About three years ago (back before retirement and COVID, when time still had
meaning) I discovered a very cool service available through my public
library. LIBBY provides access to thousands of ebooks and audiobooks.
Quite possibly your local library offers it or a similar service. What I
want to talk about here are some of the audiobooks I have listened to;
specifically examples where the performance by the narrator improved the
experience with the books for me. I have listed the first book in each series.
Joe Ide, IQ. Narrated
by Sullivan Jones. At the New Author's Breakfast at a Bouchercon each
writer had two minutes to explain their new book. The most memorable
performance was by former screenwriter Joe Ide whose entire speech was:
"IQ is
Sherlock in the hood. Thank you." That's what the movie business calls "high concept."
The IQ
series stars Isaiah Quintabe, a brilliant young African-American man in
LA who serves as an unofficial private eye. They are excellent.
The novels have dozens of characters with different accents and vocabularies. Sullivan Jones makes them come alive.
Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. Narrated
by Jayne Entwhistle. Flavia de Luce is an eleven year old girl in
1950, the youngest daughter of a landed (but no longer wealthy) family.
She drives her sisters crazy because she is brilliant, curious,
inclined to pranks, and obsessed with her chemistry lab, left over from a
long dead relative.
Jayne Entwhistle
perfectly captures Flavia's gleeful and dangerous enthusiasm -
especially when she is describing poisons in loving detail.
Dorothy L. Sayers. Whose Body? Narrated
by Ian Carmichael. I don't think I need to explain who Sayers is.
Carmichael played Lord Peter Wimsey on television and he doesn't so much
read these books as perform them. Delightful.
John Le Carre. Agent Running in the Field.
Narrated by the author. At age 87 Le Carre has not only provided a new
tale of espionage but also gave us his own reading of it. The hero is
an over-the-hill spy, freshly returned from decades of managing agents
overseas. As he is trying to adjust to running a small hatch of
not-very-good analysts in London, he meets Ed, a gruff, antisocial
young man who shares his passion for badminton. We know Ed is going to
get tied up in the spy business but don't know how. This is not one of
Le Carre's best, but it has a few moments that are utterly jaw-dropping.
Anthony Horowitz. The Word is Murder. Narrated by Rory Kinnear. Horowitz created Foyle's War and wrote many episodes of Midsomers Murders. In this series he is the narrator, and gets invited to serve as Watson to Daniel Hawthorne, a truly annoying ex-cop, now serving as a consultant to the police on difficult cases. The plots are truly mindboggling and Rory Kinnear does a good job of distinguishing between Anthony and Daniel.
And a few different experiences available from Libby...
Raymond Chandler, the BBC Radio Radio Drama Collection.
Sure, Chandler spent some of his developmental years in Britain, but
that's no excuse for us depending on Old Blighty for creating this
excellent collection of radio plays based on all seven of the Marlowe
novels, plus
The Poodle Springs Mystery, which was finished by Robert B. Parker.
Biggest surprise for me was Playback, which I had never read, because I had heard it was terrible. I enjoyed it more than The High Window.
Toby
Stephens stars as Phillip Marlowe. I assume that, like him, the rest
of the cast is British. But, boy, they have the accents perfect.
Black Mask Audio Magazine. Stories from the classic hardboiled periodical. Some are read, some are acted out. Great fun.
And one more I highly recommend, although it is not crime fiction.
Hilary Mantel. Wolf Hall.
Mantel's trilogy of novels tells the life of Thomas Cromwell, Henry
VIII's bag man. It is a stunning tour de force. On Libby each of the
three books has a different narrator. I prefer Simon Slater, who did
the first.
We have Libby and Overdrive here at our library and we use both.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteAs do we and with my son's help, I can use them.
ReplyDeleteKevin
(not a robot as I make typos)
I wish I could listen to audio books, but my mind tends to wander. My wife loves them, but I need to read with my eyes, either paper books or Kindle.
ReplyDeleteI'm reading my first book on Overdrive and enjoying it. I've always preferred print but with the pandemic and close of libraries and bookstores, this is a good alternative.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comments. Paul, I should have mentioned, I use audiobooks and podcasts when I am doing manual chores like lawnmowing, or walking my bicycle up steep hills.
ReplyDeleteRob, I second the positive comments on Toby Stephens and Company on the BBC's productions of Chandler's Marlowe books. Really first-rate work. As a long-time fan of audiobooks I cannot recommend these highly enough.
ReplyDeleteStephens (who is the son of Dame Maggie Smith, and is likely best known to American audiences for his portrayal of Captain Flint in BLACK SAILS) also portrays James Bond in the BBC's radio play adaptations of Ian Fleming's iconic spy. The radio adaptations are, not surprisingly, much more faithful to Fleming's books than the movie franchise.
And as long as we're talking about BBC adaptations of great mystery novels, you owe it to yourself to sample the work of the late John Moffatt as Hercule Poirot in the BBC's adaptations of Agatha Christie's novels. I am a big fan of David Suchet and his take on Poirot, and have also enjoyed Albert Finney, John Malkovich, Kenneth Branagh and Peter Ustinov in the role, but I have to say that for my money, Moffatt's portrayal is my favorite. And you can find the audiobooks as either Audible adaptations, or on YouTube, as well. There are between ten and fifteen of them.
Such fun!
Brian