Category: Radio Plays

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On This Day in 1959: A Ghost of Crises Past Shares "A Korean Christmas Carol"

Yesterday, we took the train up and across the border to Birmingham, England, to see the exhibition Love Revealed: Simeon Solomon and the Pre-Raphaelites at the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery. Deceptively saccharine, the title of this show (borrowed from Solomon’s fanciful dream narrative “A Vision of Love Revealed by Sleep”) also refers to the Victorian artist’s troubled life, to the disclosure of his secret and the end it meant for his career as a commercially viable painter.

There was nothing sensationalistic about this staged revelation; and even though Solomon’s paintings and drawings do not always stand up particularly well when placed alongside the works of his better known contemporaries, “Love Revealed” did not leave me with the impression that this rather obscure artist is being deemed due for a revival chiefly because certain academics with an agenda think his private life under public scrutiny, his outing and ousting, fascinatingly queer or historically significant enough to warrant such a tribute. The past may come back to haunt us—but it may also be revealed, at last, in a light that is different without being garish.

Christmas, of course, is just the time to conjure up haunting spirits; the telling of ghost stories during the season when days are darkest is a tradition in Britain, Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” being the most famous of them all. On US radio, updates of Ebenezer Scrooge were attempted on programs as diverse as Blondie (“Scrooge,” 15 Dec. 1939), The Six Shooter (“Britt Ponset’s Christmas Carol,” 20 Dec. 1953), and the syndicated propaganda series Treasury Star Parade (ca. 1942), in whose seasonal offering, “The Modern Scrooge ($18.75),” the reformed old miser becomes an air-warden.

The past was not always the exclusive domain of pastiche, however. On this day, 20 December, in 1959, a rather more gritty ghost story was presented by Suspense, an anthology of radio thrillers heard over the Columbia Broadcasting System in the United States between 1942 and 1962. Titled, “A Korean Christmas Carol,” the play tells the strange tale of an American soldier stationed in Korea, Christmas 1958.

On his way to Seoul, he picks up a hitchhiker, a fellow soldier who relates his own experience fighting in Korea some seven Christmases earlier. Insensitive to the icy weather and oblivious to the cigarette smoldering between and singeing his fingers, the stranger seems to be dwelling wholly in the past. When he steps out of the car and disappears into the darkness, he leaves behind his AWOL bag, forcing his listener to follow his path. But instead of taking him straight to some barracks or military installation, the path leads to a secluded orphanage. It is here that the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future crowd in on our haunted storyteller.

Featuring the non-traditional holiday sounds of fierce machine gunfire, the play opens and closes with a choir of Korean children—the orphans of the war to whom the mysterious hitchhiker, himself a casualty of war, sets out to deliver a bag of toys by turning the driver-narrator into his earthly messenger. Having died to save his comrades, he now returns to remind and guide his countrymen to look after the offspring of those whose lives he took.

“A Korean Christmas Carol” is a story of sacrifice and redemption, a story of making amends—a story of love revealed in a vision of death. Will the present war on terror produce or inspire any such ghost stories to be shared underneath the Christmas tree in the decades to come?

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On This Day in 1940: As War Is Waged Overseas, Stephen Vincent Benét Romances an "Undefended Border"

Just a little while ago, I was following Jack Benny and Mary Livingstone into a Beverly Hills department store, where, on this day, 18 December, in 1949, they found themselves in a stampede of bargain hunters. As the doors of the emporium opened, the valued customers were greeted with a whip and shouts of “mule train, mule train”—a regular muletide treat.

Accounts of penny-pinching Mr. Benny as a latter-day Scrooge tasked with the challenge of Christmas shopping were a seasonal feature on US network radio. Having had a few chuckles, but not enough material for this online journal, I continued to raid my library of scripts and recordings and came across a play I hadn’t read or heard in a while. It’s a play for all seasons, but one conveying a message particularly well received toward the end of the year: the promise—and the reality—of peace.

The play is “The Undefended Border” by Pulitzer Prize winning poet Stephen Vincent Benét. Written especially for radio, it was first heard on the Cavalcade of America program on 18 December 1940—about a year before the US entered into war with Japan and Germany. As I discuss it in Etherized Victorians, my doctoral study on old-time radio, both networks and sponsors were squeamish about any overt commentary on the war then being waged in Europe. Broadcasters were not permitted to play “advocate,” to endorse an anti-isolationist position, or any other political position, for that matter.

