A new sort of mystery-solving podcast – aptly called Mystery – is hitting the podcast airwaves. Mystery, which features Starlee Kine (sometimes mistakenly called ‘Starlee Kind’ – although she clearly is kind), and which is offered by startup podcast house Gimlet Media, is just six episodes in and has already garnered a huge following.
And it’s no surprise, because Kine solves weird, one-off, and everyday mysteries for everyday people. She is Everyperson’s Nancy Drew.
In fact, anyone can submit a mystery in their life – something they’ve always wanted to be able to figure out – to Mystery. There is only one rule, says the Mystery site: “The only rule is that the answer to your mystery can’t be found by just Googling.”
Perhaps the two most awesome things about Mystery are these:
1. Kine herself, and her way of doing things (see below); and
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2. No cliff hangers here! You actually get closure by the end of each episode!
Take for example Kine’s efforts to help her friend Andrea Seigel, author of the hit book Like the Red Panda, whose second book, To Feel Stuff, wasn’t doing well at all (although it’s experienced a surge since the Mystery episode).
In fact, says Andrea herself, “No one read my second book really. It didn’t do well commercially, it didn’t really get reviewed or coverage.”
Then one day Andrea saw a photo of Britney Spears carrying a copy of To Feel Stuff and was, understandably, stunned.
She wanted to know just how Britney Spears had ended up with a copy of her little-known second book.
Ah, that was the mystery.
So Starlee Kine dutifully got on the case.
And not only tracked down every lead – which often led, after twists and turns, to cold, dead ends, but devised her own ways to dig up the clues and information ultimately leading to resolving the case, which in this particular episode culminated in a non-chance (in fact a very expensive) meeting with Britney Spears herself.
(You can either listen to the full Britney Spears book mystery episode here, or read a PDF of the transcript here.)
Honestly, we can’t say enough good things about this new podcast series, and have only two tiny nits to pick: a) we wish they could put the full transcript right on the page with the podcast episode rather than on a separate page, and, relatedly, b) really? PDFs of the transcripts, from Microsoft Word?
Still, again, those are nits that probably 90% of the people out there won’t care about (although we’d bet that 95% of those who want to read the transcipt will care).
Anyways, you can visit the Mystery site here, and you can find it on iTunes.
And, if you want to submit your own mystery for consideration, you can drop them an email here.
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