Simon R. Green, Hex and the City (Audio version) (Audible, 2008)
John Taylor's the name. I work the Nightside. Only in that dark heart of London where it's always three a.m., where human and inhuman can feed their darkest desires, do I feel at home. Probably because I was born here. What I do is find things -- people, objects -- and in this case, the truth about the origins of the Nightside. That's what Lady Luck has hired me to investigate. But the more I dig, the more I discover, not about the Nightside but about the great question in my life: exactly who -- and what -- was my long-vanished mother.
Now that was fun! Despite having read every other novel in Green's Nightside series, I somehow missed reading Hex and the City even though there's a galley in the Green Man library. So I approached Hex and the City not knowing anything of the storyline -- unlike the next novel in the series, The Path Not Taken, which I just started listening to. Now, I should note that we do already have an excellent review of the novel by fellow Green fan Michael Jones in which he notes:
Simon Green writes like the hooker who mugs you during sex. One minute he's whispering sweet nothings, the next he's kicked you in the groin and made off with your innocence and valuables. He writes with a certain over-the-top flamboyance, a hearty gusto, thoroughly embracing every visceral image and exaggeration he can think of, creating an atmosphere where imagination runs wild and nothing is too extreme. His style is unique, stylized, and addictive, every action and every scene writ larger than life. Part of the appeal for this series lies in how unashamed Green is to play with characters that anyone else would find absurd, and make them fit into the setting.
And I can now say unequivocally that listening to this story was an immeasurably better experience for me than I had reading (and re-reading) any of the other Nightside novels, as the incredible work done by everyone at Audible makes the story come truly alive. Until I started using an iPod to listen to audiobooks while taking a long morning walk around the downtown area of the city I live in, I had never really appreciated the experience of a well-crafted audiobook, as I simply can't listen to them when I'm doing anything else. My first experience with an Audible produced audiobook, METAtropolis, impressed me enough that I followed the advice of Steve Feldberg, Executive Producer of all the works in the Nightside series (and METAtropolis as well) and sampled this to see how they did on their other in-house productions.
As with METAtropolis, downloading was incredibly easy, as their registration and log-in system is well-designed. (Their prices are quite reasonable as well.) It took but a few more minutes to install it on my iPod. Like METAtropolis, it breaks the file down into chapters duplicating the structure of the original book. The Nightside novels are patterned to a great degree after classic mystery works like Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, so Hex and The City was for me a quick read at a little over two hundred and fifty pages. That text length translates to eight and a half hours as an audiowork with all of the voice work here is done by Marc Vietor -- what a remarkable job he does! As I was listening to it in roughly half hour chunks while walking, my experience with it was akin to a thirties radio serial -- which, as Marc told me in an email that day, is appropriate:
When I was a kid, my parents allowed me and my siblings to watch TV only on weekends. The rest of the time I had to be satisfied with the radio or the record player. Every night before going to sleep I would listen to spoken word on the radio. At 10, with the lights out, I listened to CBS Radio Mystery Theater, followed at 11 by Dr. Demento and a Comedy Hour. I'm sure that my love of reading aloud was born back then when I listened to those voices from old radio shows in my darkened bedroom just before I fell asleep.
The story is that someone calling herself Lady Luck, a being of really immense powers, has hired John Taylor to investigate the origins of the Nightside -- the dark, secret heart of London where it's always literally three in the morning. And you wouldn't believe how big the moon is over The Nightside, or how strange the constellations are! Gods, angels, demons and monsters walk openly here, which why things are always rather interesting for the only P.I. operating in The Nightside. But when, at the behest of his client, he starts to unravel the nasty secret of his mercifully missing mother and her role in the origins of the Nightside, Nightside -- and all of existence -- could be cease to exist. Will that stop him from uncovering the story? Oh, no -- he's a stubborn bastard!
All of the Nightside novels are told in the first person singular, as narrated by Taylor himself. Think Philip Marlowe oor perhaps Lew Archer. (Yes. both are American. Damn near all English mysteries are third person narratives and none of the Green Man editorial staff could think of a single English mystery series that fit the narrative manner Green uses in this series.) Yes, he's hard bitten. Cynical. And Vietor's voice work which clearly indicates that he's seen everything life can possibly throw at him. Indeed Vietor truly makes Taylor, his world, and all of the other characters come alive for me in a way that they don't quite do on the page. That's not the fault of Green, as The Maltese Falcon works better as a film for me than it does as a well-crafted novel. Same applies to The Lion in The Winter, which is a splendid play, but only really soars in the first film version. Likewise reading anything by Green is always bloody good which is why I'm so fond of his work but hearing this story dramatized was even better!
At best, I can just say the voice work is perfect, but you really need to hear the narrative which you can do here. Bloody good, isn't it? Indeed it is. And he does all of the Nightside novels! So I envy the hours upon hours of great fiction awaiting you when you listen to all of the Nightside novels!
