PHOTO/Mark Howell

Mike Dennis stands among the covers of books he has written.

 

Local author lends voice to J. D. Salinger

 

BY MARK HOWELL

KONK LIFE STAFF WRITER

 

Key West writer Mike Dennis has found himself a place in literary history.

Dennis, a 23-year resident in Key West who (as Mike Bunis) formerly owned and played at CC Ryder’s piano bar on Duval Street before he took a four-year break as a professional card player in Las Vegas — “not gambler,” he told us, “professional players don’t gamble” — has now become the voice of J.D. Salinger.

Audible.com, the spoken-word division of Amazon.com, has engaged the voice of Mike Dennis for its recently released production titled “J.D. Salinger: Three Early Stories.”

Those stories are “The Young Folks,” “Go See Eddie” and “Once a Week Won’t Kill You.” Their release by the Devault-Graves Agency through audible.com is the first legitimately published work by J.D. Salinger in more than half a century.

“They’ve not seen the light of day in 50 years,” Dennis tells Konk Life. And Key West has scored big time: Typical listener plaudits received by Amazon on the Dennis reading include: “Great narrator: A brilliant listen” … “The pitch- perfect narration helmed by the amazing Mike Dennis enhances Salinger’s internal voice; “Mike Dennis has an awesome voice, a yummy, deep timbre that’s a joy to listen to throughout.”

Jerome David Salinger was an ambitious but war-broken young man when he wrote these stories in the mid to late 1940s, far from being the author whose novel “Catcher in the Rye” in 1951 would make him second only to Ernest Hemingway as the most famous modern American author in the world.

It was in 1948 that his critically acclaimed story “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” appeared in what would become his home in print, The New Yorker magazine, which was also something of a morgue for his prolific output of stories piling up publication.

But Story magazine was the first publication to present the name J.D. Salinger with a 1940 story, “The Young Folks,” first of the three newly-discovered stories featured in the Dennis reading.

It’s an F. Scott Fitzgerald-type tale about a high-society party and a New York girl who “wears a very bright eye” for some young men from Rutgers.

The second story is “Go See Eddie,” first published in a Kansas City publication and resonant of the period; there’s a maid named Elsie and a character who spends a lot of time doing her nails. But the two leading characters are tougher than the boys and girls in the first story and their language shows it. Their situation, too, is direr: “I’d like you to tell me what you’d do if I don’t go see Eddie” she asks. “I’d ring up your boyfriend’s wife and tell her what’s up!” he says.

Then there’s the third story, “Once a Week Won’t Kill You,” a title that has nothing to do with violent death except that the main character’s off to war and his mother is declining into dementia. The accents are all different in this piece and the climactic sentence, “once week won’t kill ya,” is profoundly moving.

This story especially demonstrates the genius (not too strong a word) of Audible. Com in selecting Mike Dennis as its narrator for these unearthed stories. Each of the characters in it is quite different and each one’s character revealed solely through the voice. Dennis has the brilliant ability to engage one’s ear with the character being quoted and the emotion being cued. A significant achievement for this particular medium.

Dennis tells us that he likes “noir crime fiction,” both to read it personally and to write it as a professional author, as well as to read it for a spoken-word download. He has read 35 titles to date for this Audible.com, mostly gangster material or dark thrillers such as the work of Jim Thompson. “I’m thrilled to have done these Salinger stories for the company,” he said as he gave us a brief look at his private and personal recording space located on the top floor of his house in Old Town.

The noir stories he himself has written are numerous, including the novel “Set Up on Main Street” and a contribution to “Murder in Key West and Other Mysteries,” both published by Absolutely Amazing eBooks.

You can’t get more local than that.

 

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