The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag by Robert A. Heinlein



Creepy Change of Pace for Heinlein

Read by Tom Weiner
Approximately 4 hours
Blackstone Audio

Multiple Hugo Award winning author Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988) changes his tone with the novella The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag.

 This audiobook seems much more like a Philip K. Dick story than a Heinlein story since it features none of the themes that Heinlein is well known for, like space travel, alien contact or time travel. Instead, we get an extra helping of creepy with a surprise ending that truly demonstrates Heinlein’s ability to master a variety of styles.

First published under a pseudonym in the now-defunct magazine Unknown in 1942, The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag features Ted and Cynthia Randall, a husband and wife private detective team based in Chicago. They are approached by a fastidious little man with a topcoat and silk gloves named Jonathan Hoag. He has an odd proposition – he offers them a preposterously large retainer to help him figure out what he does for a living. Mr. Hoag knows that he has a well-paying job that pays him cash, but he does not have the faintest idea what that job is. The crisis began while he was at a dinner party and another guest commented on the reddish stains under his fingernails and asked what he did for a living to leave such a residue behind. He was very bothered to find that he did not know.

Ted and Cynthia agree to help him and find that this may not be as easy as they thought.  They find that everything about Mr. Hoag seems to be a mystery and the more they interact with him, the more they doubt their own eyes and ears. Soon enough they discover that “the whole world might be just a fraud and an illusion.”

Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988)
The story suffers a bit from age, which is to be expected. After all, this story is nearly 70 years old. Some of the expressions that are used may have been very hip and stylish in 1942 but they sound a bit clunky to the ear nowadays. Also, some aspects of the story such as elevator operators and doctors making house calls may be totally foreign concepts to some listeners. That being said, the underlying story overcomes all of that window dressing. Rumor has it that a movie version of this story is in the works as well.

Award-winning narrator Tom Weiner skillfully handles a variety of different voices throughout. He voices Mr. Hoag perfectly, catching his prissy, fussy nature throughout, but adding a different tone once we discover his true profession. His characterization of the story’s bad guys (I am intentionally not describing them so as not to ruin their scenes) has the perfect amount of menace and mystery.

 I rate this book 5 stars out of 5.

This audiobook can be found on Amazon.com here: The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag.

 Note: I received a free copy of this audiobook from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

 Reviewed on September 3, 2011.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts over the last 30 days

TYRANNY, INC.: HOW PRIVATE POWER CRUSHED AMERICAN LIBERTY - AND WHAT to DO ABOUT IT (audiobook) by Sohrab Ahmari

Image
Published in 2023 by Random House Audio. Read by the author, Sohrab Ahmari. Duration: 7 hours, 30 minutes. Unabridged. Writing about government overreach is a common theme among conservatives like Sohrab Ahmari. In Tyranny, Inc . he switches gears and writes about overreach from the private sector instead.  He talks about predatory hedge funds that purchase reasonably healthy companies, load them with debt, and then let them die. He tells the pathetic story of the decline and fall of both Sears and K-Mart, but it's happened over and over again with multiple companies. He also talks about a number of court cases, legal rulings, new laws, and relatively new interpretations of laws that have slid the balance of societal power to private corporations. He gives tons of examples like expansive Non-Disclosure Agreements, tracking software on employee's private phones because they are forced to use them for work, and hidden clauses in multi-page employment agreements that give employer...
Read more

A PAPER ORCHESTRA (audiobook) by Michael Jamin

Image
Published in 2024 by 3 Girls Jumping. Read by the author, Michael Jamin. Duration: 9 hours, 39 minutes. Unabridged. Michael Jamin is a professional Hollywood screenplay writer. He works in television, working on comedy shows like King of the Hill, Just Shoot Me, and Tacoma FD . In the afterword he talked about his desire to write something more than TV shows. He wasn't unhappy with writing screenplays, but he wanted to branch out.  The stories in A Paper Orchestra are from Jamin's life. Some are funny, some wistful, some very sad. As a group, they all have the feel of NPR's Moth Radio Hour  - but instead of having a variety of performers, it is all from the same man. Jamin read the audiobook. In the afterword, he and his wife talked about how they worked together so that he could perform these stories live on stage. She is an actress and she helped him with presentation style - and I think she was successful at it. I worked my way through this audiobook rather slowly. At ...
Read more

