Mystery is My Hobby Presented by the Great Detectives of Old Time Radio · Adam Graham Radio Detective Podcasts

Mystery is My Hobby: Death Buys Flowers

·33 min·2 clips

I got a plan: get money for a funeral, even if I have to kill somebody.

A door is chained shut. Behind it: a body going cold, a stubborn hotel room, and a wall so close that escape sounds foolish before anyone even tests it. The elevator boy knows the building too well. Thirty-two years of riding up and down have made him good with facts, tools, and interruptions that arrive at exactly the wrong time. The Inspector wants the door open. Bart keeps pricking the scene with dry little jabs, turning a corpse and a ladder theory into quick police-room comedy. The gap outside is eighteen inches. Four floors up, with no fire escape, no rope, and no ladder, the obvious exit does not hold. Somebody floats the idea of a human fly. It plays as a joke, but it also says plenty about how thin the official explanation has become. Strong nippers cut the chain. Once the door gives, the body is all blunt business: a chair, a struggle, and a knife in the back. The knife is cheap. At ninety-eight cents, it points everywhere and nowhere, which is the sort of clue that makes a detective tired before the case has properly started. Fingerprints probably will not rescue them either. Bart's crack about someday finding a murderer polite enough to leave prints keeps the room brisk instead of gloomy. The elevator boy protests innocence. Nobody asked for the speech, and the Inspector sends him back to his elevator before he takes over the whole investigation. Then the window gets interesting. Open glass without an escape route should be useless, until Bart spots another window only a couple of feet away. That one is locked. Inside, a man sleeps in bed, so the neighboring room feels less like an answer and more like another problem. The corpse stays inconvenient. Every neat theory runs into something hard: distance, height, a lock, or a talkative witness who knows too much.

As heard by us

A brisk hotel-room murder with a locked-room puzzle and sharp back-and-forth.

A hotel murder sets the board fast, with the body already cold and the clues refusing to yield an easy path. The sealed-room setup carries the tension, helped by the open window that leads nowhere useful and an elevator boy who seems a touch too familiar with the building,…

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Why you'd press play

You want a locked-room murder that keeps talking back.

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