Harry Heuser

18th Mar 202619th Mar 2026

“Wanted: A Radio Shakespeare”; or, Something Is Rotten in the State of Make-Believe

John Wallace’s column in the March 1926 issue of *Radio Broadcasting*, which offers an intriguing glimpse at a production of “Danger,” even though the play is not discussed

When it comes to second-hand knowledge, I can get a tad—permit the portmanteau—malcontentious. You know, not just dissatisfied but downright disputatious. It frustrates me not to be able to get straight to the source and having to rely instead on a privileged intermediary.

Owing to that frustration, I tend to quote extensively from the primary sources that I discuss so as to enable my readers, whoever they may be, to enter into a conversation with me on whatever matter I happen to advance for discussion. I am not content to alert others, by way of a footnote, to materials to which they may not have immediate access or which they cannot be bothered to dig up when prompted. Inquisitive as I am, I do not expect anyone to take my word for an elusive “it.”

Mind you, the “it” in question is not, say, the US-Israel war on Iran currently underway—a fact-based rationale for which has yet to be cogently articulated—but the special brand of make-believe known, by some, as Hörspiel—plays for the ear that came into being with the advent of broadcasting in the early 1920s. It is that sort of ephemera to which I have devoted this journal, a blog whose title, broadcastellan, is another portmanteau I invented to cast myself as a keeper of the castles in the air that rose and crumbled in the early to mid-twentieth century, some exceptions notwithstanding.

Unlike silent films, almost none of the broadcasts of those pioneer days of wireless storytelling have survived, either as recordings or as scripts. Hardly any have appeared in print, despite the fact that virtually all of them were scripted. As a result, I am obliged to be told about them in contemporary reviews, which likewise are in short supply.

Fact is, we do not today enjoy the same kind of access to early US radio plays than we do to motion pictures of the 1920s. Too little has been preserved, mainly because, despite the existence of sound recording equipment, sound-only broadcasting was not thought of as anything but ephemeral, accountability, commercially understood, only just coming into being as a rationale for keeping records.

This gap—a lacuna not quite matata—leaves me, if not speechless, so at least without confidence adequately to respond to “Wanted: A Radio Shakespeare,” one such early second-hand account of radio listening. The article was published in the March 1926 issue of Radio Broadcasting as part of a tauntingly titled column “The Listener’s Point of View,” as represented by John Wallace, a critic whose remarks on the first radio play published in the United States I previously mentioned here.

Having referenced the article in Immaterial Culture, I did not return to it until now—”now” being the one-hundredth anniversary of Wallace’s remarks on, and recommendations for, the advancement of the radio play in the United States.

“Wanted: A Radio Shakespeare” is worthwhile picking up anew, considering that the attitudes toward the sound-only medium voiced by Wallace would remain valid for at least another decade, by which time, in the summer of 1936, the Columbia Workshop signaled that experimentation was, at last, however tentatively, being given a modicum of attention in US broadcasting.

26th Feb 202626th Feb 2026

“… despite the distortion of the curving horn”: The Wireless, the “Radario,” and the First “Step on the Stairs” (1926)

“What is the basic force that makes the human mind function?” The question was posed not at a symposium attended by noted philosophers and physicians, but to the readers of the 27 February 1926 issue of Radio Digest, who were subsequently asked:

What is telepathy? Is it not fundamentally Radio activity, a form of Radio transmission[?] Can the energy that starts a mass of brain cells into motion, that formulates thought and speech[,] be propelled as the voice is propelled from the vibration of the fragile filament in a vacuum tube? Does this energy ever die? Can it be attuned, converted into controlled ether wave movement, refined to audible sensitiveness?

Whoa! One question at a time, if you please—and, thinking as a public speaker—if you expect a question to sink in and elicit a response. Other than “Whoa!” that is. A bit of context would be helpful.

The above is not a passage from Upton Sinclair’s Mental Radio, a treatise written in the late 1920s, published in 1931, and endorsed by Albert Einstein. As the notion that telepathy was “fundamentally” a form of wireless transmission suggests—apart from the fact that it was published in Radio Digest—the context in which the question was posed was wireless transmission—and radio “drama” in particular.

