Archive.org hosts 78 episodes of Favorite Story, a wonderfully inspired radio program that asked a celebrity to name his or her favourite story. The story was then adapted as a radio drama. Host Ronald Colman often played a character. In October of 1947 Greer Garson‘s favourite story was Guy de Maupassant’s classic of short fiction The Necklace.
In Colman’s introduction he claims that Maupassant’s tale of a Parisian housewife with dreams of social mobility is perhaps “The greatest short story ever written.” In my view it’s certainly worthy of approaching that level.
I’m also pleased to report this episode of Favorite Story is a truly fabulous adaptation! It keeps every important story element, doesn’t fiddle with the setting or the character names, the acting is restrained and the plot’s length is perfect in the format (Favorite Story also attempted to adapt novels into the half-hour format).
Favorite Story – The Necklace
Adapted from the story by Guy de Maupassant; Performed by a full cast
1 |MP3| – Approx. 27 Minutes [RADIO DRAMA]
Broadcaster: KFI
Broadcast: October 7, 1947 Mathilde is a beautiful bride of a mid-level Parisian bureaucrat. Her natural elegance and grace seem somewhat out of place with her husband’s junior position. This is the story of a beautiful woman who works hard and gets everything she wants. First published in the February 17, 1884 issue of Le Gaulois (a French daily newspaper).
Just in case you hadn’t noticed that RadioArchive.cc is back up, it is!
Woohoo!
And now that it is I’ll be sure to be watching for the complete torrent for this great sounding new BBC Radio 4 production of The Long Goodbye (it begins tomorrow)!
The Saturday Play – The Long Goodbye
Adapted from the novel by Raymond Chandler; Performed by a full cast
4 Parts – Approx. [RADIO DRAMA]
Broadcaster: BBC Radio 4
Broadcast: October 1, 2011 – 14:30-16:00 Toby Stephens is back as Raymond Chandler’s fast-talking private eye Philip Marlowe. This is California in the 50’s, as beautiful as a ripe fruit and rotten to the core, reflecting all the tarnished glitter of the American Dream. Outside a club on Sunset Boulevard Marlowe meets a drunk named Terry Lennox, a man with scars on one side of his face. They forge an uneasy friendship but everything changes when Lennox shows up late one night, asking for a favour.
Cast:
Philip Marlowe…Toby Stephens
Terry Lennox…..Trevor White
Eileen Wade…Saskia Reeves
Roger Wade…Peter Polycarpou
Howard Spencer…James Lailey
Candy…Simon Bubb
Menendez…Alun Raglan
Dramatised by Stephen Wyatt
Directed by Claire Grove
Check out Stuart Manning’s glowing review (left). It appeared in the latest The Radio Times.
Lawrence Block has recently embraced ebooks, blogging and even twitter. He’d already gotten into audiobooks, years and years ago, even recording and marketing one all on his own. I think a side effect of all this old cataloguing has been that a bunch of his older novels (and novellas) are getting dusted-off and audiobooked! I couldn’t be happier with the latest batch. Listed below are a few the old Block tales that have been recently audiobooked, and that are eminiently listenable, and a couple of his brand new books too:
This is a fantastic novel, surprising and gritty, I loved it when I read it in paperback years ago.
Such Men Are Dangerous
By Lawrence Block; Read Fred Sullivan
Audible Download or 4 CDs – Approx. 5 Hours 7 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: AudioGO
Published: September 15, 2011
ISBN: 9780792779773 A very dangerous man. That’s Paul Kavanagh, an ex-Green Beret with nothing but time on his hands–until he gets an offer to steal a shipment of tactical nuclear weapons form the US government–and finds himself a partner, George Dattner, who has the cold eyes of a trained killer. Each of these men alone is dangerous. But anyone who tries to stop them together is guaranteed not to come out of it alive!
Block intended wrote this book as the first book in a series – it was the only book – so it is my favourite kind of series, a series of one.
The Specialists
By Lawrence Block; Read by Fred Sullivan
Audible Download or 4 CDs – Approx. 4 Hours 24 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: AudioGo
Published: May 6, 2011 (audible), October 11, 2011 (cd)
ISBN: 9780792777847 Albert Platt is a rotten man. Bred in the rough parts of Brooklyn, he made his name as a killer and has built a fortune from gambling, loan sharking, and the other pastimes of a standard thug. His latest gambit? Buying banks, robbing them, and collecting the insurance. He’s a hard man, and no one ever stood in his way until he brushed up against Eddie Manso. Manso is no ordinary veteran. He and four other commandos, battle-hardened in the jungles of Laos, have found that the civilian world demands their talents as much as the military once did. These specialists have made a living targeting vicious men whom the law cannot touch, dismantling their empires and taking their plunder. And Albert Platt has just entered their crosshairs.
