The Sounds of Crime: Review

“The Sounds of Crime”  is a three-disc CD set containing five stories specially commissioned by Whole Story Audio Books to be read aloud ‒ and brilliantly read they are too. The stories are:

“Dolly’s Trash and Treasures” by Laurence Block

“Meet Me at the Crematorium” by Peter James

“Happy Holidays” by Val McDermid

“The Walls” by Mark Billingham

“The Deceivers” by Christopher Fowler

All of them are startlingly well-written tales. I defy anyone to listen to “The Walls” without feeling an eerie, deeply unsettling (but strangely satisfying) shudder at the end.

Compulsive hoarding

But it’s the first of these stories, “Dolly’s Trash and Treasures” by the American crime writer Laurence Block that has drawn the collection to the attention of Storage.co.uk. We have written at length on the subject of decluttering (and its relevance to self storage) on this website; and, by extension, we have also written on the subject of compulsive hoarding.

Laurence Block’s 35-minute tale is written entirely in dialogue, with the American voices all very skilfully differentiated by the reader, Buffy Davis (also the voice of Jolene Rogers in The Archers). The central figure is Dolly, who is living in the squalor created by her compulsion.

Her symptoms are classic: the trash that she hoards has some value to her ‒ all those old newspapers and magazines contain interesting stuff that she will read one day, the empty bourbon bottles would be worth “good money to collectors”. “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” she muses.

Meanwhile, she is oblivious to the anti-social fallout of her habit, and the consequences for those around her ‒ the children’s rooms rendered uninhabitable by the piles of junk, the vermin feeding on rotten leftovers.

This puts the kindly agents of the public authorities in a dilemma: how can they persuade the reluctant Dolly of the need and benefits of clearing up all the mess, and take action against her will? “It’s my house,” she protests.

The story gradually unfurls. We won’t say more here. Just this: if you are interested in the subject of compulsive hoarding, this is an excellent literary treatment of it.

You will probably enjoy all the other stories in the collection too. Thoroughly recommended!

And by the way, these stories are available only as audio recordings, and are not available in print.

“The Sounds of Crime”, edited by Maxim Jakubowski, published as a three-CD set by Whole Story Audio Books, www.wholestoryaudio.co.uk