broadcastellan
broadcastellan
“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
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…
“The First Radio Play Printed in America”: “Sue ‘Em” (1925) and the Ensuing Question of Legitimacy
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…
“Ministry of All Fools”: Carol Carnac’s Murder as a Fine Art (1953), “Cozy” Crime, and the Crisis of the “Contemporary”
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…
Static and Spirits: Anarchic Airwaves, Prohibition, and the Return of Philo Gubb, Correspondence School “Deteckative”
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…
“There is a [loose] cannon”: Stephen Vincent Benét’s “Undefended Border” Revisited
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…
“… I prefer to explain all differently”: A Specious Rationalization of the Criminal Impulse to Possess Forbidden Fruit in Eden Phillpotts’ “The Iron Pineapple”
The Welsh seaside town of Aberystwyth, where I live, has no shortage of bookstores, first-hand and otherwise. At one of them—The Bookshop by the Sea, which sells both old and new volumes—I purchased, some time ago, A Century of Detective Stories. Published in 1935, it is an anthology of crime and mystery tales introduced by G. K. Chesterton,…
“You Can’t Do Business With Hitler”: A “picture of Nazi trade methods” Re-Viewed in the Second Age of MAGA
“This is Douglas Miller speaking. I’ll be very blunt and to the point. I want to give you a picture of Nazi trade methods and Nazi business methods as I saw them during my fifteen years in Berlin.” Intimate and immediate in the means and manner in which, in the days before television and internet, only network…
“… an America that must never happen—that will never happen!”: Revisiting US American Anti-Third Reich Propaganda in the Second Age of MAGA
Delving into the “Draft and Ideas” folder set aside for this blog, I came across a fragment titled “‘Chicago, Germany’: A 1940s Radio Play for Our Parallel Universe.” It was intended for posting on 10 November 2016 as a response to a “Trump administration having become a reality.” The draft was abandoned, but no other piece of…
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…
The Wireless, Herr Doktor Flesch, and the Devil: Hearing, Reading and Translating “Zauberei auf dem Sender” (1924), the First Radio Play Broadcast in Germany
What is this sound and fury? Just who is behind it all? And why? Rather than making assumptions about the receptiveness—or perceptiveness—of radio listeners back in October 1924, I asked myself those questions as I tuned in belatedly and indirectly, via the internet, to a 1962 recreation of the orchestrated chaos that is Hans Flesch’s Zauberei auf dem…
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Harry Heuser 