Brook and Sarah are joined by three fantastic mystery authors: Sara Rosett, Trixie Silvertale, and Tom Mead to play some mystery fun and games. Based on Author, Author, a mystery game show created by Ellery Queen in 1939, our guests come up with solutions to a mystery scene… a Clued in Conundrum.
Discussed and mentioned
Author, Author featuring Ellery Queen
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Transcript
This transcript is generated by a computer and there may be some mis-spellings and strange punctuation. We try to catch these before posting, but some things slip through.
| Sarah | Welcome to Clued in Mystery. I’m Sarah. |
| Brook | And I’m Brook, and we both love mystery. |
| Sarah | Hi, Brook. |
| Brook | Hi Sarah. Today we are doing something completely different, and this came about from some research that we did on an earlier episode, and it’s something that you came across, Sarah. Would you like to tell everyone about it? |
| Sarah | Sure. So, as I was researching something for our Ellery Queen episode, I came across a it was a radio broadcast called “Author Author”, and it was a game show style radio program hosted by Ellery Queen and Ogden Nash. |
| Sarah | It was originally only a replacement for the Screen Guild Theater, but became a tremendous hit with audiences. And what happened in each episode was on air, a mystery scene was presented and guest authors were challenged to come up with a clever explanation for the crime. |
| Brook | That’s right. And so we have invited three past guests who have all been on our show for their own ah interview episodes and asked them if they would be game to try this out. And that’s exactly what we’re going to do today. So let me introduce our authors. |
| Brook | First up, we have Sara Rosett. Sara writes mystery novels that are the bee’s knees with delightful settings and intriguing puzzles. A fan of Golden Age mysteries and Jane Austen adaptations, she also hosts a podcast for readers, Mystery Books Podcast. |
| Brook | Next in line is Trixie Silvertale. Best-selling author Trixie Silvertale grew up reading an endless supply of Lillian Jackson Braun, Hardy Boys, and Nancy Drew novels. She loves the amateur sleuths in cozy mysteries and obsesses about all things paranormal. These two passions unite in her mini paranormal cozy series, and she’s thrilled to write them and share them with you. |
| Brook | And finally, we have Tom Mead. Tom Mead is a UK crime fiction author specializing in locked room mysteries. He’s a member of the Crime Writers Association and the International Thriller Writers Organization. His series features magician detective Joseph Spector. So we want to give a huge welcome and thank you to Tom, Trixie, and Sara for joining us today. |
| Trixie Silvertale | Thank you. |
| Tom Mead | Thank you. |
| Sara Rosett | Glad to be here. |
| Sarah | I will introduce our game and we’ve adapted this from, ah the original opening of Author, Author, but we’ve called it Clued in Conundrums. |
| Sarah | Clued in conundrums is a game of story invention in which you will be able to hear how writers invent their story plot. The game starts with a little drama. |
| Brook | Florist Betty Bloom arrives at her flower shop to find the owner of Barry’s Buds, a new rival to Betty’s shop, dead inside her flower fridge. Not only had Barry just opened the rival florist shop, he’d recently purchased the entire block. Rumor had it he was planning to redevelop. Tensions in the neighborhood have been running high. |
| Sarah | And this is where our authors come in. Their part of the game is to create a logical beginning and ending. They’ve got to tell us what unusual tale of romance, sentiment, or intrigue lies behind this story. Their stories are unscripted, so don’t mind if they stumble a bit. That’s the idea of the Clued in Conundrums. |
| Sarah | So who wants to go first? |
| Trixie Silvertale | I will. |
| Sarah | Wonderful. |
| Brook | Take it away, Trixie. |
| Trixie Silvertale | So I went with creating a ah town and a backstory. The town of Fletching Gardens holds an annual floral arrangement competition. |
| Trixie Silvertale | And this competition is judged by the mayor, the president of the Chamber of Commerce, and local eccentric millionaire who owns a massive estate with beautiful gardens. |