Engaged in a comprehensive campaign to adjust its corporate image in the wake of a report about the company’s profiteering during World War I, the DuPont company commissioned an advertising agency to design a series of historical dramas dedicated to telling American stories of peace and progress. A well-respected writer of historical and patriotic verse, an author whose death in 1943 was argued by one contemporary critic to be “an even greater loss to radio than to poetry,” Benét was just the man to deliver such a message—but not without indirectly signalling his support for Britain in the war against fascism.

“The Undefended Border” celebrates the peace between the United States and Canada. Both countries were at war in 1812; but there existed friendships between those living along the border. Benét tells of such a friendship and how it encouraged an American citizen to go on mission to Washington to urge the Acting Secretary of State, Richard Rush, and the representative of the British crown, Sir Charles Bagot, to create a border that would foster rather than endanger friendly relations between the neighboring countries.

“All over the world, there are borders between countries,” Benét begins his play, narrated by character actor Raymond Massey:

They may be rivers or mountains—they may be nothing more than lines on a map.  But, in time of war, they are ravaged land—No Man’s Land.  And, in time of peace, the guns still look at each other. Between the wars, the grass grows back again, but sometimes it doesn’t grow for long.  And there are always soldiers.

But from New Brunswick to Puget Sound there runs a border between two great nations of proud people, individual people, people with their own customs and beliefs and ways, and that border has not one fort, not one ship of battle, not one hidden or usable gun.  There is a lone cannon.  And they point it out to tourists as a memory of the past.

The Rush-Bagot Agreement was signed in April 1817, and the two countries went on to create a “great house of freedom.” Was it the doing of that one farmer who travelled on foot to Washington to have his say?

Can the spirit of Benét’s play endure? Or will it be the doing of today’s anxious politicians to tear down our freedoms by putting up new fences? Love Thy Neighbor, I say. Just don’t ask for assistance from stubbornly feuding misers like Mr. Benny.

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On This Day in 1949: My Favorite Husband Comments on “individual liberties” and Present-Day Politics

Government radio is a cross between a museum and a religious school, dispensing classics and credo, but not especially concerned with new works. Commercial radio is a department store, carrying in stock a few luxury items, a lot of supposedly essential commodities and perhaps too many cheap brands of goods. The radio [as imagined and desired by some who write for the medium] is an artist’s studio, dedicated to creation alone. As such, it is not yet able to stand on its own, and its product must be exhibited in the museum or the gallery of the department store.

That is how America’s foremost radio playwright, Norman Corwin, summed up the problems of writing for the theatre of the mind. While its sets are being created collaboratively by writers, actors, directors, sound effects artists, musicians, and audiences, radio plays must nonetheless be staged to be realized—and 1940s network radio was hardly a public access forum. 

After World War II, even Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish found it impossible to gain access to the broadcasting boards under the department store conditions of commercial US radio. He had to take his play “The Trojan Horse” to the “museum” of the BBC’s Broadcasting House (pictured above) to give it an airing. A hollow victory indeed.

Well, today I’ve been both to the museum and the department store, each time for some decidedly conventional fare. I gave Mike Walker’s 20-part adaptation of David Copperfield another try, after recording installments six to nine (the tenth having had its premiere this evening). I think that, as much as I like the quiet dignity of a museum, I’ve still got a department store ear.

Unlike Dickens, Walker does not seem to have a mind for either a dramatic or a proscenium arch. How anyone can manage to follow this adaptation while tuning in on a day-to-day basis is beyond me. It is all very pleasant, mind you, but I cannot quite piece it together, especially since Walker’s narrator makes little effort to help us make sense of it all. Instead, he suffers—and I along with him—from an identity crisis, now being an omniscient nobody, now a self-conscious author.

So, I took refuge again in the department store and listened to a Christmas-themed episode of My Favorite Husband, starring Lucille Ball. As much as I like Ms. Ball, this is only the second or third sample I took of this I Love Lucy precursor. The premise, as stated in the introduction of each episode, holds little promise. Where is the drama if a couple like Liz and George Cooper “live together and like it”? As is often the case in the realm of situation comedies, a stereotypical mother-in-law can be counted on to create the requisite domestic friction. And George’s busybody of a mother is downright Dickensian in her prissy hypocrisy—a match, to be sure, for Clara Copperfield’s sister-in-law, Jane Murdstone.

