What mistakes do audiobooks make?, Part II

My current audiobook's narrator keeps pronouncing "cache" as if it had two syllables and were spelled "cachet."

I wonder what scrutiny ebooks get. With manuscripts written and stored on computers, it's easy to go back to the beginning of a book and correct an error that occurs throughout. But I don't know how easy it is to correct misreadings in an audiobook. One book I listened to recently had occasional sections obviously recorded separately from the rest. The insertions were noticeable but unobtrusive, and, assuming they correct mistakes, I'm glad the publishers took the time to make them. I'd have been happier if such an insertion had been made in the case of the reader who confused "cache" and "cachet" or in that of the narrator who read "psychic" for "physic."

© Peter Rozovsky 2017

"Yes, I have been drugged, but not by any psychic": What mistakes do audiobooks make?

The quoted bit from this post's title is taken from an Audible audio edition of John Buchan's novel Greenmantle, as read by Felbrigg Napoleon Herriot. The passage is apt to conjure entertaining visions of a storefront card reader conjuring spells, but it's not what Buchan wrote. Here's the passage as it appears in print, highlighting mine:

"'Drugged,' he cried, with a weary laugh. 'Yes, I have been drugged, but not by any physic.' "

But there's more. That book and the same narrator's reading of Mr. Standfast, third of Buchan's Richard Hannay novels, after The Thirty-Nine Steps and Greenmantle, include the following:

• Indegefatigable where Buchan wrote indefatigable
• Factum where Buchan wrote factotum
• St. Pacreas at least twice for St. Pancras
• "Every Boy Scout is am amateur detective and hungry for knowledge. I was followed by several who piled (sic, instead of plied) me with questions."
• The pronunciation Ameans for Amiens, and Louis Kwinz for Louis Quinze
• Portmant-yew and tonn-yew for portmanteau and tonneau
• Chamonoy for Chamonix

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The fifth item on the list reflects English pronunciation of French names. The sixth and seventh are pronunciations neither English nor French. Are they regional pronunciations I don't know? Misapplied erudition on the narrator's part?

Elsewhere, Herriot pronounces row, for a noisy disturbance, correctly, to rhyme with now, but also as in the first part of rowboat. The latter may be carelessness, or it may reflect an inconsistency of pronunciation that anyone might fall into.   This raises my questions to you, readers: What sorts of lapses and distractions are audiobooks uniquely vulnerable to? Conversely, what pleasures do audiobooks afford that printed books cannot?

© Peter Rozovsky 2017

Listening to an audiobook in French

I'm listening to an audiobook in French for the first time, Fred Vargas' Debout les morts, the novel translated into English as The Three Evangelists. My French is far from perfect, yet, to my surprise, the partial attention with which one can listen to audiobooks meshes nicely with the partial understanding imposed by the deficiency of my French. I can let the story roll by, getting the gist, without stopping to agonize over words I don't know, the way I would if reading. Already context has taught me the meaning of a few words or expressions. So I recommend audiobooks for second-language students.

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A Climate of Fear, Vargas' ninth novel featuring Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, is high on my to-read list. And The Accordionist, an English translation of a 1997 novel about the characters known as the Three Evangelists, will appear this summer. In the meantime, here's a two-part interview I did with Fred Vargas in 2013: (http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/search/label/Fred%20Vargas%20interview)

© Peter Rozovsky 2017

Rozovsky Meets Holmes: The Adventure of the Occasionally Attentive Listener, Part I

The most venerable of detective protagonists is relatively new to me. Now, thanks to the superb delivery of Stephen Frye and the desultory attention that audiobooks allow, I am drifting in and out of the complete Sherlock Holmes canon and quite enjoying what I come up with.

