The Medium Is the Murder: Technology, Human Nature, and “The Voice That Killed” (1923)

“There is a modern touch about this story that stamps it with the brand of originality.” That is how the editors of Detective Magazine introduced “The Voice That Killed,” a short work of fiction that first—and, as far as I can tell, last—appeared in print on 28 September 1923.  The man responsible for this slight but nonetheless noteworthy “touch” of the “modern” was Gwyn Evans (1898-1938), a writer best known for his fanciful contributions to the sprawling Sexton Blake Library.

While I am not prepared to pursue Evans’ trail into the far recesses of that vault of once popular culture, I have read enough of his stories to get the impression that “The Voice That Killed” is representative of Evans’ none-too original fascination with—or, perhaps, his adroit cashing in on the widespread ambiguity of his readers toward—modernity and the rapidity with which, in the years between the two World Wars, technology was transforming every aspect of human life, consuming some lives in the process.

Take Evans’ “In the First Three Lines,” for instance.  The story—little more than a joke, really stretched out to serve an O. Henry twist that made me go “Oh, brother!”—concerns a Fleet Street reporter who is as long in the tooth as his prose is winded.  Unable to suit his prose to the contemporary market, he avenges himself on the “dour but highly efficient” US American news editor of the streamlined “Daily Radio” (formerly the “Liberal”) who fired him; but, as Evans’ light-verse variety of poetic justice has it, the reporter, after cutting short his colleague’s life, fails to cut his story short enough to get the attention of his boss when he tries to confess.

As is often the case in tales of crime and detection, the “modern” in the romantic body of Evans’ suspense stories is made to collide with the enduring strain of mystery whose enjoyment, Evans suggests, is not chiefly derived from its methodical, let alone fair, solution.

Even in the construction of a whodunit such as “The Pool of Secrets,” a puzzle whose unravelling involves the debunking of a ghost story, Evans relied on sensational pulp trimmings including a domestic robot and a shoal of piranhas—science and displaced nature pitted against each other in a reputedly haunted swimming pool of a long-established but radically modernized estate that, as an old codger in the nearby village has it, is being turned into a “noodist” colony.

According to biographer Steve Holland, Evans was as prolific as he was profligate.  He was familiar, therefore, with the geometry commonly if rather anthropocentrically referred to as the “eternal triangle,” which, the story’s “modern touch” notwithstanding, forms the tried-and-untruthful premise of “The Voice That Killed.”  And although the titular vocal cords are not actually homicidal, they become part of a fiendish plot to weaponize them by turning melodious sound into a lethal electrical current.

It is the “modern touch” of ham-handed melodrama that intrigued me when I happened on “The Voice That Killed” while browsing digitized issues of Detective Magazine, especially given that the “Voice” in question is transmitted via a medium with whose history and enchantment I concern myself in much of my research and ramblings here and elsewhere: the wireless.  

“The Voice That Killed” dates from a period when radio was not yet a mass medium, when casting voices broadly was only just becoming broadcasting: scheduled programming for home consumption.  When the story was published—incidentally, on the same day the first issue of the Radio Times appeared in print—the BBC had been broadcasting for a mere ten month (since January 1923 with a formal license), meaning that what Evans refers to as a “radio phone” was still a novelty in British home entertainment.

The term “radio phone” captures the pre-broadcasting roots of radio, which was only gradually becoming a device that talked to no one in particular even as it entered the private sphere of individual listeners—a seeming paradox that is central to “The Voice That Killed.”

Some years ago, when I briefly dabbled in podcasting, I produced and narrated “The Voice on the Wire,” a short documentary exploring the uses of telephony in US American radio plays of the 1930s and ‘40s.  As I pointed out, Lucille Fletcher’s “Sorry, Wrong Number” was only one in a long line of radio thrillers that anathematized the telephone as the anti-wireless.  

Whereas radio listening, whose origins lie in failed point-to-point communication, was touted as an experience in which millions shared at any given time, the telephone, giving everyone a chance to get a word in, was demonstrated to be an untrustworthy instrument that could manipulate and torment those who depended on it as a means of connecting with the outside world.

When “The Voice That Killed” was written, the distinction between telephone and radio was not quite so clear, and the “radio phone” had not yet become the valued “friend in the corner.”  As it turns out, the “Voice” in Evans’ story is intimately familiar to—and with—the designated listener; but neither the sender nor the receiver is in control, which rests in the hands of a wireless enthusiast intent on severing their connection.

