Month: May 2012

EP0669: Sherlock Holmes: The Complicated Poisoning At Eel Pie Island

Sherlock Holmes and Watson arrive on Eel Pie Island for a glass of rum  and find a poisoning murder.

Original Air Date: June 6, 1948

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EP0668: Let George Do It: The Prairie Dog

 Bob Bailey

George investigates the murder of a fellow detective.

Original Air Date: March 12, 1951

 

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EP0667: Hercule Poirot: The Bride Wore Fright

Harold Huber

Poirot comes into his apartment to find a woman in a wedding dress hiding from a most dangerous groom.

Original Air Date: December 7, 1945

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EP0666:Barrie Craig: Angel of Death

William Gargan
Barrie is hired by a wealthy woman to be companion to her accident prone husband who keeps almost killing himself.

Original Air Date: January 4, 1955

 

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Book Review: The Silent Speaker

I hadn’t planned on getting into Nero Wolfe novels that had been adapted to TV until after finishing the novels that weren’t adapted (except for A Family Affair) and the novella collections. However, the Silent Speaker was included in the library edition of Black Orchids, so I thought to go ahead and enjoy the bonus.

The Silent Speaker starts is set in the aftermath of the World War II. The head of the federal Bureau of Price Regulation was bludgeoned to death just before he was scheduled to address the National Industrial Association, a group that bore him ill-will. Suspicion falls upon the NIA as culprits.

 

With Wolfe’s banking balance suffering, Archie undertakes “Operation Payroll” to ensure that all of Wolfe’s employees (including him) get paid, Archie cleverly horns in on the case after clearing it with Inspector Cramer and the FBI, neither of which are getting anywhere. So Wolfe is hired by the NIA to solve the case, which centers on a case of missing Dictaphone cylinders.

Wolfe is able to interview all the principle players in the case in a group interview, except for the dead man’s secretary: a beautiful and extremely intelligent woman.  After Wolfe interviews her individually, he issues an unusual injunction to Archie. Archie’s not to see the woman unless Wolfe order him to. Wolfe warns, “A woman who is not a fool is dangerous.” Someone else agrees as she becomes the murderer’s second victim when she’s found dead outside the second gathering of the witnesses and suspects.

The case is fantastically written with plenty of red herrings. It all comes down to a search for ten transcription cylinders that disappeared on the night of the murder and finally just one. And Wolfe and Archie are initially duped by a very clever ruse.

 

This book is notable for many reasons. Wolfe’s relationship with his client has rarely been more complicated, and his relations with Inspector Cramer have never been friendlier. When Cramer is relieved of command, Wolfe has to not only solve the case but to solve in it such a way as to restore Cramer and avoid having Cramer’s pig-headed replacement permanently in charge of Homicide. This leads Wolfe to take some of the most extreme measures of his career to avoid police harassment. And before it’s all over, Archie provides a revelation of its own. All in all, The Silent Speaker is one book that far exceeds the TV version.

Rating: Very Satisfactory

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EP0665: Yours Truly Johnny Dollar: The James Forbes Matter

John Lund
Johnny investigates a case where a rich man has fallen off a cliff–or was he pushed.

Original Air Date: July 28, 1953

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EP0664: Sherlock Holmes: A Case of Identity

A young lady asks Sherlock Holmes to investigate the disappearance of her fiancé.

Original Air Date:  May 30, 1948

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EP0663: Let George Do It: The Public Eye

Bob Bailey

The wife of a politician hires George to visit a blackmailer. George finds the blackmailer dead and himself in the middle of a murder investigation.

Original Air Date: March 5, 1951

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EP0662: Hercule Poirot: Murder is a Private Affair

Harold Huber

Hercule Poirot is called in by a bitter and domineering old woman to investigate the murder of a maid but to keep it private.

Original Air Date: November 30, 1945

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EP0661: Barrie Craig: Dead Bull in a China Shop

 William Gargan

Barrie investigates when a woman at Willy’s wagon complains that someone stole her bull fiddle, and finds himself in the midst of the dangerous murder case.

