Category: Listen up

Trick of the Eye by Jane Stanton Hitchcock read by Anna Fields

The open-faced innocence of Anna Field’s voice offers up a ripe acoustical image of a woman artist in New York: Faith Crowl. Faith is commissioned by an old and wealthy New York City socialite to paint the ballroom of her storied mansion in trompe l’oeil. Faith accepts, reluctantly, after a heavy dose of gossip by her gay friend, Harry. As Faith paints the ballroom, the old woman becomes curiouser and curiouser. Her personality is  baroque, gargoyle-like, impenetrable, suspect. Faith suspects. She looks for the truth behind the old woman’s past and finds that the woman is herself a work of art, an illusion.

Bruno, Chief of Police by Martin Walker read by Robert Ian MacKenzie

An intimate look at the arrangements, organization and order of small town French village life, through the eyes of the jovial, wise and well fed chief of police, for “…not  a single pig made it to market without some part of it being offered as part tribute part toll to Bruno…”.

He put the grill close to the coals, arranged the steaks, and then under his breath sang the Marsellaise, which he knew from long practice took him exactly 45 seconds. He turned the steaks, dribbled some of the marinade on top of the charred side, and sang it again. Then he turned the steaks for 10 seconds, pouring on more of the marinade, and then another ten seconds. Now he took them off the coals and put them on the plates he’d left to warm on the bricks he’d left to warm on the side of the grill.

The strolling investigator offers up an amiable mix of local types, of those who “evidently conformed to the English stereotype of bizarre affection for animals dressed in gleaming black boots, cream jodhpurs,” of the prissy European officers of hygiene who threatened the taste of the local cheese, of old men who had not spoken to each other since the war.

The reader sometimes sounds as if he’s sucking on bubbles, a kind of terrible English mumbling.

The Accident Man by Tom Cain read by John Lee

It is said that this book does not reconstruct the Diana accident. It doesn’t. It reconstructs what might not have been an accident if a sensitive, guilt ridden orphan named Samuel Carver (“Call me Carver”) who threatens to break pinkies had arranged for a car to blow up in a tunnel in Paris. Carver, like other orphans before him, is an idiota, an innocent. He does not know who it is he has killed. What does Carver know? He knows he was adopted by a middle-aged couple who didn’t love him and sent him off to boarding school when he was eight. He knows how to run and he knows how to shoot and he knows how to fall asleep in the arms of his executioner, demonstrating a disarmed and disarming new-man vulnerability. And finally, in front of the T.V. news, he knows how to cry…. Maybe, not.

2nd Grade Reading Level Mysteries

Once upon a time, when the Bronx was a happy Italian village full of children in Catholic school uniforms, public schools measured reading levels in Grades: first grade, second grade, third grade. Easy peasy. Consider your contemporary girly fiction, focused on 29 year old nitwits going shopping: second grade reading level. Consider, too, your average add-an-egg-and-mix murder mystery: the latest Carolyn Hart, for example: second grade reading level. Libraries must stop ordering and re-ordering these  Walmart quality timekillers and discover the beautiful prose of new and lovely conjurers — Louise Penny, and her new A Rule For Murder, for example.

Lee Child’s Jack Reacher in Nothing to Lose read by Dick Hill

Not since James Bond have we witnessed such a “spectacular mesomorph, built of  nothing except large quantities of bone, sinew and muscle.” Indeed, his body introduces him:

…with his shirt off  most people saw only his scars. He had a dozen minor nicks and cuts plus a dimpled 38 bullet hole in the left center of his chest and a wicked spider web of white lacerations low down on the right side of his abdomen all crisscrossed and puckered by 70 clumsy stitches done quick and dirty in a MASH unit…

There is a dreamlike quality to a story that  takes place between an emotion and the town which bears its  name, between despair and Despair.

This is the story of a jobless, homeless, carless, friendless stranger who walks into a diner and waits. And waits. The waitress never comes. After not eating, Jack is arrested for vagrancy, charged, tried, driven to the boundary, dumped in Hope and told to go away. He doesn’t.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larson read by Simon Vance

“Salander was not a normal person.” Bandied about from one institution to another,  she has a casebook full of entries written by social workers, psychiatrists, administrators: serious Swedish officials. Because she does not speak, she is assumed to be stupid. She is not. Because she looks too young, she is assumed to be innocent. She is not. She is a child of the institution, its data and its archives, and she is at home among data, at home with texts. She rents her mother’s old flat, somewhere in Stockholm, and feeds herself like a latchkey child: thick bread sandwiches with cheese and liverwurst. She is contracted by a security firm to find confidential information and report it, piecemeal. One day she is assigned a case.