Making another visit on this day, 16 December, in 1949, Liz’s mother-in-law is at her belittling and bickering best, complaining about the lack of cleanliness in her son’s home and mocking Liz’s efforts to knit a sweater for George (“why are you holding that dirty old dust rag?”). After getting Liz all frazzled, she finally takes off, but not before unravelling her daughter-in-law’s handiwork. The last word on meddling, however, comes from the program’s announcer:

Ladies and gentlemen, the Christmas and New Year holiday season is a period of neighborly getting-together and renewing community ties. It’s a time when every American should be even more aware of the individual liberties he enjoys in the United States. And this freedom demands that each of us fulfils our duties as a citizen: to vote, to serve on juries, and to participate in community, state and national affairs. By making our form of government work better here, we strengthen democracy everywhere. We provide an example of a free government, which preserves the rights and the dignity of the individual. So, remember: freedom is everybody’s job.

Not quite the announcement you’d expect to emanate from a department store loudspeaker, is it?

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Review by Request: “The House in Cypress Canyon”

Recently, I was asked to write about “The House in Cypress Canyon,” a radio play first heard in the US on CBS’s Suspense program on this day, 5 December, in 1946. Robert L. Richards’s neo-gothic thriller has received some scholarly attention, but it is rewardingly suggestive enough to accommodate multiple readings.

In her essay “Scary Women and Scarred Men: Suspense, Gender Trouble, and Postwar Change, 1942-1950,” Allison McCracken refers to “The House in Cypress Canyon” as a play that “amply demonstrates the particular kinds of domestic horrors that radio thrillers could convey.” Indeed, Suspense specialized in homegrown violence, in the terror of jealousy and the horror of revenge, in the manifestations of greed and green-eyed monstrosities.

Like the film noir, whose first-person voice-over narrations are reminiscent of and influenced by radio storytelling, many 1940s radio thrillers comment on the threat posed to men by independent females in the workplace, by shoulder-padded career women who, rather than being kept contentedly within white picket fences, appeared ruthless enough to impale their male counterparts upon them. At least their assertiveness was portrayed in such a light by the men who fictionalized this very real change in the position of women in wartime America as well as their forced retreat into the home. The first year after the Second World War was in many respects an uneasy period of adjustment.  It was a time out of joint—and “The House in Cypress Canyon” reads the signs of the times by forcing past, present, and future into a bewildering confrontation.

The titular abode is seemingly “ordinary” and “undistinguished.” Part of a pre-war housing complex whose construction was put on hold for the duration, the house was completed after VJ-Day and now awaits occupancy. No doubt, some who might have wished to live here are no longer alive, while those who remain—alone and robbed of future happiness—have no need for it at present. Lives have been put on hold so that life might go on; blood has been shed so that future generations may dwell here. Can any home built under such circumstances truly be ordinary? Not according to the real estate agent who is about to make the house available for rent, who has evidence that something extraordinary is going on inside. That is . . . has it already happened? Is it yet to happen? Is it bound to happen?

Confiding in his detective friend, the agent relates how the construction workers found a manuscript in the as yet unfinished house. It appears to be a diary—an account of life within the house after its completion, the story of how it was rented to Jim Woods (played by Robert Taylor), a chemical engineer, and his wife Ellen (Cathy Lewis), a former schoolteacher; how the “reasonably happy” couple moved in and found one of its closets locked; how the two were awakened by strange howling; how they investigated and found “oozing” from under that closet door something that was “unquestionably blood”; how they left the house in “something very close to a panic” and returned with the “moral support of two stalwart Los Angeles police lieutenants”; and how the couple, having received no assistance from the officers, found their lives forever altered.

Like the title character of Arch Oboler’s “Cat Wife,” Richards’s Ellen undergoes a destructive change; she becomes bestial and predatory but seems entirely unaware of her second nature. That side of her quite literally emerges from a secret closet, a locked room of which she had been unconscious. “If that isn’t a commentary on the housing problem, huh? A woman moving into a house without even knowing where all the closets are,” Ellen laughs.

The opening of that closet is a “commentary,” too, namely on the uncertain boundaries of marital relations, on what lies beyond as the uncommunicated, that realm where the social and the biological converge. Whereas the “den” is being advertized to Jim and Ellen as an “attractive little room, particularly for a man,” there is no such “attractive” nook for the woman of the house. Instead, the blood-oozing closet becomes the scene of Ellen’s transformation from mate to monster. Once it is unlocked, domestic stability as defined by the male architects of heterosexual relations are shattered. Men become Ellen’s vampiric prey.

