Merciless by Rich Montanari read by Scott Brick

It’s always interesting to explore a place through its crime scenes. Like the not yet totally gentrified neighborhoods of Northwest Philadelphia, on the eastern bank of the Schuylkill River. Which runs through this mystery as it runs through Pennsylvania. All along the river young women are being murdered in horrible ways. Murder is always local.

Fiddlers by Ed McBain read by Charles Stransky

We get information in clumps, tangles, bunches. There are facts, mixed up with opinions, references, foreign words, sounds and descriptions referring to where we are talking, what is going on where we are talking, the distraction-ridden machinery of a technologically frenzied environment, analogies dragged in from confused personal archives, elaborations drawing on gossip, rumours, and mother disciplines, percentages, abbreviations, brand-names, phrases in mixed tongues, side notes referencing the inaccuracies of the company we keep and the associations we accumulate.

Dialogue. Which is what McBain does. Consider Carella and Parker questioning an ex-boyfriend:

So tell us how you happened to break up?

It was the Passion. The Mel Gibson movie. I told Alicia it was Anti-semitic. She disagreed. I’m Jewish; we got into an argument.

So whose idea was it to split up?

My mother’s. I live with my mother. She said if we were going to fight already over a farkaktmovie that was just the beginning…..I hate Mel Gibson.

Thirty seconds to peel a character like an egg.

Ollie Weeks is asking Parker for advise because Ollie was kissed in the mouth by Patricia the other night after he played piano for her family. Yes, this is the fat, suspicious, comical sociopath who hates everyone equally. Except that now he has a sweet piano teacher, and a sweet girlfriend and is looking ten pounds less hateful.

Kling, meanwhile, is asking Carella for advise. About Sharon, who he loves and whom he followed and who now refuses to talk to him.

“Everybody’s always innocent, Brown said. Nobody ever did anything. Catch ’em with the bloody hatchet in their hands they say this ain’t my hatchet this is my uncle’s hatchet…Wonder anybody’s in jail at all there’s so many innocent people around….

Brown and Kling are interviewing the head of Baldwin University’s English Department who is wearing a purple butterfly bow tie and telling Brown that “we’ve never anything like this happen before….”. Brown is wondering if his wife Caroline would go for him in a tie like that one…

Because conversations are never just about information and even information is never just about information. Because even cops hear by drifting in and out of their own conversations. Hearing from where they are being heard.

Beverly Hills Dead by Stuart Woods read by Tony Roberts

The House of UnAmerican Activities Committee (on which sits Dick Nixon) is looking for Communists, and finds a few poor schmucks in Hollywood. Some Jews are inquisitioned, black-listed, and disappeared from the credits. Their words are found in screenplays by unknowns from Wyoming and Maine.

Other Jews give advise. Like Hyman Greenbaum:

Don’t buy a car until you can pay cash for it. And it should be used. You should live modestly. And don’t go to expensive restaurants unless the studio or somebody else is paying. You keep putting money in the bank. You don’t marry a co-star. You don’t buy a house until you can pay cash. You don’t ever take a job because of the location or the costar or even the director. You take jobs for good scripts, that’s all. If you can stick to that program you’ll become very rich. . . They’re going to want you to see a dentist… I’ll make them pay for it.

Good advise for any post-war generation.

The Tailor of Panama read by John Le Carre read by Le Carre

The relentless decomposition of the Oznard family has left Andrew in the position of so many young Englishmen, who had, for the first time in centuries, to feed themselves.

Young Andrew had thus determined from an early age that he was for England and more specifically, that England was for him… What he needed was a decaying English institution that would restore to him what other decaying institutions had taken away….

And what he chose was the Secret Service.

An exact and well cut commentary on the tradition of tailoring and its neo-colonial clientele.

Power Play by Joseph Finder read by Dennis Boutsikaris

Jake is the kind of guy that tells his girlfriend to stop using some pheromonal perfume by Clinique because it “messes with his head”. But apart from perfume, he is singularly unfussed. He is streetwise, he is attentive, and he belongs inside his own body. But he belongs nowhere else.

I shrugged. I guess that ‘s the advantage of being a low level flunkee. Im not a member of the team – you know what they say – the nail that sticks up gets hammered down.

Jake doesn’t stick up. Sheryl, his new CEO, would lift an eyebrow to express disapproval for Jake’s iconoclastic white trash camouflage. But she has had too much Botox.

Instead, she brings Jake along on an ‘off site’ (an extended compulsory ‘breakfast club’ for naughty executives).

Where Jake sticks up, and saves the day.

The Senator’s Wife by Sue Miller read by Blair Brown

Women are divisive. Among themselves and between their generations. Go to any academic women’s conference and see for yourself. Or listen to Blair Brown’s crisp, young, feminine voice reading The Senator’s Wife.

