I have previously written about my audio crime habit that livens up my rather tedious bus journeys into work. Well, I am here to tell you that both the audio and the crime bit are still going strong as part of my travel routine (that’s just as well as bus travel has been more than woeful in the last couple of weeks). Lately, I have been listening to a mixture of new-to-me authors as well as an old timer. And of course, I continue in my time-honoured habit of beginning any new series in the wrong place (in other words anywhere but at the beginning). My excuse is that I tend to pick up whatever catches my eye in the library, so that I often fail to get the titles in chronological order. Or at least, I don’t often have the patience to make a reservation from an author’s backlist so that I can ‘begin at the very beginning’ as Julie Andrews once so cheerfully sang.
I was particularly pleased finally to get around to Ray Celestin and his City Blues Quartet. Naturally, I inadvertently began at the end; but hey, at least I know who does and who does not end up dead by the final episode (never fear, I won’t plot spoil). The last in the series is called Sunset Swing (2021) and is set in Los Angeles, Christmas 1967. The story features three recuring characters, retired private eye Ida Young; mafia fixer Dante Sanfelippo and the one and only Louis Armstrong. The city itself is a stunning character in its own right. Now I have to go back to the beginning at some point and see how it all began (Chicago, 1919 was the time and place) as I enjoyed this book so much. As always with an audio book, the narration is very important and can make or break an audio version of a novel; Christopher Ragland did a really good job.
Again, true to tradition I picked up Peter May’s The Lewis Man (2011) which is the second in the trilogy set on the Isle of Lewis (though I have spotted that a fourth book came out in 2024, so surely this is now actually a quartet whether originally intended or not). This is a murder mystery which begins with the discovery of a body in a bog where seasonal peat cutting is taking place. For me, the bog body was the hook, having long been fascinated by the discoveries explored in the National Museum of Ireland. Perhaps not surprisingly, in this story the body turns out to be much more modern than that; an Elvis tattoo was a dead giveaway on that score. Reading the (well, listening to) descriptions of the landscape of the Outer Hebridean islands made me really want to visit, despite, or perhaps because of the bleakness. At some point I will probably read the rest of the series, especially as I became quite invested into two of the main characters, Fin Macleod and Marsaili MacDonald.
Then for something completely different, I listened to Why Shoot a Butler? By Georgette Heyer (1933) a blast from my reading past as It has been quite a while since I last read any of GH’s novels, whether historical or detective. I started with her Regency romances as a teenager and then found my way to her contemporary crime novels later. In this novel the butler is the murder victim as opposed to the trope of ‘the butler did it.’ But of course, there had to be a motive for killing an apparently harmless servant. What is it? This is one of those Golden Age of crime plots where gifted amateur detective, barrister Frank Amberley runs rings around the rural police force. This probably isn’t my favorite GH crime novel, but still an entertaining listen with some very funny lines. If you have read her Regency novels you will be able to spot the character types that she has transposed to the contemporary setting.
Sadly, not everything that I want to listen to is available in the Playaway MP3 unit format (see picture) which Is the audio version I favour for being out and about (or should I say, for being confined to public transport on wet mornings). Which, in a way is handy as I am likely to pick up something that I might not otherwise choose, if I find in a catalog search that my first choice isn’t available in that edition. What I would love is if some of the British Library crime reprints were produced in the MP3 format. Now that woould make me a very happy bus traveller!
It is probably time to browse the library shelves again…