Category: Editor’s pick

Alice in Jeopardy by Ed McBain read by Bernadette Dunne

In Cape October during the rainy season, but May is not the rainy season, you can expect a thunder storm along about 3 or 4 every afternoon… The rain when it comes mercilessly assaults the sidewalk and the streets. . . But the heat and the humidity follow as closely behind the storm as does a rapist his victim. Within minutes, you’re sweating again. This is not the rainy season, this is May, but at 3 o clock that afternoon the rain is coming down in buckets.

A fundamental law of Hemingway holds true for Ed McBain: if it is raining at the beginning of the chapter, there’s going to be sex by the end of the chapter. McBain is edgier, angrier, and New York funny, even when describing South Florida.

Did you ever go to bed with Alice?
This is now 3 o’clock in the morning. Around 3 o’clock in the morning they all ask you to start cataloging all the women you’ve ever slept with.

McBain  chronicles telephone conversations, everyday speech,  questions, commands, exclamations : between widows and out of town businessmen and redneck cops, truck drivers and sisters in law, white trash and nosy neighbors and nosy reporters, the way a real estate agent shows off a house… or a Cape:

Every discourse as smooth as single malt Scotch on fast ice.

James M. Cain and ‘Sexological Advertiser’

If ever there was a language of L.A., a language in which each noun, common or proper, is localized, dated, and cast in a Hollywood movie, it is the language of James M. Cain. And if Cain’s L.A. had a voice, she would sound like Christine Williams. She doesn’t sing, but she could be singing; she doesn’t hawk her words, but she could be a crier of the news that books hold; she doesn’t broadcast, but she could be advertising baby food or soap; or she could be doing all of these things. In her voice vibrates the radio hysteria of the 1920s, showy, fluttery, stagy, but fundamentally sweet and pure and hopeful. Indeed, it is the voice of a big country, of big spaces, with lots of land to cross, lots of square footage. Even indoors.

And so when Cain describes L.A., he talks about Glendale. The overspill. The life just outside the borders, looking in. As if all L.A. was really outside L.A., looking in.

The bathroom that he now whistled in was a utile jewel: it was in green tile and white tile, it was as clean as an operating room, everything was in its proper place and everything worked.

And before there were California girls, there were California women. They wore aprons over dresses, slips and stockings, they walked on pumps and pinned up their hair, even at home. They decorated cakes and cooked proper dinners, from scratch. They knew how to run a household and how to save money and how to mend things that broke. They had names like Mildred. And husbands like Pierce.

Next by Michael Crichton read by Dylan Baker

Increasingly, the essay, the critique, the report and the annunciation are being reconfigured in the form of fiction.

Michael Crichton has mastered this form. His Next is more than a story about the re-distribution of genomes; it is Critique, Satire, Farce and Science Report, with:

  • just the right amount of irony in representing jerks, like Brad the idiot nephew who attaches to underage teens, and relies on his rich uncle for jobs, cars, and bail;
  • just the right amount of irony in depicting the social-emotional infantilism of scientists who can’t navigate their way out of their self-made moral sinkholes;
  • just the right amount of Hollywoodability in scenes with children, animals and cars;
  • just the right amount of Doris Day type silliness in domestic showdowns between a sorry husband and his forgiving but disciplinary wife: here Blondie accepts the half-son, half chimpanzee Henry has brought home from the Lab, welcomes her role as Mommy, and scolds Henry for not thinking ahead.
  • just the right amount of mad British eco-alienated humour to work its way into the next Cadbury or British Air commercial…

(more…)

The Shadow Catcher by Marianne Wiggins read by Bernadette Dunne (!)

I am reading, no hearing, a beautiful book where a photograph is described:

This is us when we are happy is not the message that Alice Roosevelt’s wedding delivers…and unlike Alice Roosevelt who continued to be an unrepentant thorn in her father’s side even after Teddy’s death, all the Curtis children never stopped believing “Chief” could do no wrong, never stopped believing Chief was the perfect father, even after absences of many years, never stopped seeking Chief’s approval.

The woman who gives this sharp, tenderized commentary on Edward Curtis, father, renegade husband and shadow-catcher is at the wheel of a car in L.A., stuck in traffic. She tells us about Edward with the same familiarity that she tells us about the shortcut (Fountain Avenue) she will take, the shortcut everyone takes, the shortcut each of the 30 million drivers currently sharing the road believes that they alone discovered.

