I’ve been reading through Peter Robinson’s Inspector Banks series for some years now. Peter Robinson was a British-Canadian author of the long-running Inspector Alan Banks series, which debuted in 1987 and reached 28 books by the time of Robinson’s death in 2022. Banks immediately impressed me as a cut above many police procedural true detectives, and I liked the setting of the Yorkshire Dales.
When I refer to reading these, I mean with my ears through audiobooks. I had momentum going with these audiobooks at one point, but the narrator of the books available through the library changed after nine books with 2000’s In a Dry Season. A narrator change can be welcome or unobtrusive, or it can be basically fine after a period of adjustment. Sometimes it can be disastrous. This was disastrous. I sadly don’t know the name of the original narrator (I got these from the library from a city where I no longer live so I don’t have easy access to the name), but he was fine: your bog standard unobtrusive narrator, the baseline one hopes for. Unfortunately, I hate Rob Keith’s performance. Partially it’s comparative, partially it’s because he does things I don’t like in any book, partially it just feels wrong for the characters. I don’t think Keith’s posh, RP accent is a good fit for either the character of Banks (uneducated and from a working class background, but a self-taught intellectual and lover of music) or for the Yorkshire setting. Keith’s reading is slow and ponderous even at increased speed. But most of all, he’s one of those male narrators who tries to do high pitched female voices.
I hate how Keith voices women.
This is disastrous because, as anyone who has read the Inspector Banks books may know, In a Dry Season is a turning point in the series in many aspects, most notably for the introduction of Annie Cabot, a recurring character and POV narrator! It’s also a book that features historical interludes written by a woman with ties to the case. There’s a lot of opportunity to hear Keith’s idea of what women sound like.
Not to harp too much, but did I mention I hate it? It actually caused me to drop the series for several years. But by this point in the series, Banks had gotten particularly interesting, struggling with big changes in his personal life, and despite the terrible voicing and some (ongoing) hesitations about her backstory, I liked Annie Cabot and thought it was a very intriguing turn to introduce an equal and a foil to Banks. Even more so, In a Dry Season has a setup that is practically made for me: it’s a very cold case, a historical crime, unearthed in a fascinating setting of a ghost town that had been submerged by a dam and unearthed by drought. I work in a historical profession and this premise is absolute catnip for me. It haunted me that I’d given up on a book that I otherwise would like. So I made my peace with the idea that books 1-9 were sort of a different series, waited a few years, and came back to the audio series.
While this is still my least favorite narration of any series I’m actively listening to, I did end up enjoying the content of In a Cold Season even though it felt like more of a literary mystery than a proper procedural like the previous Banks books. But the shadow of the narrator impacts me, and I find it hard to untangle my feelings about the change in style and characters from their presentation. Since then, I’ve kept at the series, albeit at a slower pace, both in listening–this is one of the audiobook slogs that I referenced in my last post, as I continue to be actively repelled by Keith’s narration–and in how frequently I pick them up. Which will bring us up to the present and the most recent book I read, 2002’s Aftermath, in part two…
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