Month: August 2025

Raymond Saucisson, charcuterie supremo and magazine editor, remembered ten years on

I thought I’d celebrate the tenth anniversary of the passing of Raymond Saucisson by reposting this tribute from 2015:

Raymond Saucisson, the noted gourmand and long-time editor of Charcuterie Monthly, passed away unexpectedly yesterday. His close friend Stuart Campbell said that Saucisson’s death comes just a week after the publication of the anthology With Gusto!, for which the charcuterie supremo wrote an introduction. “I’m devastated,” said Campbell. “He was always at the cutting edge, as an editor and as a small goods expert; he was a man who took on life one huge slice at a time”.
Saucisson was born into poverty in Marseilles in 1945. He learned the art of sausage making from his mother, who sold her wares in the alleyways off Le Canebière. As a child Saucisson listened to the stories of the sailors who haunted the area, and in 1960 took a job as a ship’s cook.
After ten years at sea he jumped ship at London, eventually obtaining residence papers and gaining employment as a bus conductor with London Transport. Stuart Campbell remarks on the formidable standard of his English, considering he had virtually no formal education. “During his fifteen years on the buses he read voraciously: Georgette Heyer, The Times, Charles Dickens, The Beano, Thomas Hardy. He consumed everything that was left behind on a bus seat. The 142 to Watford Junction was his university, he once told me.”
In 1985 he was offered the editorship of Charcuterie Monthly. In a recent article he reflected on the magazine’s success: “A piece of writing is like a sausage. It has form, content, texture. And in the same fashion, what turns a quotidian article into an exceptional article is that inexpressible je ne sais quoi, the literary counterpart of a bead of glistening pork fat or a perfect balance of herbs.”
With his trademark cravat, four-day stubble and haughty stare, Raymond Saucisson will be missed around the French markets that have become de rigueur among Sunday bruncheurs (a neologism of his own invention) from Aylesbury to Auckland.
Raymond Saucisson is survived by his wife Solange, an author of vegan cookbooks. “While our dietary tastes differed, we complemented one other perfectly like ham and peas. If he was my bubble, I was his squeak,” she said yesterday.

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You can find books by Raymond Saucisson’s alter ego Stuart Campbell here.

AI voiced novel misses the mark.

I grit my teeth and pressed the button, brushing aside my ethical misgivings about depriving a voice actor of a fee. I’d accepted an invitation from my publishing platform to turn one of my novels into an audiobook using their AI voice program. The truth is that my fiction ‘business’ runs at a loss, and I had no plans to invest in a voice actor; I was motivated more by curiosity, especially since the company wasn’t charging me a cent.

Their audiobook building process is dead simple: They put your ebook version up on screen. You choose your voices from a selection of American and British examples (I chose three – one for each character) and hit the narration button.

My baby began to speak! The narration was startlingly realistic; I was in awe of the technical virtuosity of the AI engine under the hood – and I still am despite my later reservations.

My job as author was to tune the engine as it hummed along – principally by repairing pronunciation errors. The toolkit is pretty simple: You respell the incorrect word to achieve the right pronunciation, e.g. respelling row as roe to block it rhyming with how. But a good handful of errors were resistant to my efforts, despite some ingenious tactics based on my expertise in phonetics.

The audio conversion runs in real time, but it took me several hours to stop and fix errors. While the voices in the audio version sounded sort of authentic, something was slightly off. All the major phonetic elements were well executed: Properly pronounced vowels and consonants, word stresses on the right syllables, sentence stresses mostly correct, longer segments like phrases, clauses and sentences overlaid with intonation contours to signal when they began and ended.

So what was slightly off? I think the problem lay in the way that the AI engine tackles intonation, a speech mechanism that conveys all kinds of meanings. You can test the magic of intonation by reading aloud “I love you” in ten different ways: You might find yourself conveying passion, regret, sadness, anger, desperation, or even sarcasm – each rendition depending on the context. And it’s likely that the intonation pattern you use is motivated by clues that go back over several sentences or even paragraphs. But while the AI gizmo uses intonation patterns that sound human in isolation, they don’t seem to reflect emotional cues beyond the current sentence. I didn’t see evidence that it ‘remembers’ elements of the text that would motivate subtle intonation patterns.

Don’t get me wrong: We’ve come an unbelievably long way since the first Dalek croaked EXTERMINATE, EXTERMINATE. There are vast numbers of applications for AI voicing where authentic human affect is irrelevant. But my novel sounded emotionally insincere and – dare I say it? – robotic, despite the dazzling technical feat behind its production.

Midway through writing this piece, I jumped onto the audiobook catalogue to listen to the free sample of the book. This time it wasn’t so dazzling. The rendition had an odd, jumpy singsong quality that I attribute mostly to intonation problems. And one sentence slipped disastrously from fruity Midsomer Murders British into a variety of American.

The customers evidently didn’t like it. The ebook has racked up about 2000 sales over the years, was an online bestseller for a day in 2016, and has a ranking of 3.6 stars and 73 genuine reviews. I still get a dribble of ebook sales without doing any serious promotion.

How did the audio book go? Zero sales.

EXTERMINATE, EXTERMINATE.

Check out my books here.