Mystery to Me

Time to glide straight over entertainment and fun, and land far away, in the desolate fields of disappointment.

"The Mystery of the Diamond Triangle" is the fourth episode of the first season of the The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries. In this 1977 installment, Pamela Sue Martin plays famed sleuth Nancy Drew.

Nancy is out to obtain the "Diamond Triangle," a coveted award bestowed on glider pilots. While soaring above her hometown of River Heights one day, she spots a car wreck on a road that's been closed for quite some time. Sound interesting? Well, this episode glides off track pretty quickly.

Listen to Áine and Kevin fly off over talk of ruling River Heights, the lives of young lawyers, insurance wrangles, Canadian tuxedoes, and that Gordon Jump episode of Diff’rent Strokes.

Also, please excuse an error that would've gotten your hosts laughed out of the halls of the Stratemeyer Syndicate. Chief McGinnis is the police chief of the fictional town of River Heights. Chief Collig serves Bayport, the Hardy Boys’ residence. 

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Anchors aweigh! We're setting sail on a mystery ship! And a celebrity cruise at that, featuring famed detective Sherlock Holmes!

Sound fun? Well, Pursuit to Algiers, a 1945 Holmes picture starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, never arrives at its intended destination. This Roy William Neill-directed flick is a sinking ship, if we ever saw one.

Basically, Holmes and Watson are tasked with safely transporting a European princeling back to his country of origin in order to ... save democracy? Yeah, we don't get it either. Everybody ends up on a cruise ship, and it gets stupider from there. 

Listen to Áine and Kevin pursue diverse topics like the difference between Roman Catholic and Baptist services, "poppers," and the promise of a Dukes of Hazzard-Sherlock Holmes crossover. We'll share why Sherlock's ship-side shortcomings have us feeling salty. 

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Let's take off with a double-feature on one of Hollywood's first plucky gal reporters!

The first two films in the Torchy Blane series, Smart Blonde and Fly-Away Baby, both debuted in 1937. They focus on Torchy Blane, a journo who's sharp, beautiful, and romantically connected to one of the top detectives in the city. 

Glenda Farrell and Barton MacLane starred in these two Frank McDonald-directed pictures as Torchy and her stern swain Detective Steve McBride. Meanwhile, Tom Kennedy shines as the bizarrely poetic Officer Gahagan.

In the first flick, our fair-haired heroine gets more than she bargained for out of an interview when she witnesses the murder of a prominent businessman. In the second one, she's got to hold her own against a gaggle of reporters competing to fly around the world. 

Listen to Kevin and resident blonde reporter Áine get the scoop on these at-times entertaining, at-times sluggish films.

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Burn baby, burn! Franklin W. Dixon's inferno!

"Arson and Old Lace" is the 21st episode of the second season of "The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries." This one stars Shaun Cassidy and Parker Stevenson as the titular boys from Bayport on Barmet Bay. Basically, fellow-sleuth Nancy Drew has been missing for months, and the Hardy Boys sign on to take one more look at her case, before it goes cold. Things heat up quite a bit from there.

Airing on April 1, 1978, this episode also marks the final appearance of Janet Julian's Nancy Drew. Stevenson and Cassidy would go on to burn through a ridiculous final season where the Hardy Boys are spies.

Listen to Áine and Kevin fan the flames of rage against this often-silly, often-offensive episode of a 1970s kid show. We'll breathe fire and rage about the Towering Inferno, the grizzled chief who tries to hijack the show, and why hack writers should probably stay away from heavy topics like long-term kidnappings.

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Forget spandex-clad superheroes. The most ambitious crossover event in fictional history already happened, airing in two parts on November 19 and November 23 in 1986.

That's right — we're talking about the two crossover episodes of Magnum, P.I. and Murder, She Wrote.

Thomas Magnum, as played by Tom Selleck, is an affable private investigator living a luxurious lifestyle in Hawaii. Angela Lansbury's amateur sleuth Jessica Fletcher is a mystery writer with a knack for getting involved in non-fiction crimes. Both of these gumshoes called CBS home, and the rest is mystery history.

