Jennifer Crusie read by Aasne Vigesaa: Faking It

“Poker was second only to pool in Michael Dempsey’s skills his children should have.”

How can you not lose your shirt to the writer of such a genealogy?

This is Crusie as good as she was inTemptation read by the unrememberable, unpronouncable name who does Marilyn Monroe better than MM, and twirls the whole narration into a Macy Grey song.

Rogues: children of rogues, Tilda and Dempsey are lying in bed and Dempsey is trying to sink a pocket into Tilda and Tilda is explaining that she has a long term relationship with an appliance and besides, she has a headache. He tells her that this is the first time he’s heard the line spoken in real life….She stipulates:

“Hey do you pay any attention to me at all…?
“I paid attention to you last night.”
“To what you were doing. Not to me!”
“You were what I was doing.”
“It’s not like you talked to me. It’s not like you made eye contact.”
“Hey, my mouth was full. And my head was between your thighs. You want eye contact you gonna have to lean down….”

And then, a minute later:

“…How about a threesome: you, me, and the machine?”

Crusie is very very smart, very very funny, and so much more competent as a writer than the zoo of typists generating chick-lit that one finds oneself thinking: English Literature.

Frank Muller reads James Hall:: Red Sky at Night

It is wrong to suppose that language is about communication. James Hall does not communicate. He sniffs a piece of the invisible, picks it up with his mouth and lays it on our doorstep. What we call language is sometimes a body, sometimes a carcass, sometimes a feather, sometimes a bone.

Reading is not communication. It is something else.

Boom boom boom.

Lisa Scottoline read by Kate Burton:: Mary goes to Missoula

Bennie’s office of girls has moved uptown, and become a good hair office. The Good Italian Catholic girl and the Giant California Blonde combine glib girly gall with smart search skills to reconstruct, redress and prosecute a 60 year old wrong.

Mary (GIC-girl) is obsessed with an old case about an old immigrant and sets off for Wyoming because someone doesn’t want her to.

Judy who climbs mountains for fun (Mary once saw a photo of Judy’s family and thought they worked for Comcast Cable….) encourages her:

“Do you even know where Wyoming is?
“Sure, somewhere on the left.”
“Do you know what an antelope looks like?
“Sure, a dog with horns.”

South Philly accent well done by Kate Burton, who makes Mary sound smart and gullible, smart and nutty, smart and frilly. Lovable combinations. Law and fiction, fiction and law.

Martha Grimes read by Tim Curry: The Old Silent

Short cuts to well told endings of British crime novels don’t usually work. They leave out the localized, linguistic pulp of English thought. And it is thought not plot that makes a novel so very relentlessly English.

Tim Curry’s reading resonates with localized, idiomatic, parochial, inherited sense, regionality, territoriality.

Listen up. Tim Curry turns this abridgement into an exception.

Babes in the Woods by Ruth Rendell narrated by Nigel Anthony

Whatever else Ruth Rendell does or does not do, she demonstrates what might, could, would or should be said while helping the police in their inquiry. The mystery lies not so much in who did it but in who lies about doing it: who said that he didn’t do it and how did he say that he didn’t do it. Who is speaking? Who is lying?

Who lies, indeed? Well, Inspector Wexler already knows that once the media has been told, he “will get calls and no doubt e-mails from all the [i]nuts[/i] . . . We know in advance that they’ll have been seen in Rio and Jakharta and going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. . .” Note the rare use of the future perfect: “they will have been seen…” .

Children, one thirteen and one fifteen, disappeared. With their sitter. In a time of religion and heavy rains. And what the future perfect tells us about who is speaking is that such children will, in fact, not have been seen… And so we have a mystery…don’t we?

Havana Bay by Martin Cruz Smith read by Frank Muller

“Your cigar fell down. You told me how good it was and how all the women liked your big cigar. We hardly started smoking and your cigar fell down.” It is Havana radio. The whores are called hinateras, jockeys, to describe the way a girl might ride a pig.
In the Cuba of the “Special Period” however, they have run out of pigs. . . and medical supplies, finger print powder, condoms, batteries, cars, and everything else. It is never good to be Russian but especially not now, in Cuba, after 1992, after the big cigar fell down. But Police Investigator Arkady is in Havana, in his black cashmere coat. It is, after all, winter in Moscow.

Robin Cook Marker read by George Guidall

Robin Cook Marker read by George Guidall

Most bestselling writers, like Hollywood waiters, are really something else. Shrinks, lawyers, opthamologists. Divorced ex-cops. Sometimes a reporter. A confused priest or two. We excuse such slippery behavior when it gives us access to technical knowledge: why kill? how do cops catch criminals? what can laws do? Which health insurance?

