Meet Gerard Doyle, the Voice Behind the Books

DEBORAH CROMBIE: What a treat it is today to introduce you to Gerard Doyle, who has narrated most of my Duncan Kincaid/Gemma James books since the very beginning of the series! Here's the audio cover of A SHARE IN DEATH, Kincaid/James #1. (Due to contractual obligations, Gerard read the early books as Michael Deehy, but it's still Gerard!)

As you can see, we've been friends for a long time, and I love the way Gerard reads my characters, especially Gemma. She sounds just the way I imagine when I'm writing her!

I thought it would be fun to ask Gerard to give us the scoop on what it's like to narrate audio books, and he very kindly obliged. Welcome, Gerard!

DEBS: Hi Gerard! Thanks so much for agreeing to vist with us. We have so many big audiobook fans here on the blog, and every day there are more new converts.

Can you tell us how you got started narrating books?

GERARD: I sort of fell into it. I completely blew my first audition but, 3 years later, I auditioned for the same producer (who didn’t remember me, thank goodness), and I was offered my first audiobook. I received an “Earphones” award from AudioFile magazine for that book and the ball started rolling from there. My background experience as an actor has been invaluable during my years as an audiobook narrator.

 

DEBS: Do you record at home or do you have to go into a studio?

GERARD: I’ve been recording at home and self-directing for about 20 years. I have a soundproof recording booth in my basement.

 

DEBS: I love seeing that. Now I will imagine you recording.

Do you have a regular producer you work with, or is it different for every book?

GERARD: I rarely meet the producer who offers me a book to record. I record for all the leading publishers and several independent ones, but they are not involved in the recording process. The only time I work with a director is when I’m recording Christopher Paolini’s fantasy series, “The Inheritance Cycle (The World of Eragon)”, which are sweeping, epic stories about a young warrior and his dragon, and the complexity is such that two heads are better than one during the recording process.

 

DEBS: How do you prepare for reading a book? Do you have any special tricks for getting into the characters? And how do you remember the characters in a series from book to book?

GERARD: Prepping a book is a very pleasurable experience for me. Ideally, I like to sit in a chair on the beach, under an umbrella (with some liquid refreshment to hand!) and immerse myself in the exploration of a new project.

Of course, one has to read the entire book before beginning to record! People are often surprised by this, but the narrator needs to be as familiar as possible with the overall story, as well as the journey through it of each individual character.

I make note of everything the author reveals about each character’s background and relationships in the narrative, as well as what others say about them and what they say about themselves. I then try to create a voice that would truly reflect each character as I perceive them.

When recording a book in a series, I refer to my archived manuscripts and I can cross refer from the text to my archived audio files to access previous character voices, in order to maintain consistency.

 

DEBS: That sounds like a lot to keep up with. Can you walk us through your actual recording process?

GERARD: I’d be happy to answer specific questions about that. 

 

DEBS: I will bug you in the comments for some of those process things. Meanwhile, do you have a favorite accent? What about favorite genre?

GERARD: I love murder mysteries and have been fortunate enough to record many of them over the years, including Deborah’s Kincaid and James mysteries.

I very much enjoy having a stab at various accents, particularly the broad spectrum of accents still prevalent in the UK and Ireland. My background is Irish so, although my everyday accent is a sort of bland English, I’m lucky enough to have an Irish accent to drop into without it sounding fake.

I was once recording a book in a Manhattan studio and the producer pinpointed my Irish accent to the very town that my family came from. (He had just returned from there a few days previously.) I wasn’t using the accent for the book I was recording, I just happened to curse in that accent because I kept repeating the same mistake. He pinpointed the accent from those two single-syllable words of Anglo Saxon!  I was absolutely gobsmacked!

 

DEBS: That is amazing! 

I know some of your authors like to give you really difficult to pronounce passages just for fun. What’s the hardest thing you’ve ever had to read? (I gave Gerard a lot of Scottish accents in NOW MAY YOU WEEP  and it’s still one of my favorites to listen to. And I love his Irish accent reading Fergus O'Reilly in A BITTER FEAST.)  