Offering listeners “an opportunity to win fame, honor and bags of gold” for the solution of a mystery about to commence, the editors of Radio Digest got more specific, explaining:

These are questions to be considered in the strange case of Peleg Turner in the first two chapters of A Step on the Stairs, appearing in this issue of Radio Digest. Was it the voice of the dead Peleg that manifested itself, as he had predicted, through the Radio horn for the benefit of his heirs?

The WRC cast of *A Step on the Stairs* featuring Ted Husing (*Radio Digest*, 10 April 1926)

Call it ballyhoo or baloney, with those words, one of the earliest radio serials was launched in February 1926.

12th Feb 202612th Feb 2026

Live from the Lincoln Bedroom: Herbert Hoover Cautions Depression-Stricken Radio Listeners Against the “opiates of government charity”

“By the magic of the radio.” Suitably charming if by then well-worn, the phrase served as the opening of a public address by the thirty-first president of the United States, Herbert Hoover. Broadcast from the White House on this day, 12 February, in 1931, and occasioned by the birthday of Abraham Lincoln, the message conveyed in the speech that followed was decidedly less magical than the purported medium of enchantment by way of which it was delivered.

*Address of the President on Lincoln’s Birthday* (1931)

In lieu of a recording, the script published by US Government Printing Office serves as a reminder of Hoover’s inability to respond with understanding to the needs—and the mood—of the multitudes who tuned in to hear his words. And while its initial reception is now difficult to gauge, the broadcast no doubt contributed to Hoover’s defeat the following year, on 8 November, when Franklin D. Roosevelt won the popular and electoral vote, carrying forty-two states.

FDR came to be known as “the radio president.” His predecessor, however, had already made ample use of the medium, especially after the establishment of national chains—NBC in 1926 and CBS in 1927—significantly increased the possibility of reaching millions of US Americans instantly and simultaneously in their homes.

Just days after Hoover’s radio address on Lincoln’s Birthday in 1931, for instance, his administration launched a “drive against illiteracy in the United States” in cooperation with the Columbia Broadcasting System.

There was little evidence of Hoover’s ability to read the room, however, as his voice passed through the four walls in which so-called members of the far from homogenous public sat alone or in intimate circles to learn about his response to the economic crisis that had left so many of them floundering.

30th Jan 2026

“A piece of ice”: Greenland, a US Mission, and the Drafting of Another War Below Zero

The dust jacket of *War Below Zero* (1944)

When, at the 2026 World Economic Forum in Davos, the forty-seventh and perhaps last elected President of the United States, in one of his characteristic falsehood-and-insult-littered tirades, referred to Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark he had long coveted, as “a piece of ice,” his imperialism, imperiousness and imperviousness to historical facts were once again on blindingly stark display.

Greenland, Iceland, or whatever the misleader of the fabled free world may call the largest island of them all—if indeed it is land, or a land, rather than a frozen asset on the verge of liquidation—it needed to be his, outright. Until, that is, Number 47 (previously 45 but never adding up to more than number two) was duped into settling for cubes portioned out in a deal existing since 1951. Put that in your Diet Coke and drink it, sucker!

“A piece of ice.” Is not Melania enough? Well, not according to the Epstein files, if ever we get to see them entire and unredacted. The likely scenario of hell freezing over comes to mind, boggled though it is.

“A piece of ice.” That, clearly, is what cultures and communities—history and humanity—are to a rapacious tyke-oon, a petulant plutocrat whose crude, rudimentary vocabulary and short attention span remind us daily how limited his definition of “great” is and how precisely that limitation sums up the narrow mind of a bottom feeder—a Moron-roe Doctrinaire?—raised, none too loftily, on the notion that anyone aspiring to be a big fish needs to swallow whatever comes or gets into his way.

Greatness, thus conceived, means little more than to amass much to amount to more in the eyes of the world he, in a less-than-popular deviation from his America First agenda, has set his greedy peepers on.

