Listening Briefs

by Steve Steinbock

Last week I used this forum to discuss that rare interface of mystery short stories and audiobooks. I complained at how the Tantor Media adaptation of the MWA anthology The Blue Religion – nearly all audio-anthologies for that matter – lacks a table of contents. I broke down and bought a print copy. (Ironically, I think they were giving copies away for free after the Edgar Banquet in New York last month. I assumed I already had a copy, and didn’t bother to take one. Serves me right. Never turn down a free book!)

Since writing that column last week, my desk has been dominated by a sixteen-inch high stack of mystery short stories on audio. And that’s not including The Blue Religion, in print or on CD. As I look at that stack, I’m not sure if any of the titles are still in print. Dove Audio, one of the pioneers in the mass market audiobook field, no longer exists. Neither does DH Audio. Books On Tape is still around, but I’m not sure those titles are.

Half of the titles in the stack are anthologies, like The Blue Religion, each containing a dozen or more stories by various authors.

The remaining half represent a very rare species: each package contains one cassette, on which one or two short stories is recorded. Here is a criminally brief overview of these single and twin story tapes:

In the late 1990s, Otto Penzler commissioned six stories from six top-notch authors like Ed McBain, Peter Lovesey, S.J. Rozan, and Anne Perry. These stories were published as six individual low-priced audiobooks under the Random House Audio imprint “Sounds Like Murder.” Now that is the way to publish stories on audio. Penzler did it right. For years, most of these stories remained unpublished except on audio. They were well written, well read, and nicely produced.

Around the same time, Brilliance Audio (whose editor and vice president, Eileen Hutton, is a huge mystery fan and good friend to the genre) had a series of mini-audiobooks under the label “Stellar Audio: One Cassette – Two Complete Stories.” This, too, is a brilliant idea (pun unintended). The one Stellar title on my stack contains Faye Kellerman’s humorous “Holy Water” and Max Allan Collins’ “Inconvenience Store.”

Also in the late 1990s, Ed Gorman and Martin Greenberg put together a short story collection called Once Upon a Crime, with stories by Ed Hoch, Bill Crider, Jon Breen, and twenty other top-notch mystery writers, all with a fairy-tale theme. Canadian audiobook publisher Durkin-Hayes (DH Audio) issued a bunch of these stories, in pairs, as unabridged single cassette audios. The best part was that for $5.99 Canadian, you could get two good stories on a 90 minute cassette.

I’d like to see more of these short story mini-audiobooks. Today, rather than being recorded on cassette, these would all be on CD or MP3. In the meanwhile, if you’d like to listen to an Alan Treviscoe short story by James Lincoln Warren, or a Marty Crow audio drama by Rob Lopresti, click your way over to our Aural Arguments, on the right-hand column of this webpage.