GERARD: Don’t you start getting any ideas, madam!

In a recent book a mischievous Irish author, who shall remain nameless (Adrian McKinty), gave me chunks of Greek, Latin and Icelandic to articulate! I can navigate Latin but the Greek and Icelandic were very tricky. He, of course, was absolutely useless with all three languages (he and I are on very friendly terms, so I can say that (and worse!) about him) so I had to be very resourceful; contacting a Greek Orthodox priest, as well as the Greek and Icelandic consulates in DC. I eventually got the Icelandic through a chance referral to an Icelandic person in New Zealand, resulting in a midnight Zoom meeting, with me recording her speaking the Icelandic phrases and repeating them back to her until she was satisfied with my accuracy. I finally recorded and sent those pronunciation clips to the audio editor three weeks after I had submitted the rest of the finished audio for the book. Such fun! Over the years, in the process of pronunciation research, I’ve had some incredible luck and spoken to many wonderful and helpful people.

DEBS: Can you tell us what you’re working on now?

GERARD: I’ve just finished recording “Clown Town”, book nine of British author Mick Herron’s wonderful “Slow Horses” series (on which the Apple TV series is based). I’m recording some final corrections (I don’t always get it right first time!) on a delightful book called “The Last Hummingbird West of Chile”, a book my recording engineer son, Adin, and I have produced for Canadian author Nicholas Ruddock and I’m about to begin character research for a new and exciting children’s book, “The Society of Incredible Stories”, by British author, Mike Oakley. After that, I’m contributing to an audiobook of short stories by Alexander McCall Smith and Charles Todd. All while dealing with our newly acquired, rambunctious labradoodle puppy!

 

DEBS: That is Josie. Isn't she adorable??? I don't know how you get anything done, Gerard. Thanks so much for taking the time to answer my questions, and I hope you'll hang out and chat with our readers a bit this morning!

You can check out Gerard's Audible catalogue here. It runs to nearly a dozen pages and that's not including books read as Michael Deehy! There are terrific choices including crime fiction, fantasy, history, children's books, and classics. (I've added his narration of James Joyce's Dubliners to my list.) Among my favorites are his narration of Adrian McKinty's Sean Duffy novels, and of course Mick Herron's Slow Horses books. I can't wait to listen to Clown Town!

(I'm thinking I should put in something challenging for Gerard in the book-in-progress. Hmm. Any suggestions?)

P.S. If you're interested in a fictional portrayal of an audiobook narrator, I have a couple of suggestions. THANK YOU FOR LISTENING by Julia Whelan, narrated by Julia Whelan, is one of my favorite audiobooks AND one of my favorite novels. Whelan is probably my favorite female narrator. She, along with Kristen DiMercurio, narrates ATMOSPHERE: A LOVE STORY, the new novel from Taylor Jenkins Reid, and it will knock your socks off.

Also fun is HIDEAWAY by Nora Roberts, narrated by January LaVoy, another top-notch voice talent.

 

Terry Shames--Deep Dive

DEBORAH CROMBIE: We are always tickled to have our Jungle Red pal Terry Shames on the blog, and here she is with a terrific new book (and an absolutely stunning cover!)

Isn't that gorgeous? I'd dive right in!

Here's Terry!

TERRY SHAMES:  I’m so thrilled to be with the “Reds” again. It’s always engaging. Today I want to talk about serendipity and the amazing way it works for me as a writer.

Serendipity: the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way:

Several years ago when my husband and I were sailing in the Bahamas on our beloved Black Pearl catamaran, we had a side-adventure that had us riding in a dinghy, lost and fighting winds and currents. And oh yeah, the dinghy had a faulty motor that kept cutting out. Eventually things worked out, but that fraught adventure stayed with me. Not long after, I read an article about pirates in the vicinity of St. Vincent in the southern part of the Caribbean. Travelers were advised not to go there after the pirates murdered a couple in a particular heinous way in order to steal their boat. Add one more thing to the mix: I loved snorkeling, but a few years earlier had gotten certified as a diver—and discovered that I was terrified of diving.

