REVIEW BY EVAN HUNTER (aka Ed McBain)

The first time I listened to my own words spoken out loud by someone else was when Glen Ford played the role of the school teacher in the film version of The Blackboard Jungle. There was no such thing as an audiobook back then. Or if there was, I had never heard one. I have since listened to many actors reading my words, and my reactions vary each time.

There is the actor I want to strangle. (I use the word "actor" generically; for some unfathomable reason, the word "actress" is no longer politically correct. "Actor," then, for actor or actress, "he," then, for he or she.) He is the one who sends me off in a rage, wondering how he could have so egregiously misunderstood the true sensitivity of my immortal prose, the Shakespearean-like cadences, the sonorous thunder of a masterpiece! How come he didn't read it the way I heard it in my head while I was writing it?

There is also the actor to whom I want to send a dozen roses. He's the one who grasps every nuance, every meaningful pause, every inflection, every suspenseful turn of plot, every tear-wrenching line, every joke, every sly reference! Surely, this actor and I are twins, separated at birth. But even he doesn't quite get it the way I heard it in my head. Then there is none other than myself. Oh boy.

I've recorded three or four of my own books now, and my reactions vary.

You have to understand that recording one of these books isn't the same thing as sitting down and reading a bedtime story to your kids. Oh no. What they do is lock you in this tiny airless chamber while outside this cubicle your engineer and your director drink beer and eat sandwiches while constantly stopping the session because your stomach was rumbling, or there was a slight rasp in your throat, or you missed a word (or even a sentence), or you were speaking too softly (or too loudly!), or your plosive P was popping all over the place, or there wasn't enough difference between your male voice and you female voice, or you simply weren't reading with enough feeling ("Can you give us a bit more feeling, please?) or who knows why these skilled torturers choose to stop your fine performance every two or three seconds when you thought everything was going along so swimmingly?

You do it over and over again.

For three days that seem like three weeks!

At the end of that time, they do not even have the good grace to say, "It's a wrap," or something similarly professional that would make you feel like Mel Gibson or Eddie Murphy. Instead, they say something like, "It went well" ("For a writer," they are thinking) or "That was a nice reading" (meaning "Don't give up your day job") or "Sure hope we can work together again sometime" (which means "I am moving to Afghanistan right this minute!")

And months later they finally send you the tape.

And you drive along in the privacy of your automobile, and you hear your own voice reading your own words, and I'll tell you something. It still isn't the way you heard it in your head.

However hard you try, you can't make your New York inflections sound British; however breathy you make your voice, you still can't sound like a woman, however much you think you are Evan Hunter or Ed McBain, somehow you're not either one when it comes to the unrelenting ear of the microphone.

I don't know why this should be.

Perhaps, in much the same way that a printed book is never complete until a reader brings his own sensibility to it, an audio book is never complete until a listener filters through his innermost feelings the voice of that angelic actor or his inept counterpart-or even the author himself.

Maybe that's it.

Evan Hunter's new audiobook The Moment She Was Gone (Simon & Schuster Audio, $26, ISBN 0743526732) will be in stores this July.