Lawrence C. Connolly

Tag: Prime Stage Mystery Theatre

  • A Week of Readings:
    HWA, Frankenstein, & Mystery Theatre

    The last time I posted about the Pittsburgh Chapter of the Horror Writers Association was back in the halcyon days of 2019 (read that post here) when the effects of pandemics were relegated to films like Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011) or books like John Scalzi’s Lock In (2014) and Stephen King’s The Stand (1978). Back…

  • T. P. Cooke’s Demon:
    The First Pop-Culture “Frankenstein”

    An explosion. Fire and smoke. Laboratory doors shatter. The Demon appears in a blast of red flame! That’s how the Frankenstein monster made its entrance in the first dramatic adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel. Loosely adapted by Richard Brinsley Peake and starring actor T. P. Cooke as the monster (referred to as “The Demon” in…

  • Writing Mysteries:
    Round-Robin Storytelling

    In 1995, crime writers Edna Buchanan, Vicki Hendricks, Elmore Leonard, Paul Levine, and Les Standiford and eight of their writing colleagues penned the round-robin mystery novel Naked Came the Manatee. Conceives as a parody of the thriller genre and a response to an earlier multi-author novel titled Naked Came the Stranger (which has 24 writers!),…

  • This Week on Mystery Theatre:
    Strange Paintings and Stranger Names

    Is the woman in the portrait turning toward or away from the viewer? Is she young or is she old? And what if anything might she reveal about the name Ms. Ambertin? It’s enough to confound even a master sleuth, and yet–according to August LaFleur–everything you need to answer the questions and more may be…

  • This Week on Mystery Theatre:
    The Case of the Rotating Portrait

    You study the girl in the portrait, her face askance, as if she is in the process of turning away from the viewer. Her skin is smooth, neck slender and adorned with a ribbon, head high and capped with a bonnet. You fix your gaze, study her until, in a blink, the portrait changes. The…

  • 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…