CBS Radio Mystery Theater ran an astounding 1,399 original episodes. Unlike early radio drama series, in which popular episodes were re-staged, sometimes with the exact same script, not one of the nearly 1,400 episodes of CBSRMT episodes was re-done.
And yet, they came pretty damn close once. Episode #0715, which first aired in 1977, is called The Guy de Maupassant Murders. It takes direct inspiration in plot and structure from a short story by Guy de Maupassant called The Diary Of A Madman.
And yet The Diary Of A Madman was itself adapted as episode three years earlier!
Having heard them both I prefer The Guy de Maupassant Murders. I think that’s because I heard it first. But the performance is more interesting too, perhaps because it stars Fred Gwynne, best known for his role as Herman Munster.
When I first heard Gwynne’s performance I thought he was off – that he had just been unprofessional that day – it sounded as if he was just reading the script for the first time while they were recording – but upon a second listening I noticed that the way he delivers the lines completely fits the character and his psychology.
Judge for yourself.
CBSRMT #0715 – The Guy de Maupassant Murders
By Sam Dann; Performed by a full cast
1 |MP3| – Approx. 45 Minutes [RADIO DRAMA]
Broadcaster: CBS
Broadcast: September 26, 1977
Provider: CBSRMT.com The polymathic houskeeper for an aging bachelor judge follows the reports of a serial killer’s flagitious crimes with interest. The only clue is a note left on on each of the victims. It always reads “THOU SHALT KILL.”
In research for another story I came across a cool podcast along the lines of BBC Radio 4’s The History Of The World In 100 Objects. Except that instead of it being a history of the planet it’s just the history of Kansas. The first epsiode of the KSHS’ Cool Things podcast to strike me (out of my chair, through the floor, and then into a shallow grave in a nearby field) was an episode on “The Bender Knife”. Here’s the setup:
Two men settled a claim near the town of Cherryvale in southeastern Kansas in 1870. John Bender, Sr., and John Bender, Jr., built a one-room timber cabin with a trap door that led to a stone cellar. Once the lodging was complete, the Bender men sent for the rest of the family, a mother and a daughter, both named Kate. The family outfitted the house with furniture and supplies, and hung a canvas curtain to divide it into two rooms. The Benders turned the front half into an inn and grocery store where travelers on the nearby Osage Trail could find rest, supplies, and a warm meal. Ma and Kate planted a garden and small orchard near the house. By all appearances, the Benders were like most area settlers: a family of German descent who came west for a fresh start.
Business at the Bender inn would have been brisk. The southeast corner of Kansas had recently opened to white settlers, and men regularly arrived with money to purchase land and livestock. This available cash made the area a dangerous place to travel. Settlers were easy prey for robbers, and it was not uncommon for people to go missing. No one took note of people looking for their family members. This changed when locals started disappearing.
Here’s the latest crime collection from iambik audio. And while imabik offers excellent DRM free versions of their titles on their easy to use website you may also be interested to know that more than thirty titles are now available through Audible.com too.
The pick of the bunch, just going by the descriptions, appears to be The Vaults by Toby Ball. And based on the reviews of the print edition, which came out last September, it seems this debut novel is rather well regarded!
Hard Cold Whisper
By Michael Hemmingson; Read by Adam Verner
MP3 Download – Approx. 2 Hours 56 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: iambik audio
Published: July 15, 2011
Sample |MP3| David Kellgren is a process server, a job where everyone wants to kill the messenger and things can get a little bit dangerous and out of hand. David is attacked when trying to serve legal papers to a gang member and an angel comes to his rescue: nineteen-year-old Gabriella Amaya, trapped in a large dilapidated house, caring for her dying aunt. This elderly aunt has money, diamonds, and real estate, promised to Gabriella when the aunt dies. Is there any way the sultry caregiver can get her crafty hands on that wealth sooner? And share it with her new lover, the unsuspecting process server who starts to wonder if he’s become a patsy in an elaborate murder plot, or if he simply cannot allow himself to truest any woman who says, “I love you.” Set in San Diego, Chula Vista, and Tijuana, Hard Cold Whisper is Michael Hemmingson at his finest, most terse and torqued prose in the crime genre. — Hemmingson wrote Hard Cold Whisper as an experiment during the 2010 3 Day Novel Challenge during Labor Day Weekend, a concerted event where writers all over the world participate. The method here pays homage to hardboiled noir master Gil Brewer, who wrote many of his finest Fawcett Gold Medal titles in a possessed, white hot flash fury of several days or a week. Hard Cold Whisper is Hemmingson’s nod to the feel and atmosphere of the Gold Medal paperback.