First published in 1961. This is one of Block’s first attempts at a series.
Coward’s Kiss
By Lawrence Block; Read by Peter Berkrot
Audible Download or 4 CDs – Approx. 5 Hours 6 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: AudioGo
Published: June 9, 2011
ISBN: 9780792777052 Ed London is the type of private investigator that you call to clean up the mess when your mistress turns up dead. But after he dumps a body in Central Park, it appears this case is still alive and kicking. Seems that the dead girl was in possession of something special that some very shady characters want back. Now Ed, along with his pretty actress friend Maddy, will have to crack the case before he ends up dead himself. But there’s more than a murder here; there’s missing jewels, Israeli intelligence, Nazi spies, and a host of double-dealing, backstabbing thieves.
This is another unusual book for Block, it was a TV-tie in, connected with the short lived Markham TV series.
You Could Call It Murder
By Lawrence Block; Read by Peter Berkrot
Audible Download or 4 CDs – Approx. 4 Hours 20 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: AudioGO
Published: July 13, 2011
ISBN: 9780792778325 A missing person case brings private eye Roy Markham to the remote winter-bound college town of Cliff’s End, New Hampshire. But what began as a routine investigation quickly becomes dark and dangerous. Six pornographic photos and a tidy little blackmail scheme result in a brutal and baffling murder, and no one is safe – especially Markham himself.
This sounds terrific! I’m a huge fan of Block’s short fiction and this one is novella length.
Speaking Of Lust
By Lawrence Block; Read by Maggie Mash
3 CDs – Approx. 2 Hours 43 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Whole Story Audio Books
Published: August 2009 Four old friends, a policeman, a solider, a doctor and a priest, play cards and trade stories….The Daily Telegraph recently proclaimed Lawrence Block as one of the 50 great crime writers of all time. Find out why in this spicy brew or lust, deception, double crosses, violence and forbidden desire.
Here’s the latest Matt Scudder novel, Block’s series about an unlicensed private detective in NYC.
A Drop Of The Hard Stuff
By Lawrence Block; Read by Tom Stechschulte
7 CDs – Approx. 8 Hours 30 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Recorded Books
Published: June 8, 2011
ISBN: 9781449832704 A Drop Of The Hard Stuff continues Block’s popular series starring New York private detective and recovering alcoholic Matthew Scudder. Scudder is already struggling with his sobriety when his friend and fellow AA member Jack Ellery is found murdered. Now the only thing keeping Scudder from the bottle is his obsession with finding the culprit.
A brand new Hard Case Crime book marketed, in part, under Lawrence Block’s famed lesbian pseudonym, Jill Emerson.
Getting Off: A Novel of Sex & Violence
By Lawrence Block; Read by Lily Bask
9 CDS – Approx. 9 Hours 21 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Recorded Books
Published: September 20, 2011
ISBN: 9781461801955 So this girl walks into a bar…and when she walks out there’s a man with her. She goes to bed with him, and she likes that part. Then she kills him, and she likes that even better. On her way out, she cleans out his wallet. She keeps moving, and has a new name for each change of address. She’s been doing this for a while, and she’s good at it. And then a chance remark gets her thinking of the men who got away, the lucky ones who survived a night with her. She starts writing down names. And now she’s a girl with a mission. Picking up their trails. Hunting them down. Crossing them off her list…
And here’s a snippet from Lawrence Block’s self published audiobook Telling Lies For Fun And Profit (he’s the narrator too), which has now been turned into a Recorded Books audiobook:
Hey, you know who we haven’t talked about for a long time? HighBridge Audio! Here is the Fall 2011 HighBridge Audio catalogue |PDF|
There’s plenty of cool stuff in there and on their website. And while I’m very dubious of the enhanced audio track featured in the preview clip |MP3| of their upcoming audiobook of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, I have very high hopes for Highbridge Audio’s production of this gem (it’s slated for release at the end of November):
Dancing Aztecs
By Donald E. Westlake; Read by Brian Holsopple
MP3 Download – Approx. 12 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Highbridge Audio
Published: November 29, 2011 Specialist in the scam, the con, and the rip-off, Jerry Manelli is running around New York hot on the trail of a priest—a thousand-year-old, two-foot-tall, ugly, misshapen, dancing Aztec priest made of solid gold, with eyes of pure emeralds, worth a million dollars. Somebody stole it from its museum home in South America and smuggled it through U.S. Customs in a shipment of plastic imitations. But the wrong one got delivered, and the million dollar statue, mixed with the fifteen copies, is somewhere in New York. Jerry Manelli is searching for it, as are Wall Street financiers, New Jersey union thugs, Manhattan aristocrats, college professors and PR men, liberated women and unliberated wives, tough guys and conmen, and sharpshooters of every kind. From Harlem to Greenwich Village, from Long Island to Connecticut, the motley group races in and around New York in this comic adventure of the 1970s.
