Review: 'The Old Ones Are Hard to Kill' - CBS Radio Mystery Theater

I recently uncovered a gold-mine of fun old radio dramas over on the Internet Archive, and I've been listening to the CBS Radio Mystery Theater productions (there are well over 1,000 episodes to listen to!). This blog post is my general review and thoughts about the first episode, called 'The Old Ones Are Hard to Kill'.

Episode Plot (No Spoilers)

This episode follows the story of an elderly lady called Mrs. Candy who lives alone, and decides to open her home to a boarder. Her first boarder, Mr. Paulson, has just come from Brazil, and is very, very ill. He dies not long after, but not before revealing a shocking confession on his deathbed that sends the kindly old Mrs. Candy looking into a ten-year-old murder. While looking into the murder, Mrs. Candy speaks to a couple of people, both to investigate the possibility of Mr. Paulson's shocking confession and to get some advice on what to do next. 

When she seems to have hit a wall with the investigation, she gains a new boarder, Stuart Winfield, who seems interested in learning as much about Mr. Paulson as he can, and who quickly ingratiates himself with the kindly Mrs. Candy. Only, her Stuart seems to have an agenda of his own, and he might not be as sweet and kind as he's shown himself to be... 

Overall Thoughts and Review

The episode was split up into 3 acts, and to be perfectly honest, I thought the voice actress that played Mrs. Candy did an amazing job with the character! The music, though - the music was a bit loud! It's understandable, given the time and how these mystery audio dramas were listened to by audiences, but it did end up making me increase/decrease volume quite a few times during transitions. 

While I feel like the decision to make Mrs. Candy an innocent party in the whole story was probably to be expected, I do think that it might have been interesting to entertain the idea that maybe she knows more than she's letting on, or that she's shrewder than she seems! She is certainly intelligent enough to come to a range of conclusions on her own, and I quite enjoyed that, but imagine: Mrs. Candy, secretly getting rid of her boarder Mr. Paulson after learning about all the money he had (and where it was hidden), and then getting rid of her new boarder because of his obvious interest in Mr. Paulson and his money... 

I think it would have given another layer to the story, but then again, these are short 45-minute episodes that are meant to be listened to in one sitting. Also, it's quite nice to just have a sweet old lady as a protagonist, too, without any secretive plotting on her part.

Overall, the story was one that kept me guessing! I did think that the birds had something to do with why Mrs. Candy's two boarders got ill - I suspected that especially with the second boarder, and how he decided to keep Mr. Paulson's birds, and then immediately started getting sick with the same illness as the former boarder. Apart from that, I wasn't entirely sure what to expect from the second boarder or the other characters that Mrs. Candy reached out to! It was certainly a suspenseful (and, above all, fun) experience. 

I'll definitely be listening to more episodes! 

 

~⭐~

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