Listen To The Dead
By Randall Peffer; Read by Art Carlson
MP3 or M4B Download – Approx. 7 Hours 27 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: iambik audio
Published: July 15, 2011
Sample |MP3| Inspired by one of the largest unsolved cases of serial killings in the United States, the New Bedford Serial Killings of 1988. Harbormaster Corby Church finds the bones of a human body on Bird Island off Cape Cod. As brassy, young police detective Yemanjá Colón struggles with the case, she realizes that Church may know more than he’s letting on, and a trip he took to the Bahamas in the ’80s may prove the key.
Richmond Noir
Edited by Andrew Blossom, Brian Castleberry and Tom De Haven; Read by Charles Bice
MP3 or M4B – Approx. 7 Hours 51 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher iambik audio
Published: July 15, 2011
Sample |MP3| Collection edited by Andrew Blossom, Brian Castleberry and Tom De Haven. “In The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, Henry Miller tosses off a hard-bitten assessment of the City on the James: ‘I would rather die in Richmond somehow,’ he writes, ‘though God knows Richmond has little enough to offer.’ As editors, we like the dying part, and might point out that in its long history, Richmond, Virginia has offered up many of the disparate elements crucial to meaty noir. The city was born amid deception, conspiracy, and violence…
The Painted Messiah
By Craig Smith; Read by Clive Catterall
MP3 or M4B Download – Approx. 9 Hours 54 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: iambik audio
Published: July 15, 2011
Sample |MP3| The Painted Messiah combines a blistering action thriller set in the streets of Zurich and on the lakes and wooded slopes of Switzerland with a compulsive and convincing account of first century Romano-Judaean politics and the real reason for Pontius Pilate’s condemnation and execution of Christ. A legend persists that, after the ‘scourging’, Pilate commanded that his victim be painted from life. Somewhere, the painting survives, the only true image of Christ, granting the gift of everlasting life to whoever possesses it. Kate Kenyon, the wealthy young widow of an English aristocrat killed on a Swiss mountain, has an addiction to mortal risk. She feeds it by engaging in the armed robbery of priceless artefacts with her accomplice and lover Ethan Brand, a Tennessean who owns a bookshop in Zurich. Their latest target is a priceless ‘Byzantine’ icon hidden in the tower of a chateau by Lake Lucerne. So far they have never had to shoot anyone. This time will be different.
Thought You Were Dead
By Terry Griggs; Read by Gregg Margarite
MP3 or M4B Download – Approx. 7 Hours 42 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: iambik audio
Published: July 15, 2011
Sample |MP3| Meet the Perfect Man… no, no he’s not the hero of Thought You Were Dead. That would be Chellis Beith, literary researcher, slacker, reluctant detective, and a man bedeviled by every woman in his life. There’s his lost love, Elaine Champion, a now happily married inventor who uses him for market research, his best friend’s dotty ex-wife, Moe, his two vanished mothers, and his menacing boss, Athena Havlock, a celebrated writer who herself becomes embroiled in the dark side of fiction. The humour is wild, the language a thrill, the mystery within marvelously deft and daft. And as for the Perfect Man… well, nothing is as it seems. Is it? Thought You Were Dead is the most unconventional of all murder mysteries, turning the genre completely on its head, by bludgeoning flat language and Puritanical sensibilities with evident glee. This is further evidence that Terry Griggs is sui generis: an original and completely inimitable literary voice, with an eye for the cinematic.
The Vaults
By Toby Ball; Read by Michael Agostini
MP3 or M4B Download – Approx. 9 Hours 5 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: iambik audio
Published: July 15, 2011
Sample |MP3| In a dystopian 1930s America, a chilling series of events leads three men down a path to uncover their city’s darkest secret. At the height of the most corrupt administration in the City’s history, a mysterious duplicate file is discovered deep within the Vaults—a cavernous hall containing all of the municipal criminal justice records of the last seventy years. From here, the story follows: Arthur Puskis, the Vault’s sole, hermit-like archivist with an almost mystical faith in a system to which he has devoted his life; Frank Frings, a high-profile investigative journalist with a self-medicating reefer habit; and Ethan Poole, a socialist private eye with a penchant for blackmail. All three men will undertake their own investigations into the dark past and uncertain future of the City—calling into question whether their most basic beliefs can be maintained in a climate of overwhelming corruption and conspiracy.
Here’s a wonderful batch of audiobooks that didn’t show up under an SFFaudio Xmas tree. Stupid Santa!
