. “Is the woman sympathetic and pleasant to work for?,” Edward asks Midge. “If you must have a job you must take one where the surroundings are harmonious and where you like the people you are working with.”

But how does one explain the notion of work to an heir?

How to explain to a person like Edward… What did Edward know of the labour market, of jobs, They were all divided from her by an impassible gulf: the gulf that separates the leisured from the working. They had no conception of the difficulties of getting a job. And once you had got it, of keeping it… She had found a job for herself at 4 pounds a week… Midge had no particular illusions about working. She disliked the shop. She disliked Madame Alfredge. She disliked the eternal subservience to ill tempered and impolite customers. She doubted very much whether she could obtain any other job….

A 17 year old shop girl, circa 1946 or 2010?

Discontent does not stop at the door of the dress shop. Oxford is overgrown with it; circulates it, exports it.

“I must have a talk with you David and learn all about the new ideas. As far as I can see one must hate everybody but at the same time give free medical attention and a lot of extra education… Poor things all those helpless little children herded into schoolhouses everyday….

After The Funeral by Agatha Christie read by Hugh Fraser

After the funeral, there is the family and the village. There is a batty aunt, a hysterical and heirless English lord, his ancient butler, and a smattering of inadequate and weak-willed in-laws, waiting for their share. These are the leftovers of the comfortable class, who married badly and relied on unreliable servants. Unlike Miss Gilchrist, who knew how to cook, and ran a pretty little teashop before the war.

Agatha Christie, differently

A wagonful of new Agatha Christie audiobooks (“lesser” works?) shows us an Agatha knee-deep in Freud, perhaps, indeed, an “English Freud”. Here she experiments with the entire merde ridden hagiography of psychoanalytic terms: pathologies, neuroses, perversions, deviances, persecutions. Sarah has just finished her M.B. and is interested in psychology. She looks on as an old obese mother, an ugly wheelchaired figure wields a regime of psychological oppression over her “nervy” “nervous” unnerved family. The ugly Mrs. Boynton continues to perform her chores as the warden of a women’s prison, although she no longer performs them inside a prison. Instead she institutes prohibitions against the emotions, liberties, impulses, movements, of her step sons and daughters.

Sarah complains of the rudeness of Raymond Boynton, who ignores her in the presence of his mother, despite their earlier conversation. The tradition of English manners comes to Jerusalem not in opposition to rudeness but rather as a prophylactic to madness; madness is the excess of civilization, the bad habit of civilization. As the narrator in An Appointment With Death tells us about the horrific Mrs. Boynton: “In a savage tribe they would have boiled and eaten her up her years ago”.

The Deal: A Novel of Hollywood by Peter Lefcourt read by William H. Macy

L.A./Hollywood relived by a suicidal ex-husband ex-producer ex-Jew with a  screenplay.  The screenplay is  fresh off the bus from New Jersey, delivered to Charlie (post suicide) by his 21 year old nephew, Lionel. It is about Disraeli but that doesn’t matter.  The screenplay is his property, and all Charlie needs to make it (again)  in this town is one property.

The screenplay, nicknamed Ben and Bill, or Bob and Bill, somehow makes itself known to a studio,  an agent, a casting director,  who manage to get a black pro-Israel karate expert to play Disraeli, the Jew.

The characters are mimetic:

The  studio executive assistant has the unwieldy habit of walking to the nearest ladies room, locking the door, and screaming.   (It is always a mistake to actually read the screenplay.) We visit with her and her Beverly Hills therapist in intimate one hour sessions,  at which she arrives  hystericized with laughter. The therapist is straight out of DSM-V and full of noteworthy advice, relevant to any and all professional women over 35 who work among men. Cut out a small nook of rationality inside the chaos.

The director is paid in  dinar which have been blocked from leaving Yugoslavia, and doesn’t talk to the actors.  The actors are not worth characterizing.

Prepare to grow a dry grin and giggle while reading.