SEPTEMBER 11 ATTACKS: A HISTORY from BEGINNING to END (kindle) by Hourly History

Image
  Published in 2024 by Hourly History. Hourly History's telling of the events of September 11, 2001 is surprisingly well-told for a history that is supposed to take a person about an hour to read.  Is this a complete history? Hardly. Why not? Read the first paragraph again. But, it gets all of the elements across in broad strokes - the motives of the  hijackers, the reasons for their targets, and the mass casualties - but not as bad as they could have been thanks to the bravery and professionalism of the NYPD and FDNY. The book moves on to discuss the aftermath, including tearing down the remains of the buildings, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, beefed up airport screenings, and the invasion of Afghanistan in order to search for the Osama Bin Laden and other terrorists responsible for the attacks. All of it is tied up neatly in a bite-sized e-book that younger readers (not kids, but younger adults that simply don't remember 9/11) could read to grasp t...
Read more

MEDICAL MYTHS, LIES and HALF-TRUTHS: WHAT WE THING WE KNOW MAY HURT US by Dr. Steven Novella

Image
  Published by The Great Courses in 2013. Presented by the author, Dr. Steven Novella. Duration: 12 hours, 25 minutes. Unabridged. Dr. Steven Novella addresses common questions and misconceptions that people often have about medicine.  The topics covered range from the very serious (like cancer, for example) to the relatively lightweight (do caffeinated drinks actually do anything to hydrate a person?). Novella explains the science behind each of his discussions in everyday language and his demeanor is more like that of a friend than that of a lecturing authority figure.  As in all books of this sort, there were parts that I was keenly interested in and parts that I didn't care a whole lot about. But, on the whole, this book is well worth your time. I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here:  MEDICAL MYTHS, LIES and HALF-TRUTHS: WHAT WE THING WE KNOW MAY HURT US by Dr. Steven Novella.
Read more

Gray Ghost: The Life of Col. John Singleton Mosby by James A. Ramage

Image
This must be THE definitive book on John Singleton Mosby Published in 1999 by University Press of Kentucky James A. Ramage has written what must be THE definitive book on the life of John Singleton Mosby, Gray Ghost: The Life of Col. John Singleton Mosby . I cannot imagine a more thoroughly written book on the topic. Ramage discusses his family history, his childhood and more. Of course, the largest amount is written about his service in the Civil War as a partisan ranger that terrorized the Union troops arrayed against Robert E. Lee. Ramage is definitely a fan of Mosby, but he refuses to get involved in the hype that Mosby and his contemporaries sometimes engaged in concerning how effective Mosby's men were. Ramage agrees that Mosby was cost-effective, meaning that his small groups of men - usually around 120 or so - would tie down thousands of Union soldiers, but disagrees with Mosby himself that he tied down tens of thousands. John Singleton Mosby (1833-1916) ...
Read more

THE FAITHFUL SPY: DIETRICH BONHOEFFER and the PLOT to KILL HITLER by John Hendrix

Image
Published in 2018 by Amulet Books. Dietrich Bonhoeffer is well-known as one of the few ministers who stood up to the Nazis and kept his ministry completely independent of the totalitarian regime. Eventually, his principled stand led to his death in prison. Along that path there was a point where he closed down his ministry and used his connections to get a position in military intelligence. At first, this sounds like he totally gave in to the Nazis. However, it turns out that the military intelligence and the Nazi intelligence departments were completely separate entities and they did not get along very well. Bonhoeffer used that mistrust and friction to his advantage - he sent intelligence to the Allied powers, he helped with plans to sneak Jews out of Germany. These were easy actions on a moral level - if you believe the regime in charge of your country is evil, you will work against it. But, the more Bonhoeffer thought about it, the more he considered taking more decisive action...
Read more