Listen to Áine and Kevin join forces to talk about 1980s cheese, bathrobe-clad chats, and the challenges of combining two different styles of televised detecting. 

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The adventure is afoot!

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is a 1939 film directed by Alfred L. Werker. The picture is based somewhat loosely on a 1899 play by William Gillette, and is the second of two Holmes films unveiled by Twentieth Century Fox in the 1930s. 

Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce star as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's iconic duo, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson. This wouldn't be their last adventure, either! In total, they would helm 14 films in this series. 

In this story, Holmes and Watson must team up to unravel the sinister Professor Moriarity's latest plot, which involves everything from fancy jewels to Victorian horse-cart chases to sketches of sea birds! 

Embark on an adventure with Áine and Kevin as they deduce the film's charms and stumbles, and chat about heists, imperialism, and male friendships based entirely on "negging."

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One judge may be quite like another ... but this courtroom drama stands apart!

Anatomy of a Murder is a 1959 courtroom drama from director Otto Preminger, starring Jimmy Stewart, Lee Remick, Eve Arden, Ben Gazzara, and Army-McCarthy hearings legal icon Joseph Welch, with a jazzy score from Duke Ellington. It's based on a real-life case that defense attorney-turned-Michigan Supreme Court Justice John D. Voelker wrote under the pen name Robert Traver.

Stewart plays a humble country lawyer trying to do the best he can to get his client acquitted in a murder case. And what a murder case it is! There's no question about what happened — a military man gunned down a local bar-owner. What needs further dissecting is the motive. As it turns out, the bar-owner was accused of raping the military man's wife.

Like so many overwhelmed jurors, Áine and Kevin deliberate over the film's pure Michigan setting, delightful cameos, and un-clichéd, unflinching look at the justice system, as well as some light topics like misogyny, rape, and alcoholism.

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Maybe he's Bourne with it, maybe it's his years of CIA training.

The Bourne Identity is a 2002 action thriller directed by Doug Liman, starring Matt Damon, Franka Potente, Chris Cooper, and Brian Cox.

Damon plays a bullet-riddled amnesiac found floating in the Mediterranean Sea. We follow Damon's character as he pieces together the clues to determine who exactly he is. And, as it turns out, he wasn't born yesterday. This character has some serious skills, and he's going to need to put those to use if he's to survive with dangerous assassins hot on his trail.

The Bourne Identity holds up as a surprisingly fresh and thoughtful action flick. So listen to Áine and Kevin chat about the film, and punch their way through light topics like amnesia, salient spy agency acronyms, and the nature of goodness. 

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First isn't necessarily the worst,  but it's certainly not the best.

Coming out just a year after Dashiell Hammett published his unforgettable novel, The Maltese Falcon is a 1931 pre-Code crime film directed by Roy Del Ruth.

Ricardo Cortez plays private investigator Sam Spade, and Bebe Daniels is the femme fatale and podcast heiress Ruth Wonderly. Spade and the dame are just two rough characters mixed up in the scramble for the priceless avian statue that the film is named for. 

Listen to birds-of-a-feather Áine and Kevin squawk about apes, un-intimidating villains, and drunken sailors. All in all, this movie gets a lot right, but fails to soar like the classic Bogart film.

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"This old man, he played three, Bert Freed first played Columbo on TV."

This week on Mystery to Me, we'll be discussing the genesis of beloved fictional detective Lt. Columbo. The fictional sleuth — with his rumpled sensibilities and absent-minded charm — was most notably portrayed by Peter Falk. But Falk wasn't the first to have a go at Columbo. That honor would belong to actor Bert Freed, who portrayed the character on the Chevy Mystery Show.

 Columbo writers Richard Levinson and William Link first unleashed the character on the episode "Enough Rope" on July 31, 1960. The story is a classic "howcatchem," following a cunning murderer who seeks to outwit Freed's blue collar detective. 

Áine and Kevin discuss how this early version of a beloved franchise hadn't quite yet earned its rumpled raincoat. Special thanks to the UCLA Film & Television Archive for putting on the special digital screening of "Enough Rope." 

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