“A piece of ice,” indeed! The word is chilling enough as an acronym, when it refers to a deadly experiment in cryotherapy involving the deep-freezing of democracy until it falls off the body politic as if it were an unwelcome and unsightly growth.

While I could not gauge the degree of ire among the largely undemonstrative audience at Davos, the phrase certainly made my blood boil, as does pretty much every exhausting waste of air emanating from a hothead whose actions are raising the global temperature as perilously as the actual warming his administration has chosen to deny for the opportunity of raking in a final few billions. When Number 47 talks Greenland, you can bet he means greenbacks.

It is undeniably global warming that makes the island of Kalaallit Nunaat more strategic a region than it ever was, now that melting ice caps open routes and facilitate access to the Arctic.

Climate change was not yet an issue during the so-called “Battle for Greenland”—the subtitle and subject of War Below Zero, a book published in 1944. And yet, atmospheric conditions and the ability to forecast them on location were apparently key to the US interest in the region in a pre-satellite age.

According to War Below Zero, the conflict in question was not a war for “territory” but “a war for weather.”

22nd Jan 202623rd Jan 2026

“Trump … and Trump Again”: Pulp, Politics and the Impossibility of Getting Away from the One Who Gets Away with Murder

A page from *Edgar Wallace Mystery Magazine*, May 1965

Over the past few months, enervated by minor illnesses and the lingering nuisance of ingrown eyelashes that make reading for pleasure less than pleasurable, I have been busying myself performing the mentally undemanding task of cataloguing my digital collection of detective and mystery magazines, most of which, for the reason aforementioned, still await my perusal.

Not one to embrace chaos or relish disorder, I derive comfort from such indexing. The virtue of record-keeping is not simply its own reward, however. After all, owing to a dogged determination that some may prefer to label “anal retentiveness” or look upon as signs of life “somewhere on the spectrum,” I now have a fairly comprehensive overview of twentieth-century British and US American crime fiction, especially by writers active during the so-called golden age of murder mysteries between the two world wars, authors whose rules-governed puzzles resonate with us once more in a period of heightened global uncertainties and the attendant anxieties to which they gives rise.

I was just completing, for the time being, my currently 139-page-long single-spaced crimino-bibliography, replete with cross-references and annotations, when I happened on an item that brought home again how elusive and downright illusory any attempts are to escape, via fictional chronicles of crimes long solved, from the actual and ongoing illegalities of today, not least the enforced lawlessness in the rewilded West of the by now all but nominal United States.

23rd Sep 202524th Sep 2025

“It gets something off my chest, doesn’t it?”: Keeping Norman Corwin’s “Appointment” (1941) Because Liberty Won’t Keep in the Heat of Hatred

Cover of *Thirteen by Corwin*,
containing “Appointment,”
from my collection of radio-related literature

Speaking out against fascism—publicly and nationally, via the airwaves—used to be regarded in the United States of America as a moral imperative, or at least, in the terms of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), as an act “in the public interest.”

These days, in the era of MAGA on steroids—and, to be clear, the first “A” in the acronym can be readily substituted to designate any number of imperiled democracies—fascism is no longer the anathema to democratic rule that it used to be understood as constituting.

This is mainly because democracy itself—as a construct, an ideal and a reality—has become anathema to the members of a growing movement that is celebratory of autocracy and that, perversely and perfidiously, argues anti-fascism to be a threat to autocracy as a preferred system of streamlined government in which checks and balances are discarded and in which oppositional forces and alternative voices are denounced as deleterious and traitorous.

I had been meaning to write about the weaponization of the FCC in the wake of the cancellation and temporary or partial silencing of late night talk shows critical of the Trump administration; but for some reason, and via a route too tedious to trace, I happened, quite fortuitously, as it turns out, on a script for a radio play by poet-journalist Norman Corwin, the unofficial “poet laureate” of US radio during the early to mid-1940s.

I have already devoted a dozen or so posts to Corwin and his work, including plays as diverse as “A Ma n with a Platform,” “My Client Curle y,” and “Seems Radio Is Here to Stay.”

To this day, one of the most rewarding acknowledgments of my scholarly pursuits, such as they are, remains receiving word from Corwin expressive of his approval of my academic writings on him.