Winner of an AudioFile magazine “Earphones Award”, narrated by a “2010 AudioFile Best Voice winner” –
The Wycherly Woman: A Lew Archer Novel
By Ross Macdonald; Read by Grover Gardner
7 CDs or 1 MP3-CD – Approx. 8 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Published: January 2010
ISBN: 9781433278594 (cd), 9781433278624 (mp3-cd) Phoebe Wycherly was missing two months before her wealthy father hired Lew Archer to find her. That was plenty of time for a young girl who wanted to disappear to do so thoroughly—or for someone to make her disappear. And before he could locate the Wycherly girl, Archer had to reckon with the Wycherly woman, Phoebe’s mother, an eerily unmaternal blonde who kept too many residences, had too many secrets, and left too many corpses in her wake.
Another title beloved of Audiofile magazine: Starring Stacy Keach as Mike Hammer!
The New Adventures Of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, Vol. 2: The Little Death
By Max Allan Collins; From a story by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins; Performed by a full supporting cast
2 CDs or 1 MP3-CD – Approx. 1.9 Hours [AUDIO DRAMA]
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Published: December 2009
ISBN: 9781441712585 (cd), 9781441712592 (mp3-cd) Private eye Mike Hammer is no stranger to murder, but this time he has two to untangle: the killing of the Captain, a legless, homeless panhandler, dismissed by the police as “minor,” and the slaying of gambling kingpin Marty Wellman. Marty’s lady friend, Helen Venn, turns to the P.I. for help when the Mob fingers her for the next kill. Seems the new kingpin, Carmen Rich — with whom Hammer has a violent history — thinks Helen made off with ten mil in skim money courtesy of her late lover. But Mike Hammer knows a damsel in distress when he sees one and takes up Helen’s cause, igniting a series of hit attempts on his life by a small army of out-of-town shooters. Such minor distractions can’t prevent the toughest detective of them all from solving two murders and avenging a “little death” in a big way.
I liked the movie. Has anyone read the book?
Somewhere In Time
By Richard Matheson; Read by Scott Brick
9 CDs or 1 MP3-CD – Approx. 10.5 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Published: December 1, 2010
ISBN: 9781441722201 (cd), 9781441722218 (mp3-cd) Written by one of the grand masters of modern fantasy, Somewhere In Time is the moving, romantic story of a modern man whose powerful love for a woman he has never met allows him to literally transcend time. A dying young playwright staying in a turn-of-the-century hotel becomes captivated by a painting of a beautiful stage actress from the previous century. Obsessed, he begins to study everything he can about the woman and her time and becomes convinced he belongs with her. Through self-hypnosis, he transports himself to 1896, where he finds the soul mate he was fated to meet. But will he be able to stay? Somewhere In Time won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel and was the basis for the 1980 cult classic movie starring Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour.
Is this an audiobook about playing poker with the devil? Nice!
Last Call
By Tim Powers; Read by Bronson Pinchot
16 CDs or 2 MP3CDs – Approx. 19.1 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Published: December 1, 2010
ISBN: 9781441757364 (cd), 9781441757371 (mp3-cd) Scott Crane abandoned his career as a professional poker player twenty years ago and hasn’t returned to Las Vegas, or held a hand of cards, in ten years. But troubling nightmares about a strange poker game he once attended on a houseboat on Lake Mead are drawing him back to the magical city. For the mythic game he believed he won did not end that night in 1969—and the price of his winnings was his soul. Now, a pot far more strange and perilous than he ever could imagine depends on the turning of a card. Enchantingly dark and compellingly real, this World Fantasy Award–winning novel is a masterpiece of magic realism set in the gritty, dazzling underworld known as Las Vegas.
Translated from the German…
Rumo & His Miraculous Adventures (A Novel in Two Books)
By Walter Moers; Translated by John Brownjohn; Read by Bronson Pinchot
19 CDs or 2 MP3-CDs – Approx. 22.8 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Published: December 1, 2010
ISBN: 9781441757982 (cd), 9781441758019 (mp3-cd) Set in the land of Zamonia, this exuberant, highly original fantasy from Walter Moers features an unlikely hero. Rumo is a little Wolperting—a domesticated creature somewhere between a deer and a dog—who will one day become the greatest hero in the history of Zamonia. Armed with Dandelion, his talking sword, he fights his way through the Overworld and the Netherworld. He meets Rala, a beautiful Wolperting female; Urs of the Snows, who thinks more of cooking than of fighting; Gornab the Ninety-Ninth, the demented king of Netherworld; Professor Ostafan Kolibri, who goes in search of the Non-Existent Teenies; Professor Abdullah Nightingale, inventor of the chest-of-drawers oracle; and, worst luck, the deadly Metal Maiden. Astonishingly inventive, amusing, and engrossing, Rumo is a captivating story from the unique imagination of Walter Moers. Filled with humor, this novel puts a new spin on the usual epic fantasy. The comparisons are many—Douglas Adams, Lewis Carrol, J. K. Rowling, Dr. Seuss, and R. Crumb—but Moers is clearly an original. Long live Zamonia!
