broadcastellan
broadcastellan
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…
“A piece of ice”: Greenland, a US Mission, and the Drafting of Another War Below Zero
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…
“Trump … and Trump Again”: Pulp, Politics and the Impossibility of Getting Away from the One Who Gets Away with Murder
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.…
“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…
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Harry Heuser 