Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine's Podcast

Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine's Podcast turns a crime-fiction magazine's archive into audio, one story at a time. The format is consistent and simple. Linda Landrigan, the magazine's editor, gives the title, the back issue it appeared in, and a short note on the author, sometimes naming the series a character belongs to. Then the reading takes over the episode. Often the reader is the author. That matters more than it might seem. In Iain Rowan's 'Scars', the story turns on a phone call: Alice on one end, and on the other Emma, sitting in a car on a dark road with her hands shaking and a man somewhere out of sight. Alice's private fear, that Emma will end up in prison, stays unspoken. The story lives in the gap between what the two women say and what they hold back. Other stories move at a slower pace. Joslyn Chase's 'The Wolf and Lamb' is set in London in September 1888. A barmaid named Janet serves beer and gin, spots a fair-haired stranger she thinks she saw on the night of the double event, and notices which hand he drinks with. She tells herself she is attaching too much meaning to it. The story does not rush her toward an answer. Period pieces sit beside contemporary ones. James G. Tipton's 'The Green Man' sends Dr. Watson to North Wales on a case Holmes is not available for, where a blacksmith explains why a railway tunnel through a sacred valley has stirred up trouble. Floyd Sullivan's 'The Beano' brings the photographer Rick Peters back to a basement vault after a client is found dead, while a homicide detective tells him not to touch anything. Melissa Yi's 'Blue Christmas' puts a doctor beside a man who suddenly cannot breathe, reasoning through what it is not. Mary Angela Honerman's 'Five Bullet Friday' moves between characters in numbered sections, from a man losing his temper on a crowded bus to a woman answering a bank teller's question about staying positive. Across all of it, the craft is steady. Objects and rooms carry the suspicion. Social observation does the work that commentary might do elsewhere, and any humor is dry. Each episode closes on credits instead of analysis, so the story is left to stand on its own.