Interview

Talking With
Stuart Kaminsky

“A good reader makes me hear my book in a voice different from my own,” says film historian and mystery writer Stuart Kaminsky. “It’s like hearing a story written by someone else whom I really like. A good reader makes me like my novel even more than I did when writing or reading it.”

With more than fifty books to his name, the current president of Mystery Writers of America remains as unpretentious as his storytelling. After receiving his doctorate in 1972, Kaminsky taught film at Northwestern and Florida State University. His love of film led him to write his first novel, Bullet for a Star, in which 1940’s Hollywood private eye Toby Peters crosses paths with Errol Flynn, Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre. Audiobook adaptations of Kaminsky’s works include mysteries featuring Toby Peters, Moscow police detective Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov, and Chicago detective Abe Leiberman. Kaminsky has also written two “Rockford Files” novels and is at work on a series featuring Sarasota-based process server Lew Fonseca.

“The experience of reading the book and listening to it is vastly different,” Kaminsky observes. “The former goes from eye to mind and the latter from ear to mind. Our day-to-day experience makes clear the enormous difference between the two sense experiences.”

Regarding abridgment, Kaminsky confesses: “Have you ever found an author who likes her or his work abridged? I’m certainly no exception. I think that what I wrote and published was not only the way I wanted it to be, but the way it should be.”

“The quality of the reader makes all the difference,” Kaminsky says, when asked about performers. “I had one of my Toby Peters books done on audio for the blind. The reader of the first-person male novel was a woman who spoke flatly and with very precise diction as if speaking to a child. The effect was gone. My guess is the woman was donating her time for the project, and for that I applaud her, but it destroyed the effect. I couldn’t listen.”

A talented actor and university lecturer, Kaminsky hardly suffers from stage fright. Nevertheless, he says, “I can’t read my own work. Something odd happens. I get emotional reading the words aloud and feel on the verge of tears. No, I wouldn’t do a better job than the professional actors who have read my work.” He says he would love to hear Richard Bakalyan read an unabridged Toby Peters, James Garner to do his Rockford books, and Stanley Tucci to read as Lew Fonseca.

Kaminsky has been pleased with the narrators of his existing audiobooks. These have included Mark Hammer, Stacy Keach, Alan Sklar and Saul Rubinek. “Each brought his own personality, his own style, his own interpretation to the job, and I welcome that.”—Steve Steinbock

APR/MAY 99