One of the Heinlein juvies that I read while in the UK. It, along with Starman’s Quest (by Robert Silverberg) have got to be directly inspired by the famous twin paradox thought experiment!
Time For The Stars
By Robert A. Heinlein; Read by Barrett Whitener
6 CDs or 1 MP3-CD – 6.8 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Published: December 10, 2010
ISBN: 9781433230462 (cd), 9781433230493 (mp3-cd) Travel to other planets is now a reality, and with overpopulation stretching the resources of Earth, the necessity of finding habitable worlds is growing ever more urgent. There’s a problem though—because the spaceships are slower than light, any communication between the exploring ships and Earth would take years. Tom and Pat are identical twin teenagers. As twins they’ve always been close, so close that it seemed like they could read each other’s minds. When they are recruited by the Long Range Foundation, the twins find out that they can, indeed, peer into each other’s thoughts. Along with other telepathic duos, they are enlisted to be the human transmitters and receivers that will keep the ships in contact with Earth. But there’s a catch: one of the twins has to stay behind—and that one will grow old—while the other explores the depths of space and returns as a young man still.
Hasn’t this been done like four or five times before? Or maybe I just dream’t that?
Dust And Shadow (An Account of the Ripper Killings by Dr. John H. Watson)
By Lyndsay Faye; Read by Simon Vance
8 CDs or 1 MP3-CD – Approx. 9.3 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Published: December 10, 2010
ISBN: 9781441768117 (cd), 9781441768131 (mp3-cd) Breathless and painstakingly researched, this is a stunning debut mystery in which Sherlock Holmes unmasks Jack the Ripper. Lyndsay Faye perfectly captures all the color and syntax of Conan Doyle’s distinctive nineteenth-century London. In Dust and Shadow, Sherlock Holmes hunts down Jack the Ripper—the world’s first serial killer—with impeccably accurate historical detail and without the advantage of modern forensics or profiling. Sherlock’s desire to stop the killer who is terrifying the East End of London is unwavering from the start, and in an effort to do so he hires an “unfortunate” known as Mary Ann Monk, the friend of a fellow streetwalker who was one of the Ripper’s earliest victims. However, when Holmes himself is wounded in Whitechapel attempting to catch the villain, and a series of articles in the popular press question his role in the crimes, he must use all his resources in a desperate race to find the man known as “The Knife” before it is too late. Penned as a pastiche by the loyal and courageous Dr. Watson, this debut signals the arrival of a tremendous talent in the mystery and historical fiction genres.
The moral horror of colonialism as performed by Kenneth Branagh? Sign me up!
Heart Of Darkness
By Joseph Conrad; Read by Kenneth Branagh Audible Download – Approx. 3 Hours 51 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Audible Signature Classics
Published: November 23, 2010 Prose that demands to be read aloud requires a special kind of narrator. For the Audible Signature Classics edition of Joseph Conrad’s atmospheric masterpiece, Heart of Darkness, we called upon four-time Academy Award nominee Kenneth Branagh. Branagh’s performance is riveting because he reads as though he’s telling a ghost story by a campfire, capturing the story’s sense of claustrophobia, while hinting at the storyteller Marlow’s own creeping madness. Heart of Darkness follows Captain Marlow into the colonial Congo where he searches for a mysterious ivory trader, Kurtz, and discovers an evil that will haunt him forever. With this landmark work, Conrad is credited with bringing the novel into the twentieth century; we think Branagh brings it into the twenty-first. Stay tuned for more one-of-a-kind performances from actors David Hyde Pierce, Leelee Sobieski, Tim Curry, and more, only from Audible Signature Classics.
This 1959 novel’s title is derived from a few lines in the Book of Revelation…
Alas, Babylon
By Pat Frank; Read by Will Patton Audible Download – Approx. 11 Hours 14 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Audible.com
Published: December 21, 2010 This true modern masterpiece is built around the two fateful words that make up the title and herald the end – “Alas, Babylon.” When a nuclear holocaust ravages the United States, a thousand years of civilization are stripped away overnight, and tens of millions of people are killed instantly. But for one small town in Florida, miraculously spared, the struggle is just beginning, as men and women of all backgrounds join together to confront the darkness. Will Patton’s narration paints this classic tale as an ominous picture of the terrible possibilities of the nuclear age.
