mystery – Page 11

Review Of Mindstar Rising (Greg Mandel, #1) By Peter F. Hamilton

SFFaudio Review

Mindstar Rising (Greg Mandel, #1)
By Peter F. Hamilton; Read by Toby Longworth
Audible Download – 14 Hours 52 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Audible Frontiers
Published: December 1st 2011
Themes: / Science Fiction / Mystery / Global Warming / Psychic Abilities

It’s the 21st century, and global warming is here to stay, so forget the way your country used to look. And get used to the free market, too – the companies possess all the best hardware, and they’re calling the shots now. In a world like this, a man open to any offers can make out just fine.

A man like Greg Mandel for instance, who’s psi-boosted, wired into the latest sensory equipment, carrying state-of-the-art weaponry – and late of the English Army’s Mindstar Battalion. As the cartels battle for control of a revolutionary new power source, and corporate greed outstrips national security, tension is mounting to boiling point – and Greg Mandel is about to face the ultimate test.

This is an older Peter F. Hamilton novel, first published in 1993. It’s relatively short compared to his later books. Just this year it got reprinted in America with Quantum Murder as one book. (I guess thick books sell more?) It has also just gotten the audio treatment from Audible Frontiers. Peter F. Hamilton is kind of a potboiler sf writer, and yet he’s really smart. He seems to put a lot of research into his scenes, including some science. Sometimes I feel like he’s giving too many details compared to someone like Joe Haldeman, and I get a little restless. Maybe it’s my fault and I’m getting confused, which is easier to do in an audiobook. But then something shocking or intense happens, and it keeps me going. Plus his character development is above average for a genre writer. And he doesn’t shy away from sex or violence as much as other writers. I feel like he writes for adults. If you thought the Night’s Dawn or Void trilogies had too many fantasy elements, you might prefer this series. It is more straight science fiction. That’s assuming you don’t consider psychic abilities to be fantasy. At least they’re framed here in a scientific way. You may encounter some libertarian political messages as well. The setting is a post global warming world where a Leftist government has left England in shambles. It will become important to the plot.

I happen to know that Hamilton is a plotter and outlines in advance. I experienced the ‘Connie Willis effect’ while reading — I wasn’t sure why a certain character or location was introduced, but then it all tied together in the end. The last three or four hours here really cooked. He can describe beam weapons and explosions well. (Compare the end of his The Neutronium Alchemist with the end of Samuel R. Delany’s Nova.) Although I caution you there’s a somewhat grisly escape. And I don’t like the word ‘tropes’, but some of the ‘cool stuff’ you’ll see in this novel are mind uploading, cybernetic brain enhancement, and genetically enhanced animals.

No messing.

Posted by Tamahome

The SFFaudio Podcast #134 – READALONG: The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time by Mark Haddon

Podcast

The SFFaudio Podcast #134 – Jesse, Scott, Tamahome, Eric S. Rabkin, and Jenny talk about The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time by Mark Haddon.