| Trixie Silvertale | The winner of the floral arrangement competition is presented with a plaque and a key to the city, and they are also allowed to give a brief speech. So Betty Bloom has won the competition for the three years previous, and so her plan was to use her time in the spotlight when she wins again, of course, because she assumes she’s going to win again, ah to seek support for preserving the historic downtown neighborhood, you know, fighting against these developers who are threatening to take away what makes their town quaint and unique. |
| Trixie Silvertale | But knowing that Betty was the last holdout on the block and that she had heavily opposed his plans, Barry Buds snuck into her shop after hours to steal her arrangement for the competition, ruining her chances of winning. But unbeknownst to him, his partner, Chadwick Hedge was one step ahead of Barry. Chadwick had coated Betty’s beautiful vintage metal picnic basket, which was what was holding her competition ah arrangement. |
| Trixie Silvertale | He had coated it with a deadly layer of VX nerve toxin. So when Barry, picked up the display in the in the cooler, he was instantly poisoned, and he died of asphyxiation in Betty’s flower cooler. |
| Brook | Bravo, Trixie. |
| Sarah | That is so fun. I love I love where you took that. |
| Trixie Silvertale | Thanks. Yeah, that was great. That was a fun little game. I love it. |
| Brook | All right, so who’s up next? |
| Sara Rosett | I’ll go. |
| Sarah | Take it away, Sara. |
| Sara Rosett | Okay, so Betty is horrified when she finds him in her fridge. And she hadn’t gotten along with Barry, but she respected him as a horticulturist. |
| Sara Rosett | And he grew many plants in his greenhouse that he had behind his shop, and he sold those. And he was also a really savvy businessman. So, she respected him for that. So, she’s horrified. |
| Sara Rosett | But the police zero in on her, of course, because it was her shop. And she is the main suspect because there was a very public heated discussion slash argument that she had had when she learned that he had been to the downtown ah courthouse and had looked at the plat maps of Green Valley um because he had brought a builder with him and so she was, things were not going well. |
| Sara Rosett | And so they know about that and they’re not pleased she’s not pleased with that um but Betty tells the police that Barry had arguments with a lot of people he had a really hot temper and he had had an argument with the owner of the coffee shop, they nearly came to blows over parking spaces, that um he had accused the supplier, Ash, of giving the best blooms to Betty and sending him lesser grade flowers. |
| Sara Rosett | His shop assistant, Bella, had stopped by and asked Betty if she had any openings. ah Things weren’t going well with her and Barry. Betty didn’t have any openings, but she had Bella flat on job application. |
| Sara Rosett | And lastly, Barry was in the middle of a messy divorce. ah Betty knew his ex-wife, soon to be ex-wife, Daisy, from yoga class. um She had been very vocal about how she was not pleased with how the settlement was going. |
| Sara Rosett | So everyone in yoga class knew about that. But the police aren’t interested in these people, and so Betty discreetly investigates her suspects, but can’t find anything that links anyone to the murder. |
| Sara Rosett | But one day when she’s browsing this Reddit sub-thread about plants, which she often posts, she sees a post about this plant called the Queen of the Night. |
| Sara Rosett | And it’s a flowering plant that only blooms nocturnally, and then it wilts before dawn. And the person who posted it says, this flower has a mutation, this special one has a mutation, and it continues to bloom. So it blooms longer, something unusual it’s never been known before. |
| Sara Rosett | And the handle on the account is Nightshade. And that just rings a bell for her. She can’t figure out where she’s heard that or why it rings a bell until she remembers where she saw it. And she goes and she looks at the employment applications that came in. |
| Sara Rosett | And she looks up Bella’s and it says, Bella isn’t short for Isabel, as she thought, but for Belladonna, which is another name for Deadly Nightshade. |
| Sara Rosett | So she sends a message to this Deadly Nightshade account and they reply and say, “you know, oh, you want more information about this flower? It’s actually for sale for $500,000.” |