Alpha Girls: Understanding the New American Girl and How She Is Changing the World by Daniel J. Kindlon, PhD

Image
Rings true to this classroom teacher Published in 2006 by Rodale Books. As a classroom teacher that first came into the profession at the height of the Reviving Ophelia type of research done by Mary Pipher. I have participated in classes, seminars and training sessions about how girls are being short-changed in the classroom and in our culture. It was not until I ran across some research I was doing in my Master's Degree program some 15 years later that my eyes were opened to a new possibility: the girls are, on the whole, doing just fine. The boys, on the other hand, are falling by the wayside in heart-cringing numbers. Go to any public school and you can just about guarantee that 7 or more of the top ten will be girls. Look at the special education numbers and 7 out of 10 will be boys. Dan Kindlon 's Alpha Girls: Understanding the New American Girl and How She Is Changing the World does not address what is going on with boys, but it does look at a relatively ...
Read more

The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas by Jonah Goldberg

Image
A Worthy (and Very Different) Follow-Up to Goldberg's Liberal Fascism Published by Sentinel HC in 2012 . Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism  is one of the most profound political books that I have read in my entire life. It changed my view of politics and made me focus a lot of thinking that I had been doing about the actions of government in our daily lives. So, four years later, I was pleased to hear that Goldberg had written another book. The Tyranny of Clichés is not as serious as Liberal Fascism , but it does a worthy job of going after lazy thinking in our political discourse. The book goes after shorthand, cliched arguments that people use to try to win (or not lose) political arguments. Take the phrase "Violence never solved anything." This is said by any number of people to protest a war or people having guns or things of that nature. I have a personal history of that story. I used to teach in a small high school with a very liberal English teacher wh...
Read more

MY BROTHER'S FACE: PORTRAITS of the CIVIL WAR in PHOTOGRAPHS, DIARIES, and LETTERS by Charles Phillips and Alan Axelord

Image
Published in 1993 by Chronicle Books Designed to be a "coffee table book" rather than a thorough re-telling of the war, this history of the American Civil War is quite enjoyable. The strength of My Brother's Face is immediately obvious - the gorgeous, large photographs of soldiers, sailors, spies and other participants in the events of the Civil War. I find that as I get older I catch myself looking at the faces of these people and wondering what life was like for them. Some of them look stiff and fake, but some, including a lot in this collection, imbue a sense of vitality, a sense that these were living, breathing people. Sometimes it is a smirk, or perhaps a look of unease. I simply love a picture that is used in this book of the 4th U.S. Colored Troops on p. 121. This is a close-up of the picture from the book. These men all have a look of confidence, determination and even distrust that speaks to us even more than 150 years later and exemplifies what a well-chosen ...
Read more

CALIFORNIA GOLD RUSH (kindle) by Hourly History

Image
  Published in 2022 by Hourly History. The short histories produced by Hourly History are designed to read in about an hour. In some cases the size limit makes for a very incomplete history. In this case, I thought that topic and the size limit matched up pretty well. This e-book details from the beginning (spoiler alert: John Sutter of Sutter's Mill fame was clearly not a good guy) and details the good as well as the bad of the Gold Rush. Turns out there was a lot of bad, such as environmental destruction on an unprecedented level (they used mining techniques that were outlawed just a few years later. How obviously bad were they if people who let children into mines said that these techniques are clearly out of bounds?!??)  The white miners also used genocidal techniques to wipe out the local Native American populations, killed Chinese immigrants that came across the Pacific to find gold and, of course, jumped the claims of other white miners and killed them. All of the gold...
Read more