In that respect, “The Voice That Killed” is quite different from Ngaio Marsh’s “Death on the Air” (1937), to which it nonetheless bears a resemblance.  The latter involves a tampered-with radio receiver that, at the touch of the dial, electrocutes a much-hated head of the household he tormented.  In Evans’ story, however, the medium (the dial) and the message (what is being dialed) matter equally.

Drawn into one man’s revenge fantasy gone haywireless, readers are encouraged to side with Estelle Sanford, the inconstant spouse of George Sanford, an engineer “as tough as tungsten wire,” a man whose “hard, not unhandsome face” in “its cold, white intensity” was “reminiscent […] of a piece of quarried quartz” and whose “voice was cold, lifeless, almost mechanical as that of the radio phone set.”

The injured party is portrayed as a calculating, machine-like avenger, a “Robot of a husband” hardly more human than the technology he employs to carry out the killing of a woman whose passion got the better of her—a woman who fell in love with the Welsh tenor who, as the newspaper announces in its program schedule, is about to go on the air.

Evans suggests that, all along, George Sanford had a substitute lover in the wireless.  It was an “attachment to his radio phone” that “seemed to afford him some grim satisfaction.”  And yet, the even the beloved apparatus shows signs of betrayal, a pal making eyes at the ladies by catering to them:

He gazed at the rather stupid black mouth of the loud-speaker, and gripped the foolish feminine tassels that ornamented an orange and black cushion, until his knuckles shone bone white.

“[F]oolish feminine tassles.” In that gendering of the receiving set lies the timeliness of Evans’ tale, written as it was when radio—both the equipment and its application—was transitioning from a primarily do-it-yourself technology and a hobbyist pursuit of DX-ing (allegedly the domain of the male) to the consumer-oriented medium of broadcasting, an entertainment system whose output is directed mainly toward those who stay at home—and presumably belong there.  

George Sanford goes so far as physically to shackle his wife to keep her immobile as he prepares to send her to her death.  “If only her hands were free,” the narrator gets into the head of a woman who is more furious than frightened: “She felt she could have hurled herself upon him, and scratched his granite face until the blood came, just to see if he was really human.”

Reciting the broadcasting schedule, which is crucial to his plan, George points out to his captive audience of one that “[a]t seven-thirty this evening, Mr. Evan Pencraig, the distinguished Welsh tenor will sing that wonderful love song, ‘Cariad!’ The song which has brought him fame and fortune.”  That song, “Cariad” (Welsh for “love” and “beloved) also “brought” said radio star his Estelle.

Evans, who was born and raised in Wales, makes the “Voice” a Welsh one—investing it with a wildness associated with the subjugated but unruly nation to the west of England, a land proverbially of “song” but also of mystery and romance as ancient as the Arthurian legends, and of revolutionary spirit made manifest in the figure of Owain Glyndŵr, the last native-born Welshman to claim the title “Prince of Wales.”

If radio, in the minds of the imperious male, could keep wives indoors by serving up a steady diet of easily digested ready meals, it could also transport, arouse desires and awaken dreamers.  “He sends me,” as swooning teenagers used to say decades ago.  It was radio—and the disembodied voices of the ether—that could send anyone, anywhere.  It is a potentiality that terrifies Evans’ male protagonist:

You tried to laugh at my dull, mechanical mind.  You tried to cram your pale, passionate poetry down my throat.  You strove to interest me in your long-haired, unwashed artist friends—well, you will see whether it is impossible to extract poetry from machines, or art from electricity.

Due to an inelegant twist at the hands of the author and an uncharacteristic error on the part of her otherwise machine-like husband, electricity does not kill Estelle Sanford after all; and while we do not witness her escape, we have no reason to presume that she is picking up needlework to get the Welsh tenor with the killer voice out of her system—at least not as long as the “radio phone” keeps carrying his “Cariad.”

Marshall McLuhan, who coined the phrase “The medium is the message,” had it all wrong when he claimed that radio was a “hot medium,” meaning that it “allows of less participation than a cool one,” such as the telephone.  The radio phone, as Evans has it, can blow both hot and cold.  It is one man’s murder and another woman’s mojo.