| Sara Rosett | So Betty does some more digging and she finds a link in the Reddit profile to a Facebook account. She goes and checks that out. There’s no photo, but it does say that the person who owns that account is located in Green Valley. |
| Sara Rosett | And so she’s like, hmm, “this is a little too much coincidence here.” So she takes her discovery to the police and convinces them to set up a little trap, as Miss Marple would say. |
| Sara Rosett | And when ah she goes to buy the plant, Bella arrives. But instead of leaving with money, she leaves in handcuffs. So, um she had found out she had seen this plant while she was working with Barry and she She tried to steal it. |
| Sara Rosett | Things didn’t go well. They had a scuffle. She knocked Barry over and he had his head on the edge of a table and died. And she decided if she could put him in Betty’s cooler, that would throw the suspicion off of her. |
| Sara Rosett | And um that’s kind of the back story I came up with. |
| Sarah | Oh, that’s so great. |
| Brook | That’s wonderful. |
| Brook | I knew that this was going to be fun to see like how different the ideas were when you just have the same nugget to begin with. And and and it’s proving to be true. |
| Brook | And we still have one more, which I’m sure will be even more different, which is Tom. So Tom, what did you come up with? |
| Tom Mead | Okay, right. So, I came at this from a slightly different angle. I decided to do this as an inverted Columbo-style mystery. So, my culprit is known from the beginning, and it is, of course, Betty herself. |
| Tom Mead | She had the strongest motive to kill this property developer slash horticulturist who is buying up property and trying to run her out of business but because her motive is so obvious she needs a really foolproof way to kill this guy and she decides to come up with a double double bluff if you like. So she is going to frame herself for a murder and what she does is this. |
| Tom Mead | She starts a rumor around the town that she has come into possession of an incredibly rare orchid known as the Shenzhen Nongke orchid. |
| Tom Mead | Now this, if you’re a horticulturist, you will know that that is the rarest and most expensive orchid in the world. And if you’ve read Susan Orlean’s book, The Orchid Thief, or things like that, you’ll know that the ah the underground orchid trade can get pretty cutthroat. |
| Tom Mead | And of course, our murder victim is up to his neck in that very trade. So she puts about this rumor that she has come into possession of this very rare orchid, which changes hands for upwards of $200,000 for single plant. |
| Tom Mead | And she puts it about that she has got a precious example of this orchid in the flower fridge in the back of her shop. So she is setting herself up for this unscrupulous horticulturist to steal this orchid from her property. |
| Tom Mead | But what she has done is she has rigged a trap so that the flower fridge, which is… a walk-in flour fridge, because obviously it’s large enough to conceal a body. |
| Tom Mead | But she has ah contrived a clockwork mechanical device, which will once… the victim has entered the fridge. The door will seal shut behind him and he will eventually overnight suffocate in this flower fridge. |
| Tom Mead | The flower, the orchid in question, is not a priceless Shenzhen Nongke orchid. |
| Tom Mead | She has obtained a perfectly regular common garden orchid, and she has, with ordinary house paint, she has painted its petals so that it resembles this incredibly rare orchid and set up for this guy to break in and to become trapped in the flower fridge. |
| Tom Mead | And when she arrives in the morning and finds him dead, she has removed the trappings from the outside of the flower fridge. And she has apparently been the victim of an ill-fated burglary gone wrong. |
| Brook | Bravo. That was great. Everyone, you had such wonderful solutions to this conundrum. |
| Sarah | And, and now I want to read these books. |
| Tom Mead | That was great fun. I love that. |
| Sara Rosett | It was fun. |
| Trixie Silvertale | It was. Yeah, definitely. |
| Brook | And you said that, Sarah, like now you want to read the books. And I feel like um there’s we know this would likely happen, but I get ah a feel for each of these authors and the type of work that they do in their scenario. So, it really is a peek inside the way these authors plot their books, I imagine. |
| Brook | So thank you for playing, everyone. |
