steve | Cape Cod Radio Mystery Theater

My wife, Annie, and I enjoy playing a game we call ‘Million-dollar Idea of the Day’. Every day, we try to come up with an idea worth a million bucks. So far, we have come up with quite a few, most of which have never made it out of the formative stage. This one I have decided to push a little further and invite some feedback from knowledgeable people. Although it is unlikely to be worth a million, it has a noble intent. That is to create a secondary means to assist authors, particularly self-publishing authors, to aid them in pursuit of both their art and their livelihood.

Having spent 30+ years in a field closely related to book publishing, the field of Radio Mystery Theater, I have both witnessed and was victim to the technological disruption which took place across the spectrum of sound recordings, first with dubbing machines able to make unlimited copies of music and other sound recordings on audio cassettes, then CD’s. The trend only worsened as the Age of the Internet blossomed, allowing near-instantaneous digital downloads of the author’s copyrighted work, seriously undermining, if not eliminating, the copyright-holder’s ability to realize a financial return for his or her efforts.

The book publishing world has experienced similar upheavals.

Genesis of the idea:

Back during the 1980’s, I had a New York literary agent. I noticed, when it came time to renew our agreement, that rights to my representation were now spread among other New York agents, giving each of them percentages of my pie. Essentially, authors were being treated like race horses and agents were maneuvering to acquire partial stakes in various writers against the possibility of any one of them breaking into the Big Time. Literary agents were thinking like stable-owners do with unproven race horses, knowing: many would enter, most would fail, a few would succeed and every now-and-then, a real champion would emerge. This appeared to be an attempt to hedge their bets.

(Note: I am not suggesting there was anything really wrong with this practice. Possibly it even benefited the author, but I did find it curious.)

In more recent times, I wanted to try my hand at longer-form mysteries, not just single-episode stories. I proceeded to write a few mystery novels with the idea that I would later convert them into serialized radio shows, or books-on-tape.

Our grassroots radio theater project has earned a small but dedicated following. I was aware that collectors of ‘Old Time Radio’ are often on the lookout for early editions of our programs. Copies of some of our earliest published work have been auctioned and sold for upwards of $200 on E-bay. Having naturally accumulated a fair amount of material associated with CCRMT (including, original notes, outlines, scripts and manuscripts, photos, recordings of live performances, artwork, bloopers, etc.) we thought to auction some of this ourselves from our www.ccrmt.com website.

While this idea was percolating, I was at work on a mystery novel, Stalking Bulls, a Parker Robinson Mystery, set in Boston. It concerned the nephew of the Boston Police Commissioner helping solve a second major art heist ace at the Gardner Museum. While I was steeping myself in the ethos of the art world, I stumbled upon a painting by the French artist, Rene Magritte (he of bowler hat and green-apple-head fame). One of his famous paintings was a tongue-in-cheek painting of a smoker’s pipe, with the caption beneath it that read, ‘Ceci, n’est pas une pipe’. This was said to be the artist’s attempt to play upon the distinctions between what an image really is and what it stands for.