Monthly Archives: October 2010

Radio Detective Story Hour Episode 158 – Crime on the Waterfront

Often pilot episodes never make it to broadcast. Crime on the Waterfront starring Myron Wallace is one of those detective series that never saw the light of airtime. Coming before potential sponsors in 1949 just when television was getting wind in its sail, and given the plethora of radio detectives already on, Crime on the Waterfront never had a chance.… (more…)

Radio Detective Story Hour Episode 157 – Appointment With Fear

This week, a Suspense clone suggested by and scripted by John Dickson Carr, who was also the creator of the Man In Black on Suspense. Appointment With Fear was JD Carr’s bringing of Suspense to the British public in the mid-1940s. Their Man in Black looked and sounded the part – Valentine Dyall, a man with a sonorous voice. This… (more…)

Radio Detective Story Hour Episode 156 – Orient Express

This week a completely different radio play for the Radio Detective Story Hour. Not so much mystery as spy thriller. And not so much old time radio as new radio drama. The story involves a mystery on a train during Cold War Europe.  The train is another route of the Orient Express and involves murder, documents and a bit of… (more…)

Radio Detective Story Hour Episode 155 – Trent’s Last Case

This week you’ll hear from a detective who is not well known, yet, the novel on which it is based is considered very influential to the modern detective story. E.C. Bentley originally wrote his novel, Trent’s Last Case, on a challenge from his life-long friend, G.K. Chesterton. Bentley wrote this after becoming exasperated with the “perfection” Conan Doyle built into… (more…)

Radio Detective Story Hour Episode 154 – Love’s Lovely Counterfeit

James M. Cain is considered by many as one of the creators of the roman noir or “dark fiction” along with Cornell Woolrich, Jim Thompson, Dorothy Hughes and others. Some describe his stories as “hardboiled” though I don’t feel they are in the strict sense other than if one considers noir fiction as a sub-genre of the “hardboiled” school. The… (more…)