Original Air Date: December 19, 1954

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Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys On TV in the 1990s

The 1970s “Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries” is the best known TV adaptation of the two famous stars of young adult detective novels.  However, in 1990s,  they returned to television in separate programs. For these shows, the characters aged a bit. Joe Hardy and Nancy Drew were college, and Joe Hardy had started first job as a reporter for the Bayport Eagle.

The 1990s series would not make anyone forget the 1970s version. The show was filmed and produced in Canada. Of the three leads, only Paul Popowich (Frank Hardy) would ever have much of a career. The programs were syndicated   for half hour time slots which left the writers with 21 minutes to resolve the story.

Given the limitations , it’s not a surprise that some episodes were weak or not all that interesting. What’s surprising is that more of them weren’t.

Nancy Drew presented me with a few problems. The first one I encountered was that the star (Tracy Ryan) looked nothing like the Nancy Drew I’d read about in books. I’d read the Nancy Drew files of the late 80s and early 90s as well as the older novels. Nancy was a Strawberry blonde with gorgeous blonde hair. Ms. Ryan was a short-haired brunette. However, once I got used to her not looking anything like the Nancy Drew I knew, she became acceptable in the role. She did a good job capturing the inquisitive nature of Nancy Drew, so that I grew to more or less accept her in the role.  Though occasionally this crossed the line into nothing other than nosiness. After the first episode, my wife was watching and asked how the “mystery” she’d investigated (which didn’t involve any crime) was any of her business. I responded, “She’s Nancy Drew.” However, at some point that doesn’t hold water particularly in a case like, “The Death and Life of Buddy Feral.”

One big change with the series was Ned Nickerson, who had become an international aid worker, which was not a move I would predict. All Ned wants during his brief visits is to spend time with Nancy without getting involved in a mystery. Good luck with that.

Its clear that Nancy and Ned are going in separate directions. Ned is going to spend his life helping people in the third world. And Nancy-um, it’s still not clear what Nancy is doing. She wants to study criminology with a professor who appears in two episodes, but what is she going for? We never see her in class and don’t know what her major is. She’s just sitting around waiting for another mystery to pop up.  It seems to me she could do that just as easily in the third world.

Beyond her relationship with poor Ned, the series does work but leaves a lot of ground uncovered. After the first episode, Nancy lands herself a room in a mysterious hotel in the college town of Callisto. Its hotel clerk is a mysterious man named Seymour. Other than in the Billy Feral episode, the hotel setting is never fully developed which was a shame because it had a lot of potential.

Beyond these snags, the situations themselves are quite lively. Nancy finds herself battling a phony marriage racket, video pirates, international jewel thieves, and the Russian Mafia. The mysteries themselves are well-told with the possible exceptions of The Asylum” and “The Stranger on the Road” which felt like a story I’d seen before we three women running frantically around an abandoned insane asylum and haunted house respectively.  Perhaps the most amusing episode, “The Exile” ended with Nancy seated around the table with a slightly fictionalized version of the Dalai Lama eating pizza with Nancy and her friends.

The Hardy Boys met my expectations more. For starters, Popowich and Colin Gray (Joe Hardy) actually looked like what I’d imagine the Hardy Boys to look like and they also hit the character right on with Popowich’s Frank serious and responsible with Gray’s Joe much more carefree and a lady’s man. The writers also kept the series set in Bayport. Though whether they were aware that Bayport was an actual city in New York, I don’t know. The license plates with Bayport on them would indicate no.

The writers created a very believable situation for Frank. He’s a cub reporter trying desperately to get ahead and get the opportunity to write hard news and attract the attention of editor Katie Craigen (Fiora Highet).  The truths he uncovers with the help of Joe  helps him towards this goal.

The Hardy Boys Adventures are fun and intriguing. In “The Jazzman” a good friend of the boys  who runs a newspaper stand disappears before his wedding. Their search for him leads them to uncover the missing man’ s past as a jazz singer who witnessed a gangland shooting thirty years previously.  In “Play Ball” Frank Hardy seeks to uncover why a sports writer rewrote his column to viciously insults a struggling baseball star. In, “The Debt Collectors”, Joe house sits and expects to live large in a vacation doctor’s home. Instead, he’s held hostage by first-time debt collectors who think Joe is the son of the doctor who owes money to their boss.

