Simon R. Green (text) and various cast (narration),
Hawk & Fisher -- Number One (GraphicAudio, 2010)
First let's have Michael Jones, an avid Simon R. Green fan, comment on Haven:
The Haven of Simon R. Green's Hawk and Fisher books is a terrifyingly unique location, and boy am I glad for that. It's treacherous, dangerous, evil, nasty, hopeless, cruel, hazardous, and capricious. Take the worst elements of Los Angeles and New York, and slam them together with the ruthless politics of Washington, DC, and the fantasy trappings of a deranged British writer. Honest people tend to get killed in Haven. Luckily, so do dishonest people, and in great numbers. Haven's ancient, and corrupt, and the cesspool of the known world. And it's an adventure. Politics is a life and death matter, here.
I reviewed all of the Hawk & Fisher novellas when they came in in two trade paper omnibuses a few years back. Although their back story is told in Blue Moon Rising (and available as a most excellent audio work from GraphicAudio), it really isn't necessary to read (or listen) to that work before listening to this tale as it adds very little to these tales beyond explaining the description of the characters as described by Green in each and every novella:
Hawk was tall, dark, but no longer handsome. A series of old scars ran down the right side of his face, and a black silk patch covered his right eye. He didn't look like much. He was lean and wiry rather than muscular, and he was beginning to build a stomach. He had only just turned thirty, but already there were streaks of grey in his hair. It would have been easy to dismiss Hawk as just another bravo, but there was something about Hawk; something hard and unyielding and almost sinister.
She was tall, easily six feet in height, lithely muscular, and her long blond hair fell to her waist in a single thick plait, weighted at the tip with a polished steel ball. She was in her mid- to late-twenties, and handsome rather than beautiful. There was a rawboned harshness to her face which contrasted sharply with her deep blue eyes and generous mouth. Somewhere in the past, something has scoured all the human weaknesses out of her, and it showed.
Oh, do go ahead and read (or listen to) Blue Moon Rising, as it is quite good -- better by far as an audio work in my opinion, as is this work. This is largely the result of a bias I have for first person narration in fiction, like Green does in his Nightside and Secret Histories series, and thereby found the Forest Kingdom series just a little flat with its distanced third person narrative. Though I must admit the Beyond the Blue Moon novel is wonderful in print form.
Hawk & Fisher Number One is known more properly by its original British name of No Haven for the Guilty, which became, errr, Hawk & Fisher in the States. (No snarky comments on stupidly renaming books please.) All of the six Hawk & Fisher novellas are mysteries with a really heavy overlay of swords and sorcery that should remind you more than a bit of Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series though I think Haven is better conceptualized by Green than Lankhmar is by Leiber.
No Haven for the Guilty is essentially a locked room mystery with an entire city mansion being the locked room. Politics being literally a blood sport in Haven, our sort-of heroes are told to guard a City Councilor bent on cleaning Haven of its corrupt ways as quickly as possible, even at considerable risk to his own life. So it should not surprise you that he is the first of many deaths in this house over the course of a night.
Now let's turn to the audio production itself. This work was adapted, not abridged, for GraphicAudio by Timothy Lynch who hs adapted a number of the more pulpish works that this company has done. It is superbly directed by Terence Aselford who has written, directed, and acted in many a GraphicAudio work. This work has voice characterizations by Terence Aselford, Danny Gavigan, Ren Kasey, Andy Clemence, David Coyne, Richard Rohan, Mort Shelby, Tim Getman, Scott McCormick, Yasmin Tuazon, Michael John Casey, Elizabeth Jernigan, Nanette Savard, Casey Platt, and Colleen Delany.
Richard Rohan was the narrator for the very long Deathstalker series and I recognize many of the performers as being involved in that series and Blue Moon Rising as well. Significantly worth noting is that the voices of Hawk and Fisher are not the same as the voices of the people they were before coming to Haven. (See? No spoilers revealed!) One or two voices did jar me, as I clearly remembered their roles in the Deathstalker series but I got past that minor aural dissonance.
So all the voice work was as spot-on, as I by now expect from this company, but I was simply amazed by the scene-setting background noises, which allowed for a more nuanced, more intimate soundscape than one normally gets in a GraphicAudio production. Footsteps, to give an obvious example, are hard to do right but here each character has a different one; likewise the sound of in-close fighting often falls flat, but here there is a properly claustrophobic feel to several of the more violent encounters which take place. As a manor house mystery, it reminds me strongly (in a good way) of the British radio dramas of the Thirties and Forties.
Is it worth hearing? Quite so. When all six of these stories are out, they will make a lot of very excellent listening on a cold winter's night!