| Sarah | So I think this is a good time for each of you to share a little bit about what you’re currently working on or your latest release so that, as Brook says, our listeners can get to know you a little bit. |
| Sarah | So, let’s start with Trixie because you were you were first up for our tale. |
| Trixie Silvertale | Oh, sure. Let’s see. On the September 30th, I have the third book in my Christmas Catastrophe Mystery series coming out, The Lenzer Cookie Murder. |
| Trixie Silvertale | So, that is ah a series that follows Santa’s daughter on her ah exit from the North Pole. She doesn’t want to deliver toys. doesn’t want to take over the family business. |
| Trixie Silvertale | Her dream is to live in the human world and open a bakery. And so that’s what happens in book one. And then, of course, there’s a murder and she’s a suspect and she gets drawn into it. |
| Trixie Silvertale | And through the help of a human mentor and her Arctic fox sidekick, who’s really ah a wise elder that her father sent to kind of watch over her and and spy on her, really, ah they have to solve the mystery and then they kind of build a friendship. |
| Trixie Silvertale | And as the series goes on, additional murders continue to happen and they have to get involved and this current one ah someone is trying to kill Santa and so she actually has to return to the north pole and try to help her mother figure out what’s going on and of course take over Santa’s duties the ones she never wanted to have to do so i get to go back to the north pole and elves. |
| Sarah | That sounds really fun. |
| Trixie Silvertale | Thanks |
| Sarah | Sara, what are you working on or what do you have coming up? |
| Sara Rosett | Well, I have, um, the second book in a new series I’m working on coming out in October. And the the book is called Murder on the SS Cleopatra. And the series is about a woman, a lady traveler in the 1920s who goes to Egypt. The first book takes place in Cairo. This book is a cruise on the Nile and, um, inspired of course, by Death on the Nile. |
| Sara Rosett | Hopefully I’ve given it my own twist and have some interesting characters. She goes on this cruise and course someone dies, and she has to solve the case. She has a traveling companion, an older woman named Hilde, who is lots of fun and kind of helps her sleuth along with some other people on the ah journey. And so it’s a look at 1920s Egypt and the um British kind of like enclave as they travel through Egypt. |
| Brook | Wonderful. |
| Brook | And Tom? |
| Tom Mead | Ah Well, I have very recently, and in ah July in fact, ah had the the latest book in my Joseph Spector mystery series published in the US by Mysterious Press. That book is called The House at Devil’s Neck. and And it’s a it’s a locked room mystery in the the kind of golden age vintage style ah that I that I really enjoy. And this time around, Spector travels out to this house of the title to take part in a seance. |
| Tom Mead | So it’s kind of a dark, spooky book that’s set just on the cusp of the outbreak of the Second World War um and this supposedly haunted house ah where a yeah ah the ghost of a soldier supposedly roams the corridors. And this group of motley characters goes there to try and conjure this spirit. |
| Tom Mead | And then, as you can imagine, mayhem ensues and a string of bizarre, seemingly impossible murders, which Spector, as a retired magician, is is called on to to investigate using his knowledge of… um ah theatrical gimmickry and stagecraft and all that kind of stuff. So, it’s a book, I feel like I really kind of pulled out all the stops with this one because it has a very high body count and some of the some of the most fun that I’ve had with writing a mystery. So, yeah, it’s ah it’s available now ah in the US from Mysterious Press. And here in the UK, it’s published by yeah Head of Zeus, which is an imprint of Bloomsbury. |
| Sarah | Oh, all of your projects sound so good. I’m looking forward to reading each of them. |
| Brook | Well, this was so much fun. um I would love to have each of you back to play another round of Clued In Conundrums if you would be game once again. |
| Tom Mead | Absolutely. |
| Sara Rosett | Be fantastic. |
| Trixie Silvertale | Absolutely, yeah |
| Sarah | Great. Well, let’s do that, Brook. |
| Brook | Well, thank you for listening today, everyone, to Clued-In Mystery and these Clued-In Conundrums. I’m Brook. |
| Sarah | And I’m Sarah and we both love mystery. |
