So begins Darling Jim, Christian Moerk's impressive debut novel, the Tantor Audio edition of which won the Audio Publishers Association's "Audie" award last May in the category of "Thriller-Suspense". It was up against some pretty stiff competition, including recent works from Greg Iles and Elmore Leonard.
Moerk is a 40-year-old writer, born and raised in Denmark who came to the U.S. for college, received a graduate degree from the Columbia School of Journalism, worked in Hollywood for Warner Brothers, wrote for the New York Times, and now resides in Brooklyn. He spent considerable time in Dublin during his days in the film industry, and he does quite a good job evoking the accents, slang expressions, and locales of modern-day, small-town Ireland.
Dual narrators, Stephen Hoye and Justine Eyre, worked hard for that Audie, and, like the author's, their evocations of Ireland are convincing. Raised in New England, Hoye studied and worked in London theater for 20 years. Eyre is a Nova Scotian Canadian by birth, spent much of her childhood in the Phillipines where she was educated at British schools, then trained in theater at McGill University in Toronto.
(Fans of vampire lit -- and who is not? -- may be interested to note that Eyre was involved in another male-female co-narration: the Books on Tape library edition of Elizabeth Kostova's 2005 best-seller The Historian, co-narrated with Paul Michael. She can also be heard reading the forthcoming vamp mash-up, Dracula My Love: The Secret Journals of Mina Harker -- due in August from Tantor Audio and available on Playaway this Fall.)
Moerk's inspiration for Darling Jim was an Irish newspaper story about an aunt and three nieces found dead in the house in which they'd lived for months as shut-ins. From this gruesome starting point, Moerk imagines an irresistable vintage-motorcycle-riding, silver-tongued, blue-eyed shanachie or story-teller who leaves a convoluted trail of mayhem that must be pieced together by the novel's characters and readers alike. The book was first published in Denmark in 2007. The first U.S. edition was published by Henry Holt in 2009 and received very favorable notices -- a starred review in Publishers Weekly and raves from Booklist and The Washington Post.
The story is told in three parts that interweave an after-the-fact third-person narrative (read by Hoye) with two separate diaries written by two of the three sisters and read by Eyre. Each narrator does an impressive number of distinct voices and accents. Hoye's section is focussed primarily on a hapless but determined young artist and postal clerk named Niall. Eyre is especially convincing in her strikingly different renditions of the three sisters.
Typically for this genre, a goodly amount of the willing suspension of disbelief is required of the reader, but those willing to go along for the ride will be rewarded with an entertaining yarn, rendered skillfully for audio and justly deserving of its recent Audie award.
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Posted by David Perrotta, MLIS
Playaway Senior Content Strategist
Twitter: david_perrotta