He became, she tells us,

by disappearing from their daily lives, not a father but the myth of one, a myth they needed to believe in to survive. And despite his actions, despite all contrary evidence, they needed to sustain that system of belief even if it meant altering their memory, creating a false memory, a false identity of who their father really was. If Edward, the disappearing father was to play the good guy in their system of belief, then someone anyone had to play the villain because surely there was real unhappiness in their home in everything around them… and someone , never dad, no never him, someone else had to take the blame… the person who was too tired to cook dinner after working all day long, that other unromantic parent asleep at the stove in her flannel slippers, stressed out and exhausted: mom….”

And as she drives and thinks and turns her thoughts over, and over, she assembles the person of Edward Curtis, and how this photographer intersects with the structure of the family, how he poses and positions himself within the family so as to appear a certain way, to seem a certain way. This seeming was in fact his art.

It is no wonder that there is an aura of indeterminacy surrounding this shadow-catcher, an uncertainty arising from the distance he put between himself and his world, himself and his own century.

And with this distance comes a mystery, a puzzle which is reconnoitred but not entirely solved by the story we are told about a man who sets up a photography studio in Seattle just after the fire…

The Fifth Vial read by Michael Palmer read by J. Charles

There is more than one mystery here. First, how does one make sense of the handful of quotes from Plato’s Republic which are scattered about this book like annoying commercials for a new Greek candidate? Especially when there is no candidate. Plato’s ideas are credited with breeding a monstrous economy of organs, stolen from the many, given to the few, by a gang of happy scholars with an Old School knowledge of Latin and a gamey love of Greek nicknames and Latin roots. And here, then, is the second mystery: how would a greedy ruling class locate, trace and seize particular bodily organs for their own use?

Natalie Reyes, overconfident, overcompetitive, overaggressive fourth year medical student finds out how. We meet her on the day she challenges the diagnosis of a resident in charge. We watch her being summoned to the Dean’s office, judged and condemned by an informal medical school tribunal, and cut down like a too high stalk of wheat. Suspended for four months, she is sent by her boss to present a paper at a conference in Brazil. She lands in Brazil but never makes it to the conference.

Bad Luck and Trouble by Lee Child read by Dick Hill

Reacher heard the rack of the slide twenty feet behind him. He heard it very clearly. It was exactly the kind of sound he had trained himself never to miss. To his ears, it was a complete, complex split second symphony and every component registered precisely. The scrape of alloy on alloy, its metallic resonance partially damped by a flesh palm and the ball of a thumb and the side of an index finger. .. The grateful expansion of a magazine spring, the smack of a brass cased shell socketing home the return of the slide. Those sounds took about a thirtieth of a second to reach his ears, and he spent maybe another thirtieth of a second processing them. His life and his history lacked many things: he had never known stability or normality or comfort or convention. He had never counted on anything except surprise and unpredictability and danger. He took things exactly as they came for exactly what they were….

This perfectly tuned register and processor of mechanical sounds is Jack Reacher, calculator and decipherer of numerical messages, auditor and predictor of probable forces of character, probable explosions of personality, probable damage to friends and country. Reacher is a ‘restless’ ex MP who left his happy gang of Special Investigators ten years ago, and has an unsettled and unsettling personality. He does not believe in carrying a spare shirt:

No! I Don’t Want to Join a Book Club by Virginia Ironside Read by Sian Phillips

It is so civilized to recognize that one is old, so English. Mary Sharp is a spritely, frank, practical English lady, retired, and almost 60. She has lively, vivid opinions and wobbly upper arms and lives in a not very nice part of West London with a sweet young lodger. Five of her friends have died this year. The rest are about to die, one way or another. But dying is not the point: being old is the point. As she announces at a ghastly dinner part after asking the hostess to move the penis shaped flowers (“But I can’t see you, darling!”):

If you’re sixty, you’re sixty. Sixty is old. I’m just longing to be old and I don’t want to be told I’m young when I’m not. I’m fed up with being young. Boring. I was young in the sixties. … When I was 20, 60 was old. When I was 30, 40 and 50, 60 was still old and I’m not going to change the goalposts now….

And when her hostess says: “But I don’t feel a day over 30,” Mary responds:

But Marian, don’t you realize that that’s tragic? To continue feeling 30 for the whole of your life? So boring! A nightmare! I’m longing to feel sixty! What’s wrong with that?

