On June 23rd, 1948, CBS released a press statement entitled “Mysteries Circle the Globe: Cabin B-13 New Series by John Dickson Carr.” The location for the mysteries was built around the sailings of the passenger ship S.S. Maurevania. Each episode would be introduced by a Dr. Fabian, a world traveler and collector of strange and terrible tales of mystery and terror, as the opening described him. Events would occur at the port cities to which the ship sailed and at each one, Dr. Fabian would tell a mysterious story related to that city.
Music under is “All the Things You Are” performed by Andre Previn, Joe Pass and Ray Brown.
Detective fiction is full of examples of the woman-as-detective theme throughout its history. While the majority of the fictional detectives were men, there are flattering examples in which female sleuths regularly sought out clues and ultimately solved crimes.
This week’s story looks at the fictional character created by Louis Joseph Vance – The Lone Wolf. In 1914, Vance wrote his first Lone Wolf mystery novel. His leading character was known as Michael Lanyard, but this apparently wasn’t his original name. In the first novel, published in 1914, a young boy is brought to stay with a family who give him the name Marcel Troyon.
Night Beat was one of those radio series that came over the networks in the early fifties just as the medium was beginning to toll its death knell for dramatic network drama. Yet the quality of many of the shows from this period were some of the best produced by radio. This journalist as detective serial starring Frank Lovejoy, whose somewhat gravely, reedy voice was perfect as Randy Stone, ran for several years and evoked noirish themes as he traveled the big city of Chicago in search of stories of the lost souls who survived living in the dark. Well written, well acted, the series still retains its attractiveness as reporter Stone found himself embroiled in the lives of these lost souls and often crossed beyond the role of reporter into that of detective as he helped resolve the events which he encountered.
Confession which premiered over the NBC radio network on July 5th, 1953 on Sunday evenings began with the announcer intoning “The Confession you are about to hear is an actual recording…” The whole concept was to create what appeared to be a real criminal reading their own confession. The confessions were true stories of crime and punishment made by the person about whom the week’s episode was focused. Everything was revealed in a reverse order from the normal story beginning with the confession and moving back in time to the crime.
A somewhat lengthy examination of the hard-boiled detective in radio and other media. I look at Carroll John Daly’s Race Williams, Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op/Sam Spade, and Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe in the evolution of what a hard-boiled detective is.
This week a rather obscure radio detective series from the very early fifties called The Big Guy. The series starred Henry Calvin (right) who is best known as Sgt. Garcia from television’s Zorro. While the opening of the episode makes the show sound light, the subject matter is very radio detective and for the most part enjoyable.
“Riabouchinska” is an unusual tale from the pen of Ray Bradbury. Not a name normally associated with the detective genre. However, this tale published in 1953 in The Saint Detective Magazine was first heard in 1947 on the radio program Suspense when the script was created from the original Bradbury story outline. The author had not even actually written the story yet! That would come six years later. Even though Ray Bradbury is one of America’s best fantasy and science fiction writers, this tale with its theme of the ventriloquist haunted by his own dummy’s personality involved murder and a detective who wanted to get to the bottom of the reasons behind the killing. From radio then to print and finally to television, first on Alfred Hitchcock Presents and later re-written by the author himself for his Ray Bradbury Theatre, the theme is one later played out in the Hollywood film Magic starring Anthony Hopkins in an early role.