This audiobook is the subject of an upcoming SFFaudio Readalong…
Gulliver’s Travels
By Jonathan Swift; Read by David Hyde Pierce Audible Download – Approx. 9 Hours 52 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Audible Signature Classics
Published: December 14, 2010 Four-time Emmy Award winner David Hyde Pierce is famous for playing the lovably self-important Dr. Niles Crane in the hit TV series Frasier. Now, he brings the same wit and charming arrogance to his Signature Classics performance of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. More than just a mock travel book and fabulous adventure, Gulliver’s Travels is a character study and social satire that skewers politics, science, religion, philosophy, and pretentiousness with a bite and resonance that remains as fresh today as the day it was published. Maybe that’s why it hasn’t been out of print in nearly 300 years. Set sail with David Hyde Pierce for a smart, fun, new Gulliver’s Travels experience that’s unlike any other. And stay tuned for more one-of-a-kind performances from actors Leelee Sobiesky, Casey Affleck, Tim Curry, and more, only from Audible Signature Classics.
And so is this one!
Oath Of Fealty
By Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle; Read by Jeremy Johnson and Suzanne Toren Audible Download – Approx. 10 Hours 15 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Audible Frontiers
Published: June 22, 2010 In the near future, Los Angeles is an all but uninhabitable war zone, wracked by crime, violence, pollution and poverty. But above the blighted city, a Utopia has arisen: Todos Santos, a thousand-foot high single-structured city, designed to used state-of-the-art technology to create a completely human-friendly environment, offering its dwellers everything they could want in exchange for their oath of allegiance and their constant surveillance. But there are those who want to see the utopia destroyed, whose answer to tomorrow’s best and brightest hope is mindless violence. And they have just entered Todos Santos.
While I was flipping through one of my grandmother’s old English textbooks (SENSE AND FEELING) I found it contained a short story written by Will F. Jenkins. You may, as I did, instantly recognize it as a pen name of Murray Leinster (even if, in actuality, it’s the other way around). After running the title and the names by my copyright researching buddy, I was pleased to discover it was in the PUBLIC DOMAIN! I then passed it on to another of my creative friends who turned it into an episode of her podcast.
Julie Davis, the narrator, says she was planning on saving it for Halloween. I can see exactly why she was planning that, but it’s probably the perfect listening for any Autumn drive … at night …. in the country ….. with the doors locked …… very tightly.
Night Drive
By Murray Leinster; Read by Julie Davis
1 |MP3| – Approx. 58 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Podcaster: Forgotten Classics
Podcast: September 24, 2010 In which a young woman at night is faced with a life-or-death choice. Night Drive by Will F. Jenkins, was first published in the March 1950 issue of Today’s Woman magazine. In 1962 it was later collected in the Belmont Books paperback called Twisted, (edited by Groff Conklin).
Random House Audio is releasing the fifth and latest book in the Dexter Morgan series on Tuesday. This time it’s read by the author! All four of the previous audiobooks in the series were narrated by Nick Landrum for Recorded Books…
Dexter Is Delicious
By Jeff Lindsay; Read by Jeff Lindsay
9 CDs – Approx. 11 Hours 30 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Random House Audio
Published: September 7, 2010
ISBN: 9780307577542 Dexter Morgan has always lived a happy homicidal life. He keeps his dark urges in check by adhering to one steadfast rule . . . he only kills very bad people. But now Dexter is experiencing some major life changes—don’t we all?—and they’re mostly wrapped up in the eight-pound curiosity that is his newborn daughter. Family bliss is cut short, however, when Dexter is summoned to investigate the disappearance of a seventeen-year-old girl who has been running with a bizarre group of goths who fancy themselves to be vampires. As Dexter gets closer to the truth of what happened to the missing girl, he realizes they are not really vampires so much as cannibals. And, most disturbing . . . these people have decided they would really like to eat Dexter.
CBSRMT #0715 – The Guy de Maupassant Murders
The Wycherly Woman: A Lew Archer Novel
The New Adventures Of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, Vol. 2: The Little Death
Somewhere In Time
Last Call
Rumo & His Miraculous Adventures (A Novel in Two Books)
Time For The Stars
Dust And Shadow (An Account of the Ripper Killings by Dr. John H. Watson)
Heart Of Darkness
Alas, Babylon
Gulliver’s Travels
Oath Of Fealty