Sometimes titled “The Diamond Necklace” this story is a 3,000 word short story that is often upheld as a tale at, or very near, the pinnacle of ironic fiction. Guy de Maupassant’s short story La Parure is usually given the English title “The Necklace” – despite “La Parure” literally translating into English as “The Finery”.
The Necklace has been reprinted hundreds of times, in books, textbooks and newspapers. It has been collected volumes of “mystery or detective” stories – which is pretty damn odd considering that it has neither a detective nor a mystery in it. And stranger still, it has been anthologized in collections with titles like Masterpieces Of Terror And The Unknown and Isaac Asimov Presents The Best Horror And Supernatural Of The 19th Century.
How does this modest little tale, featuring a Parisian couple, and their acquaintances, a story with no supernatural elements at all qualify as a “supernatural” tale?
How can a story, like The Necklace, in which nobody dies, or is even physically injured, be considered ‘a tale of terror or horror’?
Perhaps the mystery lies not within such questions, but instead with one’s interpretation. Perhaps, just as with the translation from one language to another, there are kinds of horrors, kinds of terrors, indeed kinds of fates which can only be classified as a moral horror, a social terror, or one of life’s little mysteries that leaves us asking questions like the ones above.
Guy de Maupassant has created a story for the ages, a mystery story in which you, the reader, are the detective. Your job is to solve the case of…
The Necklace (La Parure)
By Guy de Maupassant; Read by Patti Cunningham
1 |MP3| – Approx. 19 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: November 21, 2009
|ETEXT| Mathilde is a beautiful bride of a mid-level Parisian bureaucrat. Her natural elegance and grace seem somewhat out of place with her husband’s junior position. This is the story of a beautiful woman who works hard and gets everything she wants. First published in the February 17, 1884 issue of Le Gaulois (a French daily newspaper).
Here’s the cover illustration (artist unknown) for La Parure from the October 8, 1893 issue of Gil Blas (a Parisian literary magazine):
The most evocative illustrations I’ve seen for The Necklace are by Gord Rayner- they accompany an uncredited radio style play adaptation (for four actors) in the 1960s Canadian textbook entitled Sense And Feeling edited by R.J. Scott. Here’s the 12 page play |PDF| and here are the illustrations:
Update:
Here’s a wonderful radio dramatization that keeps most of the tale intact:
Favorite Story – The Necklace
Adapted from the story by Guy de Maupassant; Performed by a full cast
1 |MP3| – Approx. 27 Minutes [RADIO DRAMA]
Broadcaster: KFI
Broadcast: October 7, 1947 Cast: Heather Angel … Mathilde Loisel Hans Conried … Pierre Loisel
First broadcast on BBC Radio more than 10 years ago I discovered this interesting documentary over on RadioArchive.cc, the terrific radio only torrent* site. Bond’s World compares the reality of the British SIS (secret intelligence service) with Fleming’s SIS, examines the peculiarities of Fleming’s writing and plots, as well as showcasing the varied impact of the globally popular Bond films.
Bond’s World
Presented by Jeremy Black MP3 via Torrent – Approx. 28 Minutes [DOCUMENTARY]
Broadcaster: BBC Radio 4
Broadcast: January 1, 2001 Historian Jeremy Black, with the aid of KGB double agent Oleg Gordievski and writer of espionage stories Nigel West, investigates the remarkable survival of James Bond past the end of the Cold War era into which he was born. What has been his impact, what are his politics, and why is he still relevant today?
Contributors:
Jeremy Black (Historian)
Oleg Gordievski (KGB Agent)
Nigel West (Author)
Readings by Christian Rodska
Produced by Miles Ward
Favorite Story – The Necklace
Getting Off: A Novel of Sex & Violence
The Necklace (La Parure)
