Hope to Die by Lawrence Block

What a wonderful Upper West Side between Broadway and Central Park West in the 70s voice to listen to …. when you’re on a boat to Kabul or Talibaq. Close your eyes and you can see the doormen, the yellow taxis, the short, balding, murderous psychoanalysts, walking their dogs between appointments with depressive middle aged lawyers suffering from garden variety impotence.

It must be comforting for the patient, I said, to have a shrink who
can pull a gun on you if you start acting out…You’re on the verge of
this major breakthrough, really getting in touch with your anger, or remembering
what really happened when your uncle came into your bedroom that night,
and you look up from the couch, and there’s Dr. Nadler, and he’s pointing
a gun at you….

Nope. Theres nothing as insidious as a bald jewish shrink on the Upper West Side — except a bald Jewish shrink with an aphorism: What do you get? You get what you get.

Seize the Night by Dean Koontz read by Keith Szarabajka

As Marcus Aurelius would say, there are good mixtures and bad mixtures.

Consider: A man, a dog, a Ford Explorer.
An American, a surfboard, a wave. Or: an experiment, a scientist, the DOD.
Good or bad?

Koontz doesn’t say. But incredible the speed with which we move to position ourselves
behind the good, or the bad. Koontz is laughing at us, watching
the gymnastics. Scratch. Is this the good or bad mix? Give me my surfboard
and my cape. Bobbiedom or die.

Bobby? Bobby (the friend, the ancillary character, the SECOND) is without a doubt the
most rocking Californian surfer dude in a century of surfer dudes. (What a voice Szarabajka has. And isn’t it always a member of the mobile immigrant army that tells America what it is? Read Marx) Bobby is every immigrant girls dream of an American boy. Bobby is the dude in Apocalypse Now water-skiing behind the PT boat in the Mekong Delta.

Chorus:”Carpe noctum “…Carpe cervisum….” [seize the beer]

Best Quotes:

I am not forbidden to know the comfort of a woman, but I am denied
all but the most meager light. Therefore, every form of illumination is
imbued with a shimmering, erotic quality….
Among humankind, for every Moe, there are thousands of Curlys and Larrys.
The genetically engineered retro-virus was brilliantly conceived by my mom….who
somehow still had time to make terrific chocolate chip cookies.

Best Words: “bobbiedom” “urinom ania” “skegin”

Best Scene: Elevator
Message: “Absolutely NEVER accept a dinner invitation from a monkey, unless you know precisely what’s on the menu.”

The Cleveland Local by Les Roberts::Les Roberts

Gruff, base, raspy, cutting: a voice with a fist wrapped around it. That sandpaper thing, that tough, tight, testosterone thing. That private dick thing, Slovak style.
Ex-cop ex-husband Milan Jacovich spits out violently funny running commentary on the seraglio of rich snobbish dames, old time bosses and stubborn Slovenes that populate Cleveland Society, while looking for a killer.

ONE DOOR AWAY FROM HEAVEN by DEAN KOONTZ read by ANNE TWOMEY 

There is always a boy and a dog (….and a psychopath) After all, you’re inside the mind of Dean Koontz , and its the loneliest night in the world, and you’ve just seen the saddest thing on earth, and there are monsters in the backyard, and you are one door away from inspirational fiction, but you’re a boy with a dog and there is no more efficient, happy,
heroic unit in Koontz than a boy and a dog (in a superman costume?) unless its a boy and a surfboard, but surfboards don’t bark. Sit. Wait for a chewable ending. Good boy.

“Her statement both reassures
and strangely disconcerts the boy…. so he makes another effort at complement:
“You really are so beautiful Miss Dunella, so stupendous, awesome, you
can live by your own rules….like a rhino.” 

 

 WHERE THE TRUTH LIES by Rupert Holmes. Read by Anna Gosteyer and Michael McEan.

  Published by Random House. Pub Date p2003.

Cutesy 70’s Lois Lane tells odd, offbeat, seriously funny story of buddy-comedians (Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis? Bob Hope and Bing Crosby?) bound by repressed hostility (Freud) and girlicide.

“. . .the world is divided up into four different types of broads. Sluts that I boff. Nice girls who in bed turn into sluts. Nice girls who remain nice in bed. These I generally leave for the working stiffs because civilians need to get laid too. And my mother. Her I don’t boff despite the name my manager calls me in moments of anger. I have no desire to boff my mother; I sort of have that in common with my father. [JOKE!]”

THE GAME OF THIRTY by WILLIAM KOTZWINKLE ::FRANK MULLER:

Imagine Frank Muller doing   CZ Sakall, the jowly, bespectacled, hysterical Hungarian who cannot stop wiping his spectacles, shaking his head and concocting scenarios of doom … “today… its going to happen today…” etc.

The stammering, anxious NYC diamond dealer calls Jimmy McShane, well heeled ex-cop and private dick, who bodyguards him,  makes sure disaster doesn’t happen today, and strolls home. Home: to the walk-up on Christopher Street, to the  old hag sitting on her heavy ovaries,   to the next ex-girlfriend re-aligning his Chakras in the flat redecorated by his  old ex-girlfriend,  to the Zelda-esque client who asks him to find her pedophilic father’s killer. Hi, ho. Absolutely funny, absolutely cool, absolutely wonderful.