Lawrence C. Connolly

Tag: mysteries

  • This Week on Mystery Theatre:
    Knock-Code Charts & Ancient Alphabets

    Can the arrangement of carved squares on the front of a locked wardrobe provide a clue for decoding the tapping sounds coming from within? And what about the red-and-white dragon heads in the center of each square? Could they possibly indicate the language of the coded message? Those are just some of the questions you…

  • This Week on Mystery Theatre:
    Arsenic, Old Lace, and Obnoxious Padre

    For a gallon of elderberry wine, I take one teaspoonful of arsenic, then add a half teaspoonful of strychnine, and then just a pinch of cyanide. That’s Aunt Martha’s recipe for wine with a kick (as in kick the bucket) from Joseph Kesselring’s dark-comedy classic Arsenic and Old Lace, and it’s too bad Jonathan Brewster…

  • The Sound’s the Thing:
    Audio Clues on Mystery Theatre

    In Francis Ford Coppola’s film The Conversation (1974) surveillance expert Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) becomes obsessed with a cryptic recording that he believes suggests a young couple is in danger. Similarly, in Brian De Palma’s Blow Out (1981), sound engineer Jack Terri (John Travolta) investigates a mystery by listening to a recording made at the…

  • Nightmares and Mysteries:
    Prime Stage Mystery Theatre – Season Two

    Heard about the actor’s nightmare? It’s a variation of the dream in which you find yourself completely out of place and unprepared for a given situation. You know, like being in the produce section of a grocery store, standing behind a stack of vegetables and hoping no one notices your naked. Or perhaps it’s the…

  • What’s Inside the Locked Room?
    A Knavish Piece of Mystery – Act 3

    You might think that the best way to solve a locked-door mystery would be to open the room and see what’s inside. But what happens when what’s inside provides more questions than answers? We’ll explore those possibilities today as Prime Stage Mystery Theatre’s podcast A Knavish Piece of Mystery enters its third week with a…

  • Countdown to Mystery: Zero Effect

    Some of the greatest detectives don’t work alone. Think of Holmes and Watson, Cagney and Lacey, Batman and Robin. You get the idea. Among the most interesting pairings are Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, from the series that the members of Bouchercon (the World Mystery Convention) nominated as the “Best Mystery Series of…