First, a few out-of-context gems:

"I can never bring you to realize the importance of sleeves, the suggestiveness of thumbnails, or the great issues that may hang from a boot lace."
-- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, "A Case of Identity"

"Forgive this weakness, Mr. Holmes. I have been a little overwrought. Thank you. If I might have a glass of milk and a biscuit, I have no doubt that I should be better."
-- "The Adventure of the Priory School"

"... ranging from his famous investigation of the sudden death of Cardinal Tosca—an inquiry which was carried out by him at the express desire of His Holiness the Pope—down to his arrest of Wilson, the notorious canary-trainer, which removed a plague-spot from the East-End of London."
-- "The Adventure of Black Peter"

"I read death on his face as plain as I can read that text over the fire."
-- "The Adventure of the Crooked Man" (This one works better if one recalls the sense in which text seems most often to be used these days. It would not shock me if some people think text means only text message.)

"Ah, I have no data. I cannot tell."

"'Data, data, data!' he cried impatiently. 'I can't make bricks without clay!'"
-- "The Adventure of the Copper Beaches"

I've realized during my listening that Doyle dangled participles and modifiers all the time, and that this doesn't matter much. So, if you can write as popular and enduring a character as Sherlock Holmes, and if you can read as well as Stephen Frye, you can go ahead and dangle all you like.

(More on Holmes to come)

© Peter Rozovsky 2017

Audiobooks: Listening isn't reading, but it will do

The audiobooks I've listened to in the past month and a half:

James McClure: The Blood of an Englishman
John McFetridge: Tumblin’ Dice, Dirty Sweet, Let It Ride, One or the Other, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
E.C. Bentley: Trent's Last Case

Donald Westlake/Richard Stark: The Outfit, The Hunter, The Sour Lemon Score, The Man With the Getaway Face, Why Me?, The Hot Rock, Get Real, Deadly Edge, The Green Eagle Score, Good Behavior, Bank Shot, Butcher's Moon, Plunder Squad
P.G. Wodehouse: Psmith in the City, Leave It to Psmith
Adrian McKinty: Gun Street Girl, Rain Dogs
Mick Herron: Dead Lions


Dan J. Marlowe: Four for the Money

John Farrow: City of Ice
Linda L. Richards: Death Was the Other Woman
Jay Stringer: Runaway Town, Old Gold
Michael Gilbert: Smallbone Deceased
Ken Bruen: Calibre
Mike Knowles: Darwin’s Nightmare, Grinder
Andrea Camilleri: Montalbano’s First Case

Plus big chunks of Gibbon and Montaigne, the latter of whom is excellent consolation for problems that include not knowing how to fill one's leisure time.

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The first known use of the word audiobook was in 1953, according to Merriam-Webster.

© Peter Rozovsky 2017

My first seven audio crime books

Audiobooks are a cool medium: They don't compel engagement the way a real printed book does; one drifts in and out or does other things, the reading fading into background music. So here's a fragmented discussion of my first batch of audiobooks, appropriate to their fragmented medium:

1) Gun Street Girl and Rain Dogs, by Adrian McKinty. The author is a friend. He's also one of the very best of all crime writers, far beyond silly discussions about whether crime fiction can be serious literature. His probing, funny, beautifully written novels are unafraid to use traditional crime fiction forms, including the locked-room mystery. Whichever crime writer you're reading, McKinty is better.

2) Grinder and Darwin's Nightmare, by Mike Knowles. Some of the most exciting and intelligent action stories you're likely to read, exciting because they're intelligent and intelligent because they're exciting.  Readers who like Richard Stark's Parkerd novels or "Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai" might like these.

3) One or the Other and Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, by John McFetridge. No one better and more seamlessly combines character, story, and history, in this case that of Montreal and Toronto in the 1970s and '80s.

4) Montalbano's First Case, by Andrea Camilleri. Among the delights of this short-story collection is one harrowing meta-fiction that at once demonstrates Camilleri's ability to write hyper-violence and shows why he chose not to do so.

© Peter Rozovsky 2017

I, the Narrator, by Mike Dennis

  Mike Dennis (Photo
by Peter Rozovsky)

Mike Dennis (right) is a Key West-based crime writer and a musician. He also combines sound and words in his latest professional incarnation. Here's Mike's pulse-pounding story of how he became an audio-book narrator and landed the gig reading and producing the new version of Mickey Spillane's I, the Jury, published by Simon & Schuster Audio.