According to a newspaper clipping attached to the found manuscript, Jim committed suicide after doing away with his spouse, an event said to have occurred on the night after Christmas, the year being unspecified. The real estate agent once again emphasizes that the journal was discovered in the unfinished and as yet uninhabited house. However impressed by the story, the detective does not consider it further and leaves his friend as he puts up the “for rent” sign. The first people to express interest in the place appear almost immediately after the detective’s departure. They are none other than Jim and Ellen Woods.

“Do you know what time it is?” Jim at one point reprimands his wife as she continues to rearrange the furniture while the midnight hour approaches. Do we know what time is it? Is the manuscript found in the “House in Cypress Canyon” a blueprint for a new phase in the battle of the sexes? Will the events described therein play themselves out with the same inevitability that brings Jim and Ellen to the doorstep of their doomed abode? Are the two rehearsing a text that Jim has already written for them, a domestic play that casts the wife as fallen angel in the house?

The dischrono-logic of “The House in Cypress Canyon” drives home the gender role confusion in which men and women found themselves in postwar America and the uneasy future anticipated by skeptics of the seeming consumer comforts of Leave It to Beaverdom.

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On This Day in 1930: Murder Trial Broadcast Summons Millions to Court

Well, it is Black Friday here in New York—the stores are opening at preposterously early hours and shoppers are lured away from their leftover turkey with promises of early bird specials and nest egg busting savings. Too lazy after a sumptuous Thanksgiving meal, I am not partaking of any 5 AM bargain debasements. Instead, I am going to celebrate yet another milestone in radio drama history—The Trial of Vivienne Ware, which opened on this day, 25 November, in 1930 and ushered in a new age of cross-promotional multimediacy.

“There’s murder in the air,” the New York Times had announced in its Sunday radio section, predicting that The Trial of Vivienne Ware would “occupy the attention of listeners over WJZ’s network for six consecutive nights beginning Tuesday.” Considerably more enthusiastic was the New York American, which declared the six-part serial to be “one of the most stirring mystery radiodramas ever presented,” quoting NBC president M. H. Aylesworth as saying that its script “established a new standard in the creation of radio plays. The simplicity and fidelity of the theme, together with the colorful word and character pictures, stand out in this new field of adaptive writing.”

The New York American—the Hearst “paper for people who think”—had good reason to eulogize the as yet unaired serial as “one of the best radio dramas ever written,” given that the program had been conceived by one of its own feature writers.

Every effort was made to prevent the program from appearing like a cheap marketing ploy and to convince WJZ, New York—the flagship station of NBC’s Blue network—to produce the series in its glass-curtained Times Square studio atop the New Amsterdam Theatre and to broadcast the event locally instead of making the required six half-hour spots available to national advertisers.

Certain to impress NBC executives was the fact that—along with Ferdinand Pecora, Assistant District Attorney of New York, and prominent New York attorney George Gordon Battle—none other than US Senator and Supreme Court Justice Robert F. Wagner had agreed to participate in the mock trial by assuming the role of the presiding judge. The titular heroine was played by Rosamund Pinchot, a stage actress who had appeared in Max Reinhardt’s celebrated staging of The Miracle, and the entire spectacular was supervised by well-known Broadway producer John Golden.

“Ladies and Gentlemen of the Radio Jury,” Wagner addressed the audience during the inaugural broadcast:

You have been called to one of the most trying tasks which befalls the lot of a citizen. You are to try a fellow being on a charge of first degree murder.  It is the more difficult for you in that this defendant has everything which would make life for any young woman most desirable.  Yet it may become your solemn duty to deprive her of her enjoyment of that life.

Standing to gain cash prizes for the most convincing verdict, readers of the New York American were advised to prepare themselves by taking in the published “information” daily, since they might miss “important loop-holes” if they did not “carefully follow the testimony and the evidence” as presented on the radio. “By reading the New York American every morning” throughout the trial and by “tuning in on WJZ each night at the specified time,” readers should be able to form their verdict as to Miss Ware’s guilt or innocence—“just like any other juror.”