And so Mary is happy to turn 60, to join the 7 million grannies in England involved in child care, to master the technology necessary to babysit an infant:

I tried everything…. I picked him up and sang to him… I offered him more milk… The only way I could calm him down was to walk him round the flat talking nonstop and pointing things out to him… Let’s look at these nice bannisters…. OOh! Here’s a mirror . I an see Gene in there, and granny’s looking a bit distraught and knackered, isn’t she? And now …. We looked out the window and watched all the cars…. occasionally people would pass by. Look, Gene, I would say in my gentle voice: there’s a man in a hood. He’s probably a mugger. He’s a naughty man, isn’t he? And look! There’s a nice drug dealer the other side of the road. He’s making lots and lots of money selling people heroin…..”

The Door to December by Dean Koontz read by George Guidall

For those of you who have been reading or not reading Koontz lately, it may not be obvious that there are two Koontzes: the early Koontz and the late Koontz. Like the early Heidegger and the late Heidegger. The distinction should open the door to hours and hours and hours of delightful, unadulterated intelligence, humorous rumination, and lines of imaginative flight: emotional transport, sideways, to use a Koontzian term. For those of us who know who Sammy Davis Jr. and Mr. Wizard are, add hours of being-with-a-member-of-one’s-own-generation type pleasure. The ease of recognition. The Door to December is early Koontz — performed by a seasoned master: George Guidall. The first actor, in fact, hired by Recorded Books, a New York City based studio that used actors (rather than babysitters) to read books out loud.

And now to the battle of principalities. Yes, principalities. Early Koontz is political and politics is always about principalities. Consider the ex-husband that kidnaps the daughter and disappears for 5 years. Consider the mother. These are characters, but they are also theories. She is a psychiatrist specializing in child psychology, and he is a behavioral psychologist specializing in behavior modification. Their theoretical differences underpin the moral-emotional ones. One theory locks the child in a gray room, isolates it, deprives it, shocks it, plays with it and forces it to change. The other theory lacks scientific rigour, but feels better. It is the theory of the mother who tries to heal the beaten child.

And alongside the good mother is the good cop. Defiant, tenacious, competent, the cop and the mother talk the child away from the institution of evil. Talk is play, talk is confession, talk is a technique which can organize both good and bad emotions.

Someday the totalitarians will take over and they’ll pass laws so you can’t pee unless you have permission from the official federal urinary gatekeeper. Then you’ll come to me with your bladder bursting and you’ll say Luther, my God, why didn’t you warn me about these people?

In Las Vegas…

…there were hundreds of people …standing around the craps tables, people in suits and evening gowns, people in slacks and jeans conscienciously rustic cowboy types standing next to people who looked as if they had just survived an explosion in a polyester factory.”

Nerve Damage by Peter Abrahams read by Alan Nebelthau

In the yard a piece of shiny scrap metal from a nuclear power plant is waiting for Roy to see it. But Roy is reading a not yet published New York Times obituary:

Roy Valois a sculptor whose large works are displayed in many public spaces around the United States and in several prominent museums, died today at INSERT. He was INSERT. The cause was INSERT according to INSERT. The self taught Mr. Valois worked almost exclusively with recovered materials, usually scrap metal but he was “no primitive” according to Kurt Palmeteer …. Roy Valois was born in the western Maine town of N. Grafton on TO COME. He went to local schools where he excelled at sports, eventually entering the University of Maine on a hockey scholarship. But it was while working at a summer job that involved welding and other metalwork that Mr. Valois found his true calling…. It was also at Georgetown that he met his wife Delia Stern, an economist later employed by the United Nations. She died in an airplane crash off Venezuela in TO COME…

Delia is also the name of the sculpture that occupies the center of his house, and reminds his next ex-girlfriend that he is still, in some sense, married. The obituary is wrong about his wife, he tells the journalist at the NY Times. Delia worked for the Hobbes Institute, not the U.N. The journalist is killed the next day.

And Roy himself is not well. He has a cough. His nose bleeds. His arm breaks. A doctor tells him that he has asbestos-caused cancer: . After his treatment in a Fung-Shui designed office, a man in a wheelchair, his age, but skeletal, is wheeled out or wheeled in by a nurse. Roy doesn’t want to be anywhere near the man in the wheelchair, because from the point of view of the unconscious anywhere near = anywhere like. And Roy scales his way through the world more or less unconscious, feeling his way around like a hockey player or a hydraulic excavator.

Roy has shovel fulls of partial information. From Dr. Choo. From his now dead wife. From the past. And we imagine that Roy will piece together something like the truth out of what remains. Scrap metal, memory, curiosity.