The Audiophile Murder Case

By Barry Ergang

A satire of the high-end audio business as a parody/pastiche of the Philo Vance mystery novels by S.S. Van Dine, this story was originally published in a prominent audiophile "underground" magazine in 1982.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barry Ergang
• Release date: Nov 27, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463358733

Barry Ergang

Former Managing Editor of Futures Mystery Anthology Magazine (www.fmam.biz) and First Senior Editor of Mysterical-E (www.mystericale.com/), Barry Ergang's fiction, poetry and non-fiction have appeared in numerous publications, print and electronic. He is a winner of a Derringer Award from the Short Mystery Fiction Society for the best flash fiction story of 2006.

Book preview

PREFACE

Written over a period of five months beginning in January 1980 as a satire of the audio business I had recently left, and to which I returned eleven years later and remained in until retiring in 2002, The Audiophile Murder Case is also a parody/pastiche of the Philo Vance mystery novels by S.S. Van Dine (pseudonym of Willard Huntingdon Wright).

I submitted the story to several mainstream hi-fi magazines whose editors said they liked it a great deal but couldn’t publish it—probably because of its less-than-charitable takes toward certain aspects of the industry, as well as the possibility that some equipment manufacturers would be offended and thus cease purchasing advertisements. A neighbor, Bill Sommerwerck, himself an audio salesman and occasional contributor to Stereophile, suggested that I send it to J. Gordon Holt, who at the time was editor and principal reviewer for the magazine. Holt liked and accepted it, but said that the story was too long to print in a single issue (at the time, Stereophile was a 48-page digest-sized periodical, not the voluminous magazine it later became). He suggested serializing it over five issues, and I agreed.

The editorial process began when Holt sent me copies of the first two installments to proofread. He made some changes here and there in dialogue and narrative; I consented to some and argued with others. I readily agreed to his change in the locked-room method because it was a big improvement over mine. But some of the changes he tried to make, although from the best of motives, often adversely affected the pastiche of the Van Dine stories with which he didn’t seem to be familiar. He graciously accepted my arguments when I pointed out inconsistencies, and restored the original text.

He did not, however, send me the third installment to proofread, and the published version unfortunately demonstrates it. It contains a lot of errors, omissions and oversights that probably confused the readership. I proofread and corrected the fourth and fifth installments but, unaccountably, Holt didn’t incorporate the corrections into the published version. Therefore many of the characters’ speeches are