The Haunted House by Hillaire Belloc
Frustrated at having to leave a thrilling story and drive to work or walk the dog? You no longer need to as a growing number of Amazon’s Kindle and Audible’s audio titles are linked by the miracle of Whispersync. Buy an ebook, and you’ll be offered the audio version — downloadable on to phone, tablet or laptop – for a moderate extra charge. Read a chapter or two of Robert Galbraith’s The Silkworm, then set out with headphones on and the audio version will start up where you left off reading. Go home and pick up your Kindle, and it will jump to where you stopped listening. Don’t ask me how it works, but it does. Go to amazon.co.uk/wfv and experiment free with various classic titles: try Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. You can also listen as you read, a brilliant teaching English aid. By no means all titles are available yet, but I was pleased to see that a little-known but delightful Hillaire Belloc novel is. The Haunted House is one of the sardonic bon viveur’s most amusing mystery stories, a P G Wodehousian take on Henry James’ favourite theme of rich Americans and impoverished English aristocrats. Maxwell Caulfield reads this unpredictable and hilarious tale with insouciance.
The Haunted House by Hillaire Belloc, narrated by Maxwell Caulfield, ebook £2.59,Whispersync Audible download, 6hr 37min, £3.49
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
Pursuing the tales of the unexpected theme, one of Naxos audio’s latest productions is a fine multivoice unabridged reading of Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, which T S Eliot called “the first, the longest and the best of English detective novels”. Switching voices brings home to the full the unreliable narrator quality of this mystifying, pacy, but also at times agonisingly slow story of a priceless jewel that carries with it an ancient but still all too potent curse. As we hear in turn from the old family retainer, the rose-loving Sergeant Cuff, the spiteful Miss Clack, the passionate Rachel Verinder and the well-meaning Franklin Blake, the story shifts its meaning and astonishes until the end.
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, narrated by Ronald Pickup, Sean Barrett, David Timson, Jamie Parker, Jonathan Oliver, Fenella Woolgar and Joe Marsh, Naxos audio, 22hr 26 min, 17 CDs, £55 or download
Mr Mercedes by Stephen King
I suspect that T S Eliot would also have approved of Stephen King, who is perhaps the scariest mystery writer ever published, and whose ability to keep us glued to his words is unsurpassed. To be seriously apprehensive about what’s going to happen, you have to like the characters, and Mr Mercedes performs the astonishing feat of creating sympathy not only for our overweight ex-cop hero, but for the sinister mother-fixated young man who drives a stolen car into a queue of jobseekers, then sets out to persuade those associated with his crime to commit suicide. Will Patton, who read Jack Kerouac’s On The Road so well, voices the motley assortment of oddities splendidly.
Mr Mercedes by Stephen King, narrated by Will Patton, Audible download, 14hr 21min, £17.99
Miss Buncle’s Book by D E Stevenson
Enough of thrills and shivers. At bedtime I like a book that I can fall asleep smiling over, and few fit that bill better than Miss Buncle’s Book. Written in 1934 by D E Stevenson (a cousin of the more famous Robert Louis), it’s one of those village England tales that warm the cockles of the heart, but has a satirical edge. A well-meaning spinster writes a roman-à-clef novel that rearranges everyone’s relationships with astonishing results.It’s read with fine Middle England cosiness by Patricia Gallimore. No Whispersync, as yet, but you can get the book itself in an elegant Persephone Books reprint or ebook.
Miss Buncle’s Book by D E Stevenson, narrated by Patricia Gallimore, Audible download, 9hr 57min, £13.99