I was undecided whether to place this here or in mysteries, as it is a full-cast, unabridged dramatic reading of the classic detective novel, done by KCRW in 2000.

 

I decided to place it here. :>)

 

The cast (see below) is amazing.

 

Note that I have kept the bittrate higher than I usually do for audiobooks in order to preserve the voicing.

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The Zebra-Striped Hearse
Ross MacDonald

Hailed in his lifetime not only as the best mystery writer in America but as one of the country's most important writers in any genre, Ross MacDonald was a superb delineator of post-war life in Southern California. His classic private eye, Lew Archer, entered the literary detective canon as an equal alongside Chandler's Philip Marlowe and Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade.

Actor/director Harris Yulin returns as Lew Archer, in "The Zebra-Striped Hearse," reprising the role he played and directed for the award-winning KCRW production of Macdonald's "The Sleeping Beauty."

This gripping, full-cast unabridged dramatization is set amid a cat's cradle of artists, surfers, neurotic rich and resentful poor. Strictly speaking, Archer is only supposed to dig up the dirt on a rich man's suspicious soon-to-be son-in-law. Like a roving conscience, Archer navigates the dark frontier between criminal guilt and human sin, following a trail of corpses down the California coast to Mazatlan while a zebra-striped hearse and the future son-in-law keep crossing his path.

The production, with an original and haunting score by renowned television composer Steve Croes, features Edward Asner, Kathryn Harrold, Jennifer Tilly, Richard Dysart, Bruce Davison, Tony Plana, Shirley Knight, Tyne Daly, Mary Kay Place and others.

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