James R. Hedrick
7 books read for LibriVox
- Shaw having fun with his own critics: a young woman's play gets staged anonymously, then actual reviewers bicker over who wrote it. Inside, two respectable kids come home from jail refusing to feel ashamed, and their parents' panic is funnier than it has any right to be.
- Frank and Joe spend most of this one hunting for Chet and Biff after their motorboat trip goes wrong, and the Blacksnake Island stretch has real vintage-adventure charm. It's dated 1920s boys' fiction, breezy and formulaic, so come for nostalgia, not depth, and you'll have fun.
- One of the cozier Hardy Boys outings: Frank and Joe hunt a missing professor along a stormy coast honeycombed with caves, with Chet along mostly for the sandwiches. Pure comfort-food adventure, formulaic and fast, best if you want an evening of uncomplicated flashlights-and-hermits fun.
- Four golfers find a body under a viaduct and detect it half to death, each theory more ingenious and more wrong. Knox is gently mocking the detective story from inside it; funniest if you already love the genre's rules.
- You get sharp, brittle dialogue and a surprisingly bruised family drama, with Nicky’s drug use exposing the rot beneath his mother Florence’s glamorous social life. It’s melodramatic and a little dated, but Coward’s cruelty and comic timing make the emotional collisions land.
- A stranger's body turns up in a bathtub wearing nothing but a pince-nez, and Lord Peter Wimsey investigates mostly because it amuses him. The banter is the point here, though Sayers gives him real shell shock underneath, which keeps the froth from floating away entirely.