The Affair at the Semiramis Hotel: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

The Affair at the Semiramis Hotel, credited to A. E. W. Mason, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of The Affair at the Semiramis Hotel by A. E. W. Mason. Read in English by David Wales Inspector Hanaud is a member of the French Sûreté. He is said to have been the model for Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, as well as the opposite of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. The Affair At The Semiramis Hotel (1917), a novella, is the second Hanaud mystery. Did the robbery/murder really happen or was it the mescal-induced hallucination of the witness? The first novel is At The Villa Rose (1910). The third is The House Of The Arrow (1924) (there are seven through 1949, available at project gutenberg Australia). In 1910, Mason undertook to create a fictional detective as different as possible from Sherlock Holmes, who had recently been resuscitated after his supposed death by Arthur Conan Doyle in 1903. Inspector Gabriel Hanaud was stout, not gaunt like Holmes; a professional policeman, not a gentleman amateur; from the French Sûreté, not Victorian England; and relying on psychological insights rather than physical evidence. His "Watson" is a retired London banker named Mr. Julius Ricardo. - Summary by David Wales

Recording facts

• Recording title: The Affair at the Semiramis Hotel
• Author credits: A. E. W. Mason
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 4
• Listed recording duration: 1:43:36

Catalogue topics

• short story
• novella
• murder mystery
• inspector hanaud
• mystery story

Track guide

1. 01 - Part 1 — 21:36
2. 02 - Part 2 — 31:50
3. 03 - Part 3 — 23:54
4. 04 - Part 4 — 26:17

Listen to this recording

Open the complete recording and player on Internet Archive. The player includes the full track list and available download formats.

Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.