Judge Dredd Crime Chronicles: The Devil's Playground

Judge Dredd Chronicles #Crime Chronicles 3

by Jonathan Clements

Genres: Audiobook, Science Fiction

Audio CD

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Jonathan Clements is an author, translator, biographer and scriptwriter. His non-fiction works include biographies of Confucius, Marco Polo, Mao Zedong, Koxinga and Qin Shihuangdi. He also writes for NEO magazine and is the co-author of encyclopedias of anime and Japanese television dramas.

Reviews

[Hone Haapu · Rating 4 out of 5]

The jury is still out on Dredd audio books. The difficulty arises from the fact that Dredd is not a big talker, so cannot/ should not narrate a story himself. So obviously writers need to come up with literary devides which allow these Dredd stories to be told through the eyes of another character.

[Keith · Rating 2 out of 5]

Answers the age-old question: What would happen if an Amish on rumspringa encountered Judge Dredd?

[Dan Organ · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love Judge Dredd. As a character he doesnt say much, the audio book needs the girl character to narrate the story. I enjoyed it.

[Wendy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This story starts with the idea of showing us Mega City One through the eyes of an outsider, a member of a religious sect known as the "Plainfolk" (clearly based on the Amish), who eschew modern technology. They live a life entirely separate from the city, except that their young people venture out on their 17th birthday, and are given a year and a day to experience the outside world before they decide whether to rejoin the Plainfolk community or leave it forever.

So, Wendy Plainfolk steps out into Mega City One, and is immediately caught up in a murder investigation, which will eventually lead her back home and force her to question the basis of the society she's grown up in.

I think the major flaw in this story is that it takes a while to get going. We get an opening teaser of Wendy and Dredd meeting, and then the story jumps back to deliver a large expository lump of backstory. It's necessary information, and reasonably entertaining, but I found myself impatient to get back to Judge Dredd. The murder investigation is great fun - Wendy Plainfolk and Joe Dredd make a great odd-couple detecting team. It's a pity that their pairing didn't go on for a bit longer. (Part of me was rooting for Wendy Plainfolk to be made a judge at the end of this story, though neither her character nor the established continuity about the training of judges really made this remotely plausible.)

Purely a personal thing, of course, but that I now possess an MP3 file of Judge Dredd saying, "Get over yourself! You did good, Wendy," justifies the purchase price of this audio all by itself.

[Adam Graham · Rating 2 out of 5]

This story is based on a solid premise. It imagines a commune (quite similar to the Amish) existing in the center of Megacity One and like today's Amish, they send their youth forth out into the world to see whether they liked it or whether they wanted to join the church. It's a fascinating premise but the story is hurt by the fact that the author loves it too much.

We see Wendy Plainfolk eating a hot dog when Judge Dredd arrives on the scene and then wham, we get twenty straight minutes of backstory telling us about this commune and how she got out and ended up at the hot dog stand. So we end up 1/3 of the way through the story with nothing have happened other than Wendy buying a hot dog and Dredd showing up.

The rest of the story has a few interesting moments, particularly Wendy's emotions when she sees Rita dead, but there's a lot of stupid stuff as Dredd continually drops Mega City One slang and technobabble on Wendy and acts like she's an idiot when she doesn't know it despite the fact she's never seen the stuff. Because of all the time spent on exposition, the actual story is only so so, with many shifts in moods that are sudden or exposition.

This is a good idea, but I can't help but thinking it would have made a far more interesting comic book where pictures could have more quickly set up the story. As it is, this release is mediocre at best.