Although I have discussed many of Corwin’s writings for radio in Immaterial Culture, I had somehow failed to show up for his “Appointment”—a play first produced on 1 June 1941 as part of the cycle Twenty-six by Corwin.

15th Sep 202516th Sep 2025

“The First Radio Play Printed in America”: “Sue ‘Em” (1925) and the Ensuing Question of Legitimacy

A photograph published in the April 1926 issue of *Radio Broadcast*
showing a young John Huston (left) and fellow members of the Provincetown Players

Here I go again. Another broadcasting centenary, another radio “first.” This “First,” mind, is wrapped in quotation marks, as the claim is not mine. I am not going to dispute it, either, or challenge someone else to have the last word in the old “Who’s on First?” routine. I have been there before.

Picture it: Early 2024. I am commemorating the one-hundredth anniversary of radio “drama” at an event I staged with British playwright Lucy Gough at the National Library of Wales. I set out by acknowledging the widely held assumption that Comedy of Danger by playwright-novelist Richard Hughes was the “first” original radio play to be broadcast … anywhere.

The claim served as a hook. It was designed to underscore the international significance of the event. At the same time, I tried to justify its happening in Wales by drawing attention to the play’s Welsh setting and the playwright’s affinity with the country. More important to me than arriving at a definitive answer to the vexed question of whether Comedy of Danger should be regarded as the “first” of its kind are the shifting definitions of the term “radio play” on which, to my mind, hinges the answer to that question—or rather, its unanswerability and ultimate pointlessness.

After all, it is difficult to say what is “first” in any field if the field itself is not clearly delimited first, or if the field is so limitless that it defies delineation in the first place. In the case of “radio play,” Hörspiel (play for listening) or radio drama—relatively arcane though this field of study may be—definitions not only vary greatly but are often not even attempted.

When is a play a radio play? That is a question I have been asking for a long time in my musings on the wireless, and it is a question I keep asking myself. “When is a play a radio play” strikes me as a more useful way of framing the debate than the more obvious question “What is a radio play?” because the former encourages us to avoid the most perfunctory of answers: A radio play is a play written for and/or heard on the radio.

Sure, on the surface it barely scratches, that statement sounds reasonable enough. But are all plays written and produced for radio broadcasting radio plays by default? Is it the medium, then, that makes a play—any play—a radio play?

Not that “radio” as we understand or know it these days bears a close resemblance to “radio”—as a receiver set, a system, and a phenomenon—anno 1925, the year when Sue ‘Em, proclaimed by its publisher to be the “first radio play printed” in the USA, successfully made a play for first place in a radio playwrighting contest.

6th Sep 20259th Sep 2025

“Ministry of All Fools”: Carol Carnac’s Murder as a Fine Art (1953), “Cozy” Crime, and the Crisis of the “Contemporary”

Digging into my collection of British Library Crime Classics

You do not need to be a card-carrying member of the Thursday Murder Club to have spotted the signs, superabundant as they are. Like red herrings surreptitiously slipped into a vegan barbeque, the pattern of mischief and deceit is too conspicuous to go unnoticed: murder mysteries, whether freshly prepared, reheated or rehashed à la mode, are back with the vengeance particular to them.

Fictional murders are just what we assume the doctor would order if reliable medical advice, especially in this age of unfounded attacks on science—were within easy reach of our purse. I won’t go so far as to call mysteries the patent medicine of our day; but I am convinced they are taken freely and frequently as a temporary remedy for the widespread malady of which they are symptomatic.

Not to generalize from the small sample of my experience, but only yesterday—and “yesterday” only because I can never get my act together so as to leave “today” unedited—I walked home after paying an overdue visit to the Gayberystwyth Books, that indispensable local dispensary of diversity-affirming queerness, with a copy of Jaime West’s Death on the Pier (2022), a murder mystery set in 1933 Brighton. All the while, I am screaming bloody murder at the sight of division sowers like Trump and Farage who are determined to push the democracies they blight ever closer toward Berlin 1933.