Talked about on today’s show:
the upside-down dog cover, Jesse doesn’t like the cover, Eric finds hidden meaning in the cover, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is it mainstream or a mystery or YA?, Asperger’s or autism?, what is it like to be inside another person’s head?, generates tolerance, Elaine’s post on TED Talk: Elif Şafak on The Politics Of fiction, neurotypical characters, extraordinary abilities and extraordinary deficits, Constituting Christopher: Disability Theory And Mark Haddon’s by Vivienne Muller, Scott loves lists, the reader is ahead of the narrator, unreliable narrators, Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes, The Speed Of Dark by Elizabeth Moon, mystery vs. family drama, Oedipus, “Sophocles not Freud”, Christopher Robin, (Winnie The Pooh), “there is something naively wonderful going on”, information vs. meaning, who did it? vs. why did it get done?, moving from what to why, Eric found the book joyful and uplifting, at the end?, abusive vs. human vs. murderous, PETA would not be pleased, “sometimes people want to be stupid”, Occam’s Razor, “now I know what box they fit into”, Cinderella, the Grimm Brothers, Jesse loves the infodumps, the asides are a highlight, where is Siobhan?, the Recorded Books audiobook version has a great narrator (Jeff Woodman), prime numbered chapters, are the pictures necessary?, Orion (the hunter in the sky), the most common word in the book is ‘and’, “he’s adding things up”, “this is a very true book”, “lies expand infinitely in all directions”, what Science Fiction and mystery look for, “sometimes people want to be stupid”, prime numbers are like life, rationalism vs. empiricism, Christopher yearns for uniqueness, right triangles, the appendix (is not in the audiobook), the brown cow joke, unreliable narrator, Conan Doyle’s beliefs, information vs. understanding, Harriet The Spy, dude don’t stab people, “a tag cloud of the novel”, Alexander And The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by Judith Viorst, Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., “Repent Harlequin!”, Said The Ticktockman by Harlan Ellison, sense of wonder, Toby the rat (Algernon), Uncle Toby, The Life And Opinions Of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne, the poet “does not number the streaks of the tulip 18th century”, The History of Rasselas by Samuel Johnson, Candide by Voltaire, books inside books, Have Spacesuit, Will Travel by Robert A. Heinlein, Three Men In A Boat by Jerome K. Jerome, Donald E. Westlake, Lawrence Block, Jo Walton’s Among Others, the third season of Star Trek, art making reference to itself, The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, Star Trek‘s third season, Spectre Of The Gun, “we just need the skeleton to tell the story”, “most of the protagonists in Science Fiction novels don’t read Science Fiction”, Jenny’s review of Ready Player One, The Emperor Of Mars by Allen_Steele (audio link), standing the test of time, Jesse’s extended metaphor about winnowed books washing up on beaches 100 years later, Eric is reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, propaganda melodrama, Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart, Light In August by William Faulkner, the humanizing influence, comparing The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time with The Speed Of Dark, the novel’s form shapes the novel market, Jesse thinks series hurt readers, wondering what’s going to happen next vs. what idea is being explored, the value of series, the train trip, the maths exam, “the walls are brown”, in Science Fiction metaphors are real, clarified butter and clarified mother, the word “murder”, Julie Davis’s reading of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Carrot Juice Is Murder by Arrogant Worms, the fairy tale that is Sherlock Holmes, is the father good?, a clarified father, Jesse was tricked into reading this book, Jenny likes Margaret Atwood’s trilogy, “get ‘im Jenny”, Oryx And Crake, H.G. Wells didn’t need any sequels!, sequel is as sequel does, David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, The Godfather, the market rules, the world building is the point (for series and authors), Agatha Christie, The Tyranny Of The “Talented” Reader, The Wheel Of Time by Robert Jordan, has Neuromancer by William Gibson passed it’s prime? (tune in next week to find out), Home Is The Hunter by Henry Kuttner, Jesse looks to books to deliver on ideas (not to make time pass).

Posted by Tamahome

New Releases: New Lawrence Block Audiobooks

Aural Noir: New Releases

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.

Hard Case Crime 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:

Posted by Jesse Willis

CBS Radio Mystery Theater: The Creature From The Swamp

SFFaudio Online Audio

“Soon after ‘It‘ appeared in Unknown (the pulp mag competitor of the Weird Tales title which showcased Conan and Kull and Lovecraft), Ted Sturgeon’s name was a household word – at least if you lived in a house-hold where fantasy books lined creaking shelves. More Than Human, ‘Microcosmic God‘ and The Synthetic Man were still in the future, but it was all there – all the talent and the promise – lying there newborn and naked and writhing in a story called ‘It‘ which has never been topped in its field, and which has itself directly or in, directly spawned a virtual army,of gloopy-glop monsters which have infiltrated nearly every comics company which ever went into hock for a four-color printing press.”

-From an essay entitled A Somewhat Personal Pronouncement by Roy Thomas (found in Supernatural Thrillers #1 – December 1972)

The Creature From The Swamp

If there is a concise history of fictional wetland creatures with non-specific pronoun-noun names I’m not aware of it. Be it an IT, a MAN-THING or a SWAMP THING I’ve a a real HEAP of fascination for the merging (or emerging) of man-like-life from decay and vegetable matter.

Here’s a brief timeline of my own devising:

August 1940 – Street & Smith’s Unknown Fantasy Fiction -> It! by Theodore Sturgeon
(a composite being of mud, mold, decaying foliage surrounds a human skeleton and comes alive)

1942 – Hillman Periodicals -> The Heap
(the will of a WWI flying ace clings “to the smallest shred of life through sheer force of will” and arises from swamp muck in a rotted body intermingled with vegetation)

May 1971 – Marvel Comics -> Man-Thing
(a “slow-moving, empathic, humanoid” that had once been a man arises)

July 1971 – DC Comics -> Swamp Thing
(a plant elemental awakens)

December 1972 – Marvel Comics -> Supernatural Thrillers -> A comics adaptation of the original It!