If one listens from cover to cover, one can learn incredible things:
Never get into a car with an armed felon. When a body dies, it is flooded with potassium; so if you want to kill someone, use a potassium derivative to cover your trail. In every bureaucratic health care administration sits a bored actuary who does nothing but dream up new ways to reduce insurance risks, to wit: eliminate individuals who are genetically marked to live long and die sick.

Cook does his “forensic pathologists have more fun” routine. It’s a good routine. But, god help us, its not technical enough. We want more long, unpronounceable medical terms. More ugly medically-specific showmanship and one-upsmanship. More perverse occupational fetishes. The rumors, the gossip, the news: what do forensic pathologists talk about, think, eat? What color lipstick do they wear? Where do they buy their CO2? their shoes? their condoms? How about those space suits? The reason Patricia Cornwall is so good is that she skulls the profession, shows us its brain, and makes it bleed. Robin Cook surveys the hospital as an institution, its political posture and position and positioning, its players, its life-cycle, its economics. At a distance. After all, he’s doing something else.

“What’s reasonable and what isn’t has little to do with decisions about health care in this country…. By a strange twist of fate, managed care companies and malpractice plaintiff attorneys suddenly found themselves in the same bed in their desire to keep any malpractice reform legislation from happening… Managed care companies didn’t want things changed so that they could be sued and the malpractice attorneys didn’t want changes that would cap pain and suffering awards or eliminate contingency fees… “

Elizabeth Moon The Speed of Dark read by Grover Gardner

Elizabeth Moon The Speed of Dark read by Grover Gardner

Pattern recognition is the theme of this second millenium. Knowledge is pattern recognition. Love is pattern recognition. Beauty is pattern recognition. Those who can recognize patterns get to recognize more patterns. Hi, ho. Class struggle.

Now, lets get flush. A few small and weary ancestors hammered away at a short list of ideas. They are museum quality, priceless, with some entertainment value.

But you don’t want to get behind an idea. Not in heavy traffic. It is all over the road. It is in your face. In the right lane. In the left lane. In the right lane. Then, suddenly, without warning, it stops. In the middle of the road. Miles in front of the light. Sitting pretty on some double line, any double line.

For ideas, substitute patterns. Pro cogito ordo est.

Lou the autistic works for a company that makes weapons systems and other good stuff. He spends thousands of hours in front of a computer screen recognizing mathematically gross patterns within data fields. Patterns take the place of knowing how to think.

Lou sees patterns, Lou makes patterns, Lou is patterns.

28% of Lou’s patterns span Margot: a very pretty normal he talks to when he goes fencing at Tom’s house every Wednesday. 5% span shopping for groceries (Tuesday), 5% span driving to work (8:02 -8:25), 1% span cleaning his car (Saturday), 7% span going to Church (Sunday morning).

This is a monstrous book. A brilliant book. A good book.

It shows us inter alia that normality depends on the undaunted recognition of patterns: social signals, facial expressions, vocal tones, and on the order and organization of appropriate reactions to such patterns….

Maybe.

I just looked up “undaunted” to see whether it means the same as dauntless. The OED reads: undaunted: not daunted. No! You think? We autistics protest. Why don’t normals say what they mean? Why don’t words mean exactly? Why should mathematically coherent, numerically aligned, literal, pattern-recognizing beings kowtow to semantic ninniness. Aarrrrgh.

But we do.

Metaphors as Politics: Donald Westlake: Watch Your Back!

If you walk into a bar and hear a bunch of guys wondering about why angels have to sit on clouds “as if they don’t got chairs in heaven,” you’re probably in a Dortmunder novel. If the guys are hunched over their drinks with that 1000-yard stare that suggests that therapy is no longer an option, and the bar looks like that section of the socialist realist mural where the workers have been utterly shafted by the plutocrats, you’re reading the most exacting critique of the overfed, distracted unproductive children of America since Schumpeter.

Alternatively, you could just be a tourist having a real New York Experience, like spending 40 minutes in a Central Park buggy behind a farting horse.

Dortmunder, Kelp, Tiny, Stan and Stan’s mother, are crooks but they are crooks with values. Unlike the new huge indoor population who prop up and support a huge, useless service industry and its reality hacks. What, after all, happens to real thieves when property is virtual?

DonaldWestlake.com

This Far No Further by John Wessel read by Richard Ferrone

A nice little vignette of malicious 1990’s life with its Coke, its Sexual
Saturation & its top of the mornin’ Fuck You Very Much Sadism. P.I.
ex-con Harding is hired to track and video rich respected Plastic Surgeon
& wife-beater in the course of perverse sexual scenes.
Erotic, staccato descriptions of girls tied up, girls forced into double
penetration, girls sucking huge, rich, respected, well-educated dick. Then
things get ugly.

The job begins to smell like a set up. The dipsy Goth
girlfriend gets beaten up. The beautiful victimized almost wife begins
to look more beautiful….