August 5, 2022: Some audiobook/podcast recommendations
Daily Diary, Day 704:
First of all, just to let you know I did successfully turn around my day, yesterday. A “front” moved through that while it didn’t bring any rain did cause the temperature to drop from 80 degrees at noon to 70 degrees at 2 pm. So, after doing a little more writing after my noon meeting, I got in my hour walk. And then wrote a little more and got 718 words written for the day. More than I expected.
As to what I have been listening to, last week I finished listening to Sara Paretsky’s newest book in her V. I. Warshawski (female private detective) series, Overboard. I really enjoyed it. As I have mentioned in previous posts, I started reading these books in the early 1980s, and it has only been as I started listening to some of her books, including her earlier works that I realized how much she had influenced me.
On the surface, her character and setting couldn’t be more different from my Annie Fuller/Dawson San Francisco mysteries.
V.I. is a tough-talking woman from a working-class Chicago immigrant community and the mysteries are contemporary. But VI uses her background (law school, stint in legal defender’s office) to primarily investigate what we would call white-collar crimes like embezzlement, fraud, insurance scams, etc. In the process, like Annie, she interacts with people of wealth as well as a lot of working-class individuals of a variety of ethnic backgrounds. Like Annie, she also wrestles with the personal conflict created when friends and romantic partners want her to give up her single-minded pursuit of justice if they think it is going to risk her well-being. The setting and the period may be very different, but I am struck by how the crimes and the personal conflicts are so often similar. I definitely recommend checking out her books, in whatever format you prefer.
I also started listening to a podcast that I would like to recommend, because while I’ve only listened to a few recordings (they are short, usually under 20 mins), I’ve really enjoyed them. The podcast is called Shedunnit. The podcast focuses on the group of authors who wrote what is called the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, with a particular slant on women, including women writers and women characters. As someone who grew up on Agatha Christie and as an adult, devoured the mysteries of Josephine Tey, Ngaio Marsh, and Dorothy Sayers, I have liked what I listened to so far. I also hope the podcast may give me some ideas about other authors to check out.
In the podcasts I’ve sampled so far, she either interviews someone who is an expert on a certain kind of mystery (the locked room mystery, for example), or interviewed an historian who gives her some insight into the historical background (say of clerical workers in the 19th and early 20th century) as it explains characters in these mysteries with these backgrounds.
Anyway, I plan on making these podcasts a regular part of my walks.
Finally, I just listened to the Alternate Futures podcast interview I did several weeks ago. Since I didn’t feel like I embarrassed myself too much in it (smile), I am giving you the link here. About half of the interview covered being an indie author and my historical mysteries, the rest is on the open source, multi author world I helped create called the Paradisi Chronicles. This might be of particular interest to those of you who have read my Caelestis Trilogy or are following along as I have started writing a new book in this series. This link should get you to the podcast.