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First and foremost, I want to convey my deep appreciation to Peter Rozovsky for giving me the opportunity to appear on DBB. He has a lot of followers, and I'm very grateful for the chance to tell my little story on his great site.

And what a story it was! Well, for me, anyway. Since my latest reinvention of myself (and there have been many over the long years) as an audiobook narrator, I was hot to move up the ladder. Of course, I didn't kid myself. I knew I had to have a worthy product, skillful storytelling, quality sound production, and knowledge of my own strengths and weaknesses as a narrator if I was to achieve any success at all. The first thing I learned was the learning curve is steep.

So after a couple of years, I get a handle on sound crafting, and I hone my natural ability to tell a story. Then one day in the summer of 2014, I was trolling Amazon and came across Mickey Spillane's I, The Jury. The cover was typical Spillane: a gorgeous doll coming out of her clothes while a guy holds a gun on her. Then whoa! I noticed there was no audiobook attached to it.

Positive I had made a mistake, I looked again. No audiobook. I went to Audible.com and typed in the title. No results. There was an audiocassette on Amazon dating back to the Paleolithic Era for sale by a third-party vendor, but no modern downloadable audio version. Could this be true? I, The Freaking Jury, the first Mike Hammer novel and the biggest selling book of Spillane's entire career, does not appear in audiobook form?

Well, it was true, all right. I looked up the other Hammer books. Nearly all of them were available as audiobooks, and those were all narrated by Stacy Keach, who played Mike Hammer on TV for years. I mean, the guy is Mike Hammer!

I set out to become the narrator for this novel. First, I had to find out who held the audio rights. I wrote to my friend Max Allan Collins, novelist and Spillane collaborator, and he essentially told me to forget it. Simon & Schuster had the audio rights to all the Hammer novels, he said, and they had released them with Stacy Keach's powerful voice driving them. He said it would probably be just a matter of time before they got around to I, The Jury.

OK, not good news. But I kept after it, anyway. Fruitless efforts at contacting Simon & Schuster yielded nothing. After a lot of digging into the bowels of their website, however, I turned up the name of the head of their audiobook division. I called S&S, asked for him, and to my surprise, I had him on the line.

Once I collected myself, I explained who I was: an audiobook narrator/producer operating out of my home studio in Key West, and I wanted the chance to narrate and produce I, The Jury.

Now, this is the point where a guy like him would tell a guy like me, "We don't work with home studio narrators," or "We use movie stars to narrate our audiobooks," or "Buzz off, kid." And you know, you couldn't blame him if he did. Not even I could blame him. But instead, he said, "Do you deliver a finished product?"

Knowing that I had now arrived at my date with destiny, I said "Yes. But how about if I send you a brief recorded excerpt of I, The Jury? That way you can not only get an idea of how I would approach the material, but also of my sound quality." He paused for what felt like forever, then said, "OK." And he gave me his e-mail address.

I carefully prepared a recorded piece from the novel and sent it off to him. Frankly, though, I was sure that the minute he hung up the phone, he was shouting into his intercom, "Get me Stacy Keach!"

A couple of months went by. I was certain the game was over. But one day I opened my e-mail to find a response. He had sent my sample to the head of their production department for her opinion. My God, I still had a shot!

Two more months go by (they sure move slowly up there in New York), and one day I get an e-mail from the head of S&S audio production. She liked my sample, but she asked if I wouldn't mind submitting a finished version of the entire first chapter, so they could get a better idea of my sound and my consistency, as well as how I would handle more dialogue. I really couldn't believe it!
Of course, I did the first chapter, laboring over it lovingly and with great precision. Another month later, she writes back and offered me the job. We agreed on the terms and I narrated and produced the audiobook. It'll be released in unabridged form Wednesday, July 28. And you know, I still can't believe I'm actually the voice of Mike Hammer.

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Mike Dennis' narration of I, The Jury, from Simon & Schuster Audio, is available on Amazon. http://tinyurl.com/p6et4qp