Meanwhile, so-called “cozy crime” is back on the pop-cultural menu. Mysteries have become part of a regular diet, healthy or otherwise, followed, like a regimen of killer recipes from a keto cookbook, by millions of contemporary fiction bingers, be they bookworms or streaming service subscribers. Defying the warning label, I am currently ingesting Not to Be Taken (1937-38), a serialized whodunit by Anthony Berkeley published in the US under the title “A Puzzle in Poison.”

“One Man’s Poison” might be a suitable alternative title for Murder as a Fine Art (1953), my previous dose of the genre, even though the weapon employed by “another man”—whose identity I shall refrain from divulging here—is, despite its material refinement, rather less sophisticated once applied: a pompous government employee at the fictional Ministry of Art is brought down—splatter of brains and all—by a giant Canova bust, for which the victim had long expressed a violent dislike.

The crime novelist determining upon that choice weapon was Edith Caroline Rivett (1894-1958), writing as Carol Carnac. Some five years before assuming this guise, Rivett had started her career as a mystery writer under the decidedly more ambiguous name of E. C. R. Lorac.

27th Jun 2025

Static and Spirits: Anarchic Airwaves, Prohibition, and the Return of Philo Gubb, Correspondence School “Deteckative”

Illustration for “The McNoodle Brothers’ Radio Mystery” in *Radio News*, Sept. 1923

Philo … Gubb? Never heard of him. Nor, in all my years—make that decades—as a reader of detective fiction, had I come across, or become aware of, Ellis Parker Butler (1869–1937), the writer who brought Philo Gubb—“a tall, thin man, with the face and gait of a flamingo,” a paperhanger with a hankering for “deteckative” work—into a flurry of being. Not until recently, that is.

Generally, I do not mind stumbling onto what might have been got at with greater ease and efficiency through methodical research. I am aware that any perceived surprise on my part—that “Eureka!”-inducing moment of discovery—may be owing to an absence of assiduity. That said, some of the most memorable encounters are made by chance, along circuitous routes.

In the case of Ellis Parker Butler and his brainchild Philo Gubb, though, I regret not having made the acquaintance of either of them sooner, given that this particular route led me back, unexpectedly, to the early days of broadcasting, about which Butler had much to say that might have been of interest and use to me in Immaterial Culture, my study of so-called old-time radio.

Now, Immaterial Culture does not pick up on the story of broadcasting until the network days of the late 1920s. To gain an understanding how radio evolved, a look at prehistoric transmissions, albeit largely in the absence of sound recordings, is nonetheless instructive. You cannot expect to “get” the cream of old-time broadcasting if you neglect an inspection of the cat’s whiskers for traces of same.

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9th May 202524th May 2025

“There is a [loose] cannon”: Stephen Vincent Benét’s “Undefended Border” Revisited

The published script as it appeared in We Stand United, an anthology of radio plays by Stephen Vincent Benét and “decorated” by Ernest Stock.

I commenced this journal back in 2005. It was intended as a continuation of, and promotional vehicle for, my doctoral study “Etherized Victorians: Drama, Narrative, and the American Radio Play, 1929–1954.” Its title, broadcastellan, was meant to declare me to be keeper of a vast Luftschloss—a neglected alcazar of the air, immaterially composed of numberless radio recordings I determined to play back.

As of this post, broadcastellan is nearing its twentieth anniversary. While I do not take this as an opportunity, let alone an excuse, to reissue older posts, I nonetheless wonder: When history seems to be repeating itself, perhaps I may be justified to do the same, if only to demonstrate that not every “been there” necessarily translates into a feeling of “done that,” and that not all twice-told tales are a rehash—not, at least, when you approach them from a perspective that has profoundly, even fundamentally, changed along with the context, your life experience and your attitude toward the world.

I devoted one early entry to “The Undefended Border” (1940), a play by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Stephen Vincent Benét (1898–1943). Revisiting it now, in the age of the MAGA tariff wars and annexation threats, I cannot but think of the loose cannon that is recklessly flouting, or at any rate tarnishing, the legacy of the rusty “lone cannon” commemorated in Benét’s play.