According to Radio Digest, verdicts, letters of congratulations, and demands for a sequel were received from places as remote as Canada and Virginia, as well as from ships at sea; an estimated 14,000 listeners eventually acquitted the fictional heroine on trial, with about 2000 arguing the “society girl” to be guilty. More significant for the publisher was that the serial had increased the circulation of the New York American “far in excess of expectations,” as a result of which Hearst papers in San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, and Omaha sponsored the trial with different casts of local luminaries.

A follow-up trial involving the murder victim’s less privileged “friend,” nightclub singer Dolores Divine, was staged a few weeks after the acquittal of the first defendant. A generic version of the radio scripts for both serials, prefaced by excepts from the printed reports and concluding with the audience verdict, was subsequently published by Grosset and Dunlap, which marketed Kenneth M. Ellis’s The Trial of Vivienne Ware as the “first radio novel, an innovation in both the radio and publishing worlds.”

Unfortunately, no recordings of this interactive multi-media event seem to have survived. I sure would have enjoyed tuning in . . .

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Catching Up With the Gals

Well, I couldn’t resist seeing the gals today. Bea Arthur, Rue McClanahan, and Betty White were at a DVD signing at a Barnes & Noble down in Chelsea, Manhattan (pictured below). I got to tell Rue that I learned English watching the show, which rather astonished her. It’s quite true.

Picture this. New York City. The late 1980s. I was a small-town German boy on a five-month visit to the Big Apple—flat broke but ready for adventure. One morning, counting my dollars after another night out, I caught a rerun of The Golden Girls. The laugh track suggested that I missed out on quite a bit of fun. Still, I fell instantly in love with those four women: the naive, good-natured Rose, the flirtatious and selfish Blanche, the sarcastic but insecure Dorothy, and her equally sarcastic mother (Estelle Getty, who is apparently too ill now to get about much). Okay, so I assumed at first that Bea Arthur was a drag queen. Not that that kept me from watching.

It didn’t take me long to make my morning visit to Miami Beach part of my daily routine. It took me quite a bit longer to get most of the cultural references (for many of which you’d need footnotes by now, anyway). But once I got them and learned much about American humor besides, I gained the confidence to be funny in English. Quotations from The Golden Girls gradually sneaked into my repertoire of witticisms, my everyday language. Eventually, I went to university here in NYC. I’d like to think that the gals had something to do with that.

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Listening to “The Thing That Cries in the Night”; (Chapter Fifteen): Radio Is a Deserted Home

Well, Heavenly Days! This morning, I caught a glimpse of the Great Gildersleeve and the McGees (Fibber and Molly, that is), who were featured in a triple bill of radio-takes-the-pictures comedies on Turner Classic Movies. Of course, radio always takes the pictures, provided the audience has a mind’s eye keen enough to develop them. Soon I’ll head out to pay a visit to the Museum of Television and Radio. As I noticed yesterday, the bookstores, second-hand or otherwise, are not exactly well stocked with radio-related publications; the late-1990s resurgence of interest in radio dramatics and pre-TV broadcasting here in the US seems to have died before it could mature as an independent, sustained, and regenerative field of study.

My own study on the subject of old-time radio, Etherized Victorians, doesn’t have much of a chance in a market that caters to people with short memories or nostalgic longings, instead to those who, like me, think of audio drama as alive if largely abandoned.

Today, my rather unsuccessful attempt at creating enthusiasm about Carlton E. Morse’s I Love a Mystery must come to an end. On this day, 18 November, in 1949, “The Thing That Cries in the Night” stopped bawling at last.

In his fifteenth and final chapter of “The Thing,” Morse keeps on postponing the prosaic business of making sense, until he eventually explains away the mystery of the voice without a body and solving the case of the name without a face.  Not that Jack Packard, one of Morse’s trio of adventurers, finds pleasure in lifting the veil.

“The House of Martin has fallen,” he concludes, soberly; the collapse has proven too devastating and deadly to call for celebration.  The story of a house under the corrupting influences of Hearst and Hollywood, “The Thing That Cries in the Night” is also a chapter in the history of radio, the medium for which Morse chose to write. Exposing the double life of the not-so-sweet Charity, the secret career and inglorious demise of a radio voice and its bodied double, Morse turns ventriloquism into a metaphor for the depersonalizing business of commercial broadcasting and its body of tongue-tied artists and scribes who, generally barred from speaking their mind and forced to mind their speech, stomached ignominy while devising various modes of indirection.

