Listen: Lost suspense masterwork returns to life in second Library of America audiobook

Last week we shared details of our first-ever audiobook: The Horizontal Man by Helen Eustis, a 1946 novel included in our upcoming two-volume anthology Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s.

Fools’ Gold by
Dolores Hitchens
(Doubleday, 1958)

Today we’re equally excited to give a sneak preview of our second audiobook, Fools’ Gold (1958) by Dolores Hitchens, another title in the Women Crime Writers collection. The story of two juvenile delinquents fresh out of lockup and a sheltered young orphan girl who hatch a robbery scheme that goes badly astray, Fools’ Gold is perhaps best known today as the inspiration for Jean-Luc Godard's 1964 film Bande À Part (Band of Outsiders).

A 2011 review by Dan Stumpf on the MysteryFile blog suggests the novel is ripe for reappraisal: Stumpf calls it “a nasty piece of work. . . . quite well done. [Hitchens] has a good feel for letting the characters shape the plot, and she isn’t bothered by a bit of clutter and untidiness as things play out in a nicely cluttered and untidy finale.”

Scott Brick recording Fools’ Gold
in Los Angeles, June 2015.

Longtime audiobook producer Patti Pirooz, who is also handling The Library of America’s Horizontal Man audiobook, is shepherding Fools’ Gold through production in Los Angeles. Behind the microphone is Scott Brick, a writer, actor, and veteran audiobook narrator with more than 600 titles to his credit, ranging from bestsellers like Moneyball and The Bourne Identity to classics like In Cold Blood and Light in August. Publishers Weekly named Brick its “Narrator of the Year” in 2007, and he has won two Audies from the Audio Publishers Association and over fifty Earphones Awards from AudioFile magazine for his work as a reader.

Want to hear a sample of the narrating chops that have made Brick so lauded in his field? Enjoy a brief excerpt of his Fools’ Gold reading via the audio player embedded below.



Watch Reader’s Almanac in the coming months for further information about our Fools’ Gold audiobook and Women Crime Writers, both of which will be released in September.

Related post:
Orange Is the New Black star is the voice behind first Library of America audiobook

Orange Is the New Black star is the voice behind first Library of America audiobook

Back in mid-May, Library of America staff members paid a visit to Merlin Studios in New York City for a behind-the-scenes look at an exciting new project: the recording of The Library of America's first audiobook.

The Horizontal Man by Helen Eustis,
collected in the forthcoming anthology
Women Crime Writers: Eight
Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s.

The work in question is The Horizontal Man, a 1946 novel by Helen Eustis (1916–2015) that will be included in Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s, a two-volume set coming from The Library of America this fall. (Click here for a list of other titles in the anthology.)

Centered on the murder of a philandering professor at a small Connecticut women’s college, The Horizontal Man allegedly drew on Eustis's own experiences as an undergraduate at Smith College. It won the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award for best first novel, and the eminent scholar and mystery-suspense aficionado Jacques Barzun named it one of the Fifty Classics of Crime Fiction, 1900–1950 in a ranking he published with Wendell Hertig Taylor in 1976.

Actress Barbara Rosenblat.

The Library of America is drawing on veteran talent for its initial foray into audiobooks. Patti Pirooz, the former publisher of audiobooks at Penguin, is producing The Horizontal Man, and the reader is Barbara Rosenblat, a veteran of stage, film, and TV who is perhaps best known for her role as Miss Rosa on the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black. What fans of Rosenblat's work on Orange may not know is that she has also been hailed as "the Meryl Streep of audiobooks"—i.e., a versatile and widely acclaimed reader whose hundreds of credits range from Bridget Jones to classics and numerous mystery series.

Watch Reader's Almanac in the months ahead for more information about Women Crime Writers and our Horizontal Man audiobook, both of which will be released in September.