Serendipity put all those things together. I wrote Perilous Waters, featuring a fearless, impulsive young woman, Jessie Madison, a dive instructor in the Bahamas. She gets into bad trouble when pirates board a boat that she is on with a casual date. The action starts from there and never lets up. Did I model Jessie on myself? Goodness no! I’m the opposite of fearless, and like I said I’m terrified of diving.

In order to understand why Jessie was in the Bahamas on short-term basis, I decided to make her a victim of her own impulsiveness. Almost done with FBI training, she made a big mistake and was kicked out. She went to the Bahamas to take stock of her life. Later, this lead to another convergence of events—serendipity. Keep reading!

At the time, I thought the Bahama book was a standalone. My agent, Kimberley, had a different take on it: “Oh, no, this is a series.”

What do you do when your agent says, “Write another one,” and you have no idea what to write? Jessie. Diver. Bahamas. No, I didn’t want her to stay in the Bahamas. Diver. Diver. Wait. Kicked out of FBI training? Hmm.

As serendipity would have it, about that time I ran across an article about the FBI dive team. Who knew there was even such a thing? USERT—the FBI’s Underwater Search and Evidence Response Team. A team sent all over the world to investigate evidence found underwater. This specialized FBI team gets called in for the most difficult underwater recovery cases.

As MORE serendipity would have it, I also read about Project Recover, a private team of divers that works with the U.S. military and families to recover bodies of missing American service members. One of their special projects is finding WWII airplanes and returning remains to families for burial.

So…what if USERT had been called in because divers with Project Recover found something strange when they were on a routine dive? Sounded like an interesting story. Now, all I had to do was figure out a way to get Jessie Madison on that USERT dive team. And because of coincidence or serendipity or magic—whatever you want to call it--the groundwork turns out to have been laid in the first book. Jessie had almost been ready to be inducted as an FBI agent. This being fiction, I managed to weasel her onto the team.

Now, I had the who and what (Jessie and the USERT team and an old WWII airplane) now all I had to do was think of the where the book would be set. I wanted it to be in a difficult dive area. Again, serendipity struck: On that same catamaran, in addition to the Bahamas, we had explored the Aeolian Islands, a string of small, volcanic islands north of Sicily. I looked up diving there and found that there is a spot that is considered such a difficult dive that very little information is given out about it to the public. They don’t want casual divers. PERFECT. That meant I could make up stuff about the area.

Once I had Jessie on site, I had to get into the details of what the diving would be like in such a difficult area. Oh, serendipity you amazing, free-floating genius! One of my friends is an experienced diver. She has been diving in volcanic areas, and could tell me all the perils of those dives—including the presence of deadly currents! But of course serendipity wasn’t about to let me end there! I found out that another friend whom I didn’t even know was a diver was a member of a body recovery dive team. These two people helped me make the underwater world come alive.

One more piece of serendipity? In the Bahamas, I had snorkeled at the site of a small plane that went down in the shallow waters off one of the islands. Even though I knew the pilot had gotten out safely, snorkeling over that underwater airplane was one of the spookiest things I’d ever seen. So describing Jessie’s emotions on seeing the downed World War II airplane in deep water was easy.

I’d love to hear from Red writers how serendipity has helped you make up stories and informed your writing. I think readers would love to know about that part of the “sausage-making.”

Terry Shames writes the Samuel Craddock small-town police procedural series and the Jessie Madison thriller series. She has won the Macavity Award, an RT Critics award, and has been short-listed for numerous other awards, including the Strand Critics Award. Terry lives in Los Angeles with her husband, her dog Monty, and Max the Cat. Their current boat is a 34-foot Catalina called Andiamo—“let’s go!” in Italian.

DEBS: Terry, I love that you are writing about a diver and are terrified of diving! Writing gets us out of our comfort zones, at least on the page.