The dark art of casting voices, narrowly or broadly, is exposed as a duplicitous act, an impersonation in whose impersonal nature we can descry the corruption of communication and the unwholesome fragmentations of modern life.

Thus concludes my adventure in radio listening. Had it met with a more favorable reception—or just more of a reception, for that matter—I might have fixed my mind’s eye on a longer serial, such as Chandu the Magician. Instead, I will listen to the sounds of the city for a while as I mingle with the more tangible multitude. Perhaps you’ll be here when I return.

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Listening to “The Thing That Cries in the Night”; (Chapter Fourteen): Desperation Is a Clash by Night

Well, if prices had plummeted as rapidly as city temperatures, I’d be enjoying some terrific bargains today. Yesterday, I went downtown to my favorite electronics store and went hunting for a few old movies. I am not prepared to pay $25 or more for a copy of, say, Queen Kelly; nor am I eager to get my hands on $5 DVDs that turn Hollywood entertainment into headache-inducing eyestrainers. I always keep abreast of what’s in the stores by reading the notes and reviews posted by fellow bloggers like Brent McKee and Ivan Shreve; so I pretty much knew what to look our for while in town.

I had my eye on The Doris Day Show and the Ann Sothern sitcom Private Secretary, both of which I turned down for the reasons just stated. This time, I walked away with The Harold Lloyd Comedy Collection, a set of seven DVDs containing most of Lloyd’s best films, some shorts, stills, as well as episodes from his Old Gold radio program. With prices for this anthology as high as $100, I was pleased to have snatched it up for the relative bargain of $63. Today I will head downtown again to have a browse at the best second-hand bookstore in town (you know, the one featured in Absolutely Fabulous). Now, on with the show . . . I Love a Mystery that is.

On this day, 17 November, in 1949, creator-writer-director Carlton E. Morse opened the penultimate chapter of “The Thing That Cries in the Night,” the fifteen-part radio thriller I have been following for nearly three weeks now. Compared to the previous installment, today’s 10-minute segment is a decidedly noisy affair. It is the equivalent of a car chase sequence in an otherwise not uninspired detective story. For all its excitement, it is something of a cop-out.

Only yesterday, Morse was demonstrating how terrifying and mysterious a voiceless presence can be when the ambiguities of silence are introduced to challenge the sound-equals-life dynamics of radio drama. Silence, however, was dreaded by none more than the broadcasters, who filled the air with words, noise, and music to prevent listeners from twisting the dial or questioning the soundness of their receivers.

In Jack’s dialogue with death, Morse had found an ingenious way of giving silence a voice. Now, in a desperate attempt to crank up the thrills, his storytelling is in danger of being reduced to a frantic mess of juvenile tumult and shouting, a nocturnal free-for-all during which the stuffy air of the Martin mansion is filled with much mindless clamor and sense-numbing chloroform (the weapon of choice for Morse’s unseen and supposedly ethereal adversaries).

I Love a Mystery was always introduced as an “adventure-thriller”; and in episode fourteen, it is adventure that prevails. If silence is the stuff of mystery, adventure plays itself out in loud noise and boisterous speech. Will “The Thing” shut up when the mystery concludes tomorrow? Time for me to take a break from blogging and signal-hunting. The town beckons.

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Listening to “The Thing That Cries in the Night”; (Chapter Thirteen): Terror Is an Intangible Presence

Well, it is a mild, sunny afternoon here in the asphalt jungle (even though the trees on the block I used to call my neighborhood suggest another kind of jungle altogether). I’ll be off on a shopping spree in a moment, hunting for movies, books, and a few clothing essentials I just can’t seem to get in the UK. I will report on my tour of local second-hand book shops and video stores before long; but before I venture out, I must first pay another visit to a certain LA mansion that has been in my mind’s eye these past two and a half weeks.

I mean, of course, the dark house featured in Carlton E. Morse’s I Love a Mystery serial “The Thing That Cries in the Night.” In the thirteenth installment, heard on this day, 16 November, in 1949, Morse’s mystery exposes listeners to what is as rare on the streets of Manhattan as it is in radio drama: the disconcerting din of silence.

In the previous chapter, private investigator Jack Packard claimed to have untangled the mysteries of the Martin mansion, but refuses to share his thoughts with anyone, including his two partners. Doc Long and Reggie York. Staying put, despite Grandmother Martin’s attempt to dismiss her inquisitive retainers, Jack provides his bewildered friends with a list of cