Remembering Frank Muller: John’s Inspiration for Narration

 Frank Muller and his daughter, Diana, in studio. Courtesy of frankmullerhome.com

This would have been Frank Muller’s 60^th birthday. Muller passed away in 2008. Though he never wrote a book, he was one of my largest inspirations in literature.

Muller was one of the greatest narrators of my lifetime. He was a stage actor who only happened to see a notice for narrators in the lobby one day. He wound up reading hundreds of books for cassette and CD, sadly losing his voice just before the rise of Audible and podcasting. His breathy, almost contemptuous reading of Melville’s Moby Dick was the only way a teenaged John Wiswell got through the entire thing.

A Muller impression is difficult to build. The words roll across the roof of your mouth more than they do your tongue. Wind comes from the top of your throat, rather than the bottom where your lungs and all the active parts rest. Your mouth becomes a nasal passage. Sentences begin strong and end almost in whispers. Every ‘w’ and ‘n’ is a potential place to stretch. When you realized that voice has narrated Thomas Harris’s Silence of the Lambs, you reached for your credit card, because holy shit. He read Hannibal Lecter like that?

I don’t hide my fondness for audiobooks. They’re good in the car, while you clean, and sometimes I’m simply in the mood to listen rather than read. At this stage I enjoy picking them up for books I’ve read, so I can hear how other people interpret voice (and often, to argue with their choices). At thirteen, when I was bedridden and often didn’t have the strength to sit up, people like Mr. Muller brought me the world. They read me legal thrillers at noon, Horror stories at dusk, and could you please, I know it’s 1:30 AM, but I can’t sleep and I’d so like to hear the Battle of Helms Deep one more time. Mom scooped them up from the library every week to help bide my time. Even when I got walking again, I’d take his recordings out to listen to time after time.

He built his cred with me by voicing some of the best John Grisham and Stephen King titles. Runaway Jury. Different Seasons. His The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet might be my all-time favorite narration. Though likely good money to Mr. Muller, they were his ‘in’ for me. I enjoyed them so much that if he was reading Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, I’d give that a shot as well. Muller enjoyed bouncing between from classics and contemporary literature, claiming the variety of work recharged his batteries. His was the rare class of professional narrators, like John Glover, whom could convince me to pick up an audiobook through name value, something typically reserved only for authors.

In 2001, Mr. Muller had a motorcycle accident. He was thrown across the highway and landed on his face and chest. The helmet potentially saved his life, but his body was racked and his heart stopped multiple times in the hospital. He was disabled for the rest of his life, and never able to narrate again. Lingering complications followed him to his death.

His was one of the few celebrity deaths that actually shook me. I’d wanted him to read my books. Until college I internalized everything I wrote, seldom reading it out loud, more often imagining his voice in my head. Whenever I got off my ass to finally pen those epics I had hidden in me and made excuses not to write just yet? Well, he was supposed to record those. It was one of those big dreams, third only behind making inexplicable millions of dollars and entertaining other bedridden children with my works.

Now even if I wrote them, even if they were great and successful, his voice wouldn’t be there to bring them to life. It was about then that I began saying everything I composed out loud to test its quality. It’s good exercise for writers, especially developing ones – you catch more qualities of grammar and implication. I kept at it, though, because I was so nervous in front of recorders or audiences. During a class reading, I’d stare at the page for safety. God forbid I missed a word.

It is not exaggeration to say the loss of Mr. Muller’s talent spurred me to embarrass myself. I took storytelling classes. I talked publicly about my sickness, family and mythology. I performed work in front of more groups, including my least favorite audience, children. I took out books I’d never seen before and read them out loud to test how voices arose. It was a crash course to getting over my own awkwardness, stutters and issues. There were hours when the syndrome would fog my brain and leave me unable to complete sentences. At my best, I still tripped. You don’t know how reassuring it was to read Muller telling Ric Johnson, “I find myself making every conceivable mistake at some point or other. That's why take 2 was invented.”

There's been a little success. The Possible Origins narrations are one of the most popular features on this site. Last year I got my first requests to do book recordings.  If I'm so fortunate, maybe one day I'll narrate my own audiobooks, or maybe I'll be the recipient of someone else's talent. But today I won't record anything. Today I've got Muller's Great Expectations, and I'm in the mood to listen.