For audiobook fans, the Audio Publishers Association audiobook dinner is always one of the brightest moments of the biennial Public Library Association conference. This year in Portland, a crowd of around 600 turned out to hear an exceptionally entertaining line-up of speakers: best-selling mystery/suspense authors Chelsea Cain, Marcia Muller, and Sue Grafton, along with Judy Kaye, accomplished stage actress and the longtime narrator of Grafton's super-popular "alphabet mysteries" series.
The evening started off with a paean to both libraries and audiobooks from Chelsea Cain, author of Evil at Heart (2009), Sweetheart (2008), and Heartsick (2007), all of which feature detective Archie Sheridan and serial killer Gretchen Lowell. (The 38-year-old Portland author has also written 5 other books including a 2004 parody of Nancy Drew, Confessions of a Teen Sleuth.)
Cain told a not-uncommon story among writers -- a bookish childhood spent carrying armloads of titles home from the library every week. Cain's own version involved a confession of being left unattended for long hours at the library by a harried single mom. Librarians, she said, save more lives than doctors.
Cain's happy ending came when, after years of renting audiobooks on cassette, she finally met -- and eventually married -- the guy from the tape rental company, who now works for a living as... A LIBRARIAN. Needless to say, the crowd loved this.
Next up was Marcia Muller who talked about her popular Sharon McCone series and confessed that she can't bear to read her own work after it's been published (too great an urge to mark it up with a blue pencil) but that she can LISTEN to the audiobook version and thereby hear the voice of her heroine in a new way. She shared selections from a large collection of favorite e-mails from her readers, each sample strangely "off" in one way or another. For example: "I love having your books on audio. Now I don't have to read them."
Nine of Muller's novels are available on Playaway. Click here, to see them all. Two other titles, including her most recent, Locked In, are available on Playaway from BBC Audiobooks America.
By the way, Muller is married to author Bill Pronzini, and they are the only married couple to have each been named a "Grand Master" by the Mystery Writers of America.
Narrator Judy Kaye, whose stellar stage career has included a Tony award for Carlotta in "Phantom of the Opera" and a lengthy run in the original cast of "Mama Mia," declared that narrating Sue Grafton's alphabet series has been "one of the best things that ever happened to me in my life" -- no small claim for one so accomplished. She called the Grafton books the most popular thing she's ever been involved in, which ought to tell you something about just how huge Grafton's fan base is.
And then came the mistress herself. Grafton's alphabet mysteries (which she's been writing at the rate of nearly one per year since 1982) have sold in the hundreds of millions and been translated into over two dozen languages. The audiobook versions alone have sold over 1.75 million copies.
Like her series heroine, Kinsey Milhone, Grafton spoke bluntly and forcefully. For example: "I would rather roll naked in broken glass than sell [Hollywood] these stories." (Come on Sue -- tell us how you really feel.) She went on to explain that, having spent 15 years as a Hollywood scriptwriter, she wanted nothing more to do with that world. "I am not a team player. I am not a good sport."
Grafton comes by her trade honestly -- her father, C.W. (Cornelius Warren) Grafton wrote detective novels in the 1940s and 50s. His books are out of print, but he may have inspired her practice of catchy serial titles. Borrowing from the folk tale of The Old Woman and Her Pig, "Chip" Grafton named his first two books The Rat Began to Gnaw the Rope and The Rope Began to Hang the Butcher. According to Wikipedia, "a partial manuscript of a third novel, The Butcher Began to Kill the Ox, is known to exist.")
Tongue firmly in cheek, Grafton spoke about the many trials of the writing life, her many hours of therapy, and ultimately her decision to get a life and slow down the pace.
Grafton credited Jungian therapy ("very intellectual and abstract -- not 'boo-hoo' therapy") with teaching her that everyone has inside them both the person that they want to be and a repressed, "shadow side." Her fiction, she said, is her way of giving voice to that dark, repressed side.
Her assertion that the things we most despise are a part of each and every one of us and that we all should own these pieces of ourselves rather than deny them drew noises of both protest and agreement from the audience. A librarian sitting near me whispered, "That's why I read mystery fiction -- to feed my shadow side."
"Kinsey Millhone is my shadow," said Grafton, "and realizing that has changed the way I work." "Everything is process," she said. "I need to learn to trust the process."
It wasn't entirely clear that Grafton is always able to heed her own advice, but her self-deprecating observations frequently had the audience howling with laughter. At various points in the evening, many folks were laughing so hard that tears were streaming down their cheeks -- the mark, clearly, of a writer who connects with her audience.
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Posted by David Perrotta, MLIS
Playaway Senior Content Strategist
Twitter: david_perrotta