I've had some wonderful serendipitous magic happen in the writing process, but I'd say the thing to remember, when the idea of making a whole novel out of nothing seems completely daunting, is that you have to start with one thing. Sort of a fictional "If you build it, they will come." What do you think, fellow Reds?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Memorable Afternoon Teas

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Afternoon teas have been much on my mind lately. My daughter and her family leave on Friday for a trip that will end with a few days in London and, of course, Kayti being the plan ahead person that she is, she wanted to choose a place for a proper afternoon tea. She picked Grosvenor House, which, by a funny coincidence, was the first place I ever experienced afternoon tea, on my first trip to London with my parents. Kayti asked if I thought it would be good and I assured her that it would. Tea is hard for a top-notch London hotel to mess up! (Photo courtesy of Grosvenor House London.)

Then, another friend who had family members making a summer London trip asked me for suggestions, and so I did a deep dive into recommendations on the internet as well as my own past favorites. I thought it would be fun to share some of my most memorable teas here.

#1 on my list is (formerly) Gordon Ramsay's Claridge's. This was on a trip with my (as above!) plan-ahead daughter. We can't nail down the exact date, but Gordon Ramsay's tenure at Claridge's ended in June 2013 and I think we were trying to get in under the wire. The only reservation available was the day we were scheduled to arrive. Our plane was due to land at Gatwick about 7 a.m. so we thought, sure, no problem for 2 p.m. tea. You can guess what happened. The plane was late, then when we finally deplaned, Kayti's luggage never came off the baggage carousel. By this time in a mad panic, we snagged her a dress and shoes in one of the airport shops (thank goodness this was arrivals at Gatwick and not Heathrow,) took the train into London, then a cab to Claridge's. We changed in the ladies' lounge and just managed make our two o'clock seating. After all the drama, everything--the room, the food, the service--was divine. It was truly a once in a lifetime experience.

Another memorable tea was at Sketch in Mayfair with a half dozen friends and maybe a wee bit too much champagne. I remember how fabulous the decor was, and what a good time we had, but I do not remember the food! I'm sure it was lovely! I encourage you to click on the link above to play with the Sketch website (and to gasp at the prices.)

A favorite I have been to several times is St. Ermin's Hotel in Victoria. I used to love to go there because it was just around the corner from New Scotland Yard but, alas, the Met headquarters has moved to the Embankment. Still, St. Ermin's is a great central London choice. Not only do they serve an absolutely delicious afternoon tea, they have beehives on the roof that you can visit. 

You can adopt a bee. This would be a fun choice with kids.

Another memorable tea was at The Ritz after visiting Buckingham Palace, this with The Poisoned Pen owner Barbara Peters, author Kate Charles, and another London friend. Again, I remember the occasion and the spectacular Palm Court better than the food. That interior really is something to see!

I've had tea at The Connaught courtesy of my friend Deborah Harkness, and this time I do remember that the food was fabulous!

A tea more memorable for the view than for the food was at Oblix in The Shard, which Kayti and I had during a visit in 2022. The view really is amazing, but I think you could enjoy it just as well over a considerably less expensive cocktail.

My last recommendation is less expensive than many of the fancy hotel teas, but every bit as delicious, if not better. That's The Wolseley in Piccadilly, just a few doors down from The Ritz. 

The Art Deco restaurant is housed in the former Wolseley Motors showroom, designed by architect William Curtis Green in 1921 and restored in the early 2000s by restaurateurs Chris Corbin and Jeremy King. The interior is stunning, but the restaurant feels relaxed and it serves everything from breakfast to late evening snacks. This is a place I feel very comfortable going on my own, which I'm not sure I'd say for the fancier hotels.

I hope if anyone is planning a trip to London this little mini guide will be useful. And if not, you can daydream along with me.

Dear Reds and readers, have you had a memorable afternoon tea? (Not necessarily in the UK!)

Oh, and happy birthday to my darling daughter today! It's too bad we're not celebrating over afternoon tea in London!