The series also features two episodes with Tracy Ryan playing Nancy Drew. The two shows crossover in France where Nancy Drew also filmed four episodes.  Any time you can get two of the best known detective shows together for a cross-over or two, it’s a great deal, and the crossovers were both fun and intriguing, particularly the first one which had Frank filling in for his father, a well-healed policemen, and sheepishly trying to deliver a speech his father had written that was critical of the French police.

The only problems I have with the series is that it occasionally veers  into political opinions which is a bit of a turn off as the  Hardy Boys has never been political. In addition, no one quite seems to know what order the episodes are supposed to be in which isn’t such a big deal except that Frank gets a goatee in the middle of the series and so if you go through it in the wrong order the goatee will be reappearing and disappearing every other episode.

Each series had 13 half hour episodes. The best way to enjoy them is to watch the shows on Netflix. (and they are available as of the writing of this piece.) The Hardy Boys set is also available through Amazon. There are some fair priced used sets, but the $33.99 retail price for 13 twenty one minute episodes is absurd.

Still, if you can find a way to watch the series without paying an arm and a leg, both the Nancy Drews and Hardy Boys series are worth watching.

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MP3 Download Review:Gordon Macrae in Concert / Hallowed Be Thy Name

Gordon Macrae was a leading baritone on radio with his performances on programs like Skyline Roof (1946),  The Gulf Spray Show (1947), The Texaco Star Theater (1948), and most importantly, The Railroad Hour (1948-54). It was on the Railroad Hour that Macrae brought to radio countless musicals and operettas including classics like New Moon, Brigadoon, and The Mikado as well as then-more recent Broadway hits like State Fair. Macrae’s star rose fast on radio and it would carry over to films where he would star in screen adaptations of plays he’d adapted for radio such as Oklahoma and Carousel. 

Amazon has released two of Gordon Macrae’s early Albums Gordon Macrae in Concert (1958) (which was ironically recorded entirely in the studio)  and Hallowed be Thy Name.

The In-Concert CD includes a mix of love songs, philisophical songs like I Believe” and “Lost in the Stars”, and classic ballads.  The song begins with the faster-tempo classic Begin the Beguine which McRae infuses with passion and power which would set the tone for the rest of the CD. Macrae’s performance of His version Old Man River is one of the most solid versions of the old standard, as Macrae perfectly captured the mood of the song.

This was something he also achieved with “Danny Boy” as he shows incredible range.  One reviewer who first heard it in the 1960s, wrote, “I was born in Ireland and I heard the song ad nauseum in Australia when my father and his pals had passed the 8th beer milestone and, really, I think I had developed antibodies to the song. Until Gordon’s version.”

The second part of the album Hallowed be Thy Name was made up of sacred songs and Macrae’s performance is striking. The songs are mostly the type of things you would hear in church in the late 1950s. To re-enforce this effect,  the songs are accompanied by an organ and/or a choir rather than an orchestra.

As someone who grew up only hearing the refrain of “Jesus Loves Me,” I was pleasantly surprised to hear actual verses sung to the song. Macrae sang several classic standards hymns such as “Onward Christian Soldiers” and “Rock of Ages”  and also the “Hallelujah” chorus. Railroad Hour fans will recognize Macrae’s version of “The Lord’s Prayer”  and he also sings “The 23rd Psalm.” Macrae’s best song on this particular album had to be his version of, “Holy, Holy, Holy” a song that was perfect for Macrae’s voice.

Overall, Amazon’s combination of these two great albums of secular and sacred songs was a treat that showcased one of the truly great musical talents of the golden age.

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EP0660: Yours Truly Johnny Dollar: The Black Doll Matter

John Lund

Johnny investigates the murder of an insured and a key clue is a missing black doll.

Original Air Date: July 21, 1953

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EP0659: Sherlock Holmes: The Case Of The Accommodating Valise

Sherlock Holmes investigates a series of jewel disappearances at railway stations.

Original Air Date: May 23, 1948

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EP0658: Let George Do It: See Me Once, You’ve Seen Me Twice

Bob Bailey

George steps in when it appears that a woman’s new partner in a twin act is in on a racket that’s led to murder.

Original Air Date: February 26, 1951

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