Black Mask 3: The Maltese Falcon - and Other Crime Fiction from the Legendary Magazine
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Black Mask 3: The Maltese Falcon - and Other Crime Fiction from the Legendary Magazine
Buy Now for £15.99
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Narrated by:
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Jeff Gurner
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Oliver Wyman
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Pete Larkin
About this listen
From its launch in 1920 until its demise in 1951, the magazine Black Mask published pulp crime fiction. The first hard-boiled detective stories appeared on its pages. Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner and John D. MacDonald got their start in Black Mask. The urban crime stories that appeared in Black Mask helped to shape American culture. Modern computer games, films, and television are rooted in the fiction popularized by "the seminal and venerated mystery pulp magazine" (Booklist). Never before in audio, these vintage stories are the darkest of the dark, and the best of the best.
Crime fiction fans old and new will delight in rediscovering these taut, character-rich, heart-stopping tales, now on audio for the first time. Includes:
- “The Maltese Falcon” by Dashiell Hammett; read by Jeff Gurner
- “Cry Silence” by Frederic Brown; read by Oliver Wyman
- “Waiting for Rusty” by William Cole; read by Pete Larkin
The narration is excellent and the various characters are well defined though there is a case to be made for a multi-part dramatic presentation.
Where I have issues is with the clumsy chapter divisions. Each Audible chapter contains multiple chapters of the novel. While I think that the editors were correct to include the plot summaries that appeared with the serialisation, they should have been presented as separate chapters as should also have been the case with the individual chapters of the novel. Thus, one could skip the summaries if desired. For this reason I give one less star for the story.
But still, congratulations for making it available.
Excellent story but better chapter divisions are needed
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It lacks some asides in conversation and incidental details. This is what makes the storytelling in this version tighter and a little pacier than the book version.
Some of the differences are unimportant - a substitution of "sharp" for "determined", or a change of word order. For example, "eyes opened suddenly" versus "eyes suddenly opened".
Other differences are arguably significant. For example, after saying of Wilmer "He makes me nervous", Spade adds in this version, "I'm afraid of him".
The audiobook is well read. You can detect in the reader sometimes a Bogart and Greenstreet impersonation creeping in.
The two extra stories included at the end are very good ten-minute tales.
A must-have rarity for fans of The Maltese Falcon
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