Cape Cod's radio mystery master
Audio incarnations, situated here, conjured by Steve Oney
Steve Oney’s “Cape Cod Radio Mystery Theater” is a series of nuggets, audio coal Oney has compressed into diamonds since 1982.
They are invitations to gather around like in living rooms of the past, throwbacks to when people, quiet and glassy-eyed, were glued to a box as voices, sound effects, and music poured out, their minds turned inward as cerebral images wafted.
These days shows emanate from tinny computer speakers, but Oney’s goal is the same, and he always evokes Cape Cod people and places. Often Captain Waverly Underhill is engaged, a Sherlock Holmes kindah citizen-detective with Dr. Schofield as his Watson, who solves mysteries and murders in dunes, at lighthouses, on rips, figuring out the curse of a whale’s tooth, the mystery around a junebug, why there’s danger at seven-mile bend.
“There’s mystery, and there’s suspense,” muses Oney, sitting with Annie at a living room table in their old-Cape West Barnstable home, vista revealing marsh to Cape Cod Bay, mics and recording equipment signaling this is where the magic takes place:
“The mystery is, ‘What happened?’ The suspense is, ‘What’s going to happen?’”
He has a collection of almost three dozen shows, counts 225 National Public Radio stations that have aired his work at one time or another including locals like the old WFCC on Seagull Beach, WOMR, WMVY.
He remembers the first one, “The Legacy of Euriah Pillar,” 1982:
Oney became intrigued with doings at the Barnstable County courthouse down Route 6A from his home, in particular Probate Court. He would sit for hours observing people contest wills, argue estates. A fictional scenario wafted up:
An eccentric man dies, but before doing so puts his considerable cash in a box and buries it in a hidden place. Knowing his sons despise each other, he gives each half the necessary instructions to find the treasure, hoping this will force them to get together and reconcile.
What happens instead, as Oney wryly notes, “was the opposite of his hope.”
Go-to elements were present from the get-go; Cape locations, Captain Underhill’s deductions, an unexpected plot twist or two, subtle foreshadowing. He gathered a creative troupe from across the Cape who brought resonance to his scripts; Dave Ellsworth as Underhill, Wally O’Hara as Schofield, Stephen Russell and Patience Martin in multiple roles, Mark Birmingham’s scores, John Todd’s early production.
Steve has sold plenty of cassettes and disks over the years, and charges a fee to download off his website, but it’s hard to profit from homegrown audio that can be copied with a click. Money is “a leaky boat,” as he puts it. This is a labor of love, personal resources defraying expenses.
“The joy of being a writer is foremost,” says Oney. “It’s the closest a guy can get to being pregnant. I can go for a swim and that can set off a whole thing; the result might become ‘Revenge of the Titanic.’”
When he’s head-deep in a tale, Annie says he gets so preoccupied “I just wave at him as he goes by.” This has been going on a long time; the two moved here together in 1978, and Annie has been Steve’s muse and partner all the way.
At 73, it might take a little longer to compress a diamond, “but if I’m lucky,” he says, two a year emerge. “The Case of the Sleeping Policeman” is most recent, and he has one in mind called “Danger, If Flashing,” set a decade into the future when a tsunami overwhelms Cape Cod.
This is the beauty of radio storytelling, a power never lost even if no longer culturally central:
Sound alone can conjure any location, any situation, travel to any time, and still leave plenty of headroom for every listener’s participatory role, which is:
Add more imagination.
(Here’s the Radio Mystery Theater website)
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