And listen for this divisiveness. In the pasteurized neighborly conversations of Miller’s two women: the 37 year old newly married Meri, unemployed, hypercritical and amoral, and the handsome, charming, well mannered Senator’s wife, Delia, archaism of a femininity shaped by different rules.

The light chatter of the women is seductive and irresistable and light, and unfolds their character, their virtu, as well as their style. Delia is a full-figured soul, a solid, generous, private collection of duties girdled by public beliefs and public habits. Delia is the effect of a life shared with her country, her party, her church, and a husband shared with other women. Tom Naughton, the Senator, has indeed had many women, some of whom Delia ignored and some of whom she didn’t. Her private life with Tom is ruleless. She lives more or less alone in their home in Massachusetts most of the year, and travels to Paris in the Spring. She is a privately sexual woman.

Meri, by contrast, is a patchwork of debts, impulses, and discomforts. She writes freelance pieces for a variety of journals and papers, faithful to none, committed to nothing. She finds a job at a radio station, she becomes pregnant. She loves her body, loves the pleasure it gives her, and is unhappy in pregnancy. To effect change, she goes shopping. She can assume the fantasy of a pregnant woman in the same way as she can assume the fantasy of a wife or a neighbor. Indeed she is enchanted by her neighbor, the senator’s wife. Enchanted in her very misconfiguration and misrecognition of Delia: who is (the copula) the senator’s wife but is not (the existential is not, the essential is not) the senator’s wife.

Delia is political in her own right, in her own shoes, at her own party:

My favorite of the entire group was Martha Mitchell. Old Martha critiqued the whole thing from home by the telephone… She’d call someone and announce one luny event after another with her big wide mouth. Remember Tom? When she said she’d been kidnapped by the FBI and it was true. They were all true, all these things that people assumed were dipsomaniacal….

The senator’s wife, like Martha Mitchell, is a political woman, a political animal. And then, too, a wife.

Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious by Gerd Gigerenzer read by Dick Hill

A short sharp meditation on how we know what we know and how we decide what we decide by the director of the Center of Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.

When I became director of the Max Planck institute of Human Development, I wanted to create an interdisciplinary research group whose members actually talked worked and published together–a rare thing. Unless one actively creates an environment that supports this goal, collaboration tends to fall apart within a few years or may never get off the ground in the first place. The major obstacle is a mental one.

Researchers like most ordinary people tend to identify with their in group and ignore or even look down on neighboring disciplines. Yet most relevant topics we study today do not respect the historically grown disciplinary borders and to make progress, one must look beyond one’s own narrow point of view so I came up with a set of rules, not verbalized but acted upon that would create the kind of culture I desired.
Those rules included: EVERYONE ON THE SAME PLANE.

In my experience, employees who work on different floors interact 50% less than those who work on the same floor. And the loss is greater for those working in different buildings. People often behave as if they still lived in the savannah, where they look for others horizontally but not above or below ground. So when my growing group needed an additional 2000 square feet in which to operate, I vetoed the architect’s proposal that we construct a new building, and extended our existing offices horizontally so that everyone remained on the same plane…..

This pancake theory of organizational vitality is just one demonstration of the non-logical rules that govern human environments.

Intelligence is at work in what we call gut feelings, hunches and intuitions — despite the fact that we cannot account for them. Intelligence is also at work in the non-logical rules of thumb we use to navigate and predict the behavior of others.

Consider a woman waiting for a black suitcase at Kennedy Airport, and a cop who is looking only for a woman who is looking out for him. How does he zero in on the woman?

Consider a baseball player who wants to catch a ball: how does he calculate where the ball will be so he can catch it?

How does Harry decide on which of his two girlfriends he should marry?

Different heuristics and rules of thumb underlie intuitions, enabling fast action, utilizing ‘recognition memory’ and the ability to track moving objects… But these rules are not logical. Gerd Gigerenzer navigates the place that gut feelings hold within human knowing, inviting us to re-evaluate both knowing and feeling.

Thunder Bay by William Kent Krueger read by Buck Schirner

Solid, sensible text hulled out of an old, heavy earth:

The farmer was a tense willowy man with a German name and a head as bald as a rock.

and

The farmer’s wife was fine cook and a generous woman.

Meals, too, are solid and heavy and bald: boiled ham, baked chicken, wax beans, mashed potatoes, corn fritters, brown bread, rhubarb pie.

Food centers the story and exposes economic differences. Sam’s Place is a local diner for poor white trash, where Minnesota Indians eat fried balony and jelloed fruit. The proprietor is an ex-sheriff with three children, a busy wife, and local loyalties. One of them is an old odd Indian who gives him a mission: find my son and deliver a message.

The rich, Canadian son does not want to be found. He is unmined, along with a local past, dirty, unpleasant, but rich with truth.