March 1974 – CBS Radio Mystery Theater -> The Creature From The Swamp

I really enjoyed this production from CBS Radio Mystery Theater’s first season. It is obviously inspired by its predecessors but it also incorporates some earlier mythology to good, and mysterious effect.

Go now, follow Larry Drake, a man burned by the flames of the past, follow him into the swamp. See what fate befalls him. See what fate befalls the beautiful woman he rescues from a frightening creature that lays waiting within the marshy depths of the Devil’s Cauldron.

CBS Radio Mystery Theater – #0053 – The Creature From The Swamp
By Ian Martin; Performed by a full cast
1 |MP3| – Approx. 45 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Broadcaster: CBS
Broadcast: March 7, 1974
Provider: CBSRMT.com

Cast:
Robert Dryden
Jack Grimes
Leon Janney
Joan Loring

Posted by Jesse Willis

The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant

Aural Noir: Online Audio

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 Necklace (La Parure) illustration from Gil Blas, 1893

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:

THE NECKLACE - Illustration by Gordon Rayner from SENSE AND FEELING

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

Posted by Jesse Willis

Aural Noir Review of Unknown (A Special Edition of Out of My Head) by Didier van Cauwelaert, translated by Mark Polizzotti

Aural Noir: Review

Unknown (A Special Edition of Out of My Head)
By Didier van Cauwelaert; Translated by Mark Polizzotti; Read by Bronson Pinchot
4 CDs – Approx. 4 Hours 21 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Published: December 2010
ISBN: 9781441759788
Themes: / Mystery / Identity / Amnesia / Identity Theft / Science / Botany / France /

This fast-paced thriller is the basis for the February 2011 film Unknown, starring Liam Neeson, Frank Langella, Diane Kruger, and Aidan Quinn. Martin Harris returns home after a short absence to find that his wife doesn’t know him, another man is living in his house under his name, and the neighbors think he’s a raving lunatic. Worse, not a single person — family, colleague, or doctor — can vouch for him. Worse still, the impostor shares all of Martin’s memories, experiences, and knowledge, down to the last detail. He is, in fact, a more convincing Martin than Martin himself. Is it a conspiracy? Amnesia? Is Martin the victim of an elaborate hoax, or of his own paranoid delusion? In his high-powered new novel, Didier van Cauwelaert, the award-winning author of One-Way, explores the illusory nature of identity and the instability of the things we take for granted. Dispossessed of his job, his family, his name, and his very past, Martin Harris is an Everyman caught in an absurd and yet disturbingly convincing nightmare, one that seems to have no exit and that resists every explanation. Part moral fable, part Robert Ludlum-style thriller, Unknown is a fast-paced tale of one man’s desperate attempt to reclaim his existence — even at the cost of his own life.

Unknown is an old fashioned mystery story with an amateur detective who is trying to solve the most important case of his life – his own. The narrative, told in first person, is brisk, fresh, and just slightly foreign. It was such a good for me to have a short novel like this, one that wrapped itself up in less than a day and a half of listening! It reminded me of such wonderful standalone novels as Ed McBain’s Downtown |READ OUR REVIEW| and Donald E. Westlake’s Memory. But unlike those two novels, which had passive protagonists, Martin Harris is competent and determined. He had me investigating and pondering right along with him. I, like he, was attentive to his dilemma, was constantly working through the possibilities of what might be going on, following the thought processes and tripping over the doubts he had in every scene. And, I did all this after seeing the film! I’m really kicking myself about that. Had I read the book, before watching the movie, I think I would have enjoyed the novel quite a bit more. That said, the novel isn’t the movie. The novel is different in tone and detail.

It’s cool to have an intelligent protagonist who thinks through dozens of possible scenarios despite being constantly bombarded by failure. The portrait Didier van Cauwelaert paints, of a distraught victim of identity theft, is full of the kinds of ambiguity and doubt that feels like a very European version of a Robert Ludlum novel. The protagonist may be American, but the novel feels French. The little things that might mean something are everywhere, all the characters seem to have a back story, all of which might be red herrings or just nothing at all and the focus on character and inner-space was surprising. Had the novel been twice the length I doubt I would have enjoyed it half as much.

Bronson Pinchot’s facility with accents is perfect for this novel set in Paris with an American hero. The audiobook is currently available at the Overstock 50% off discounted price (on CD). My thinking is that I did this all wrong, I should have watched the movie after reading the book. If you do it in the right order, let me know what you think of the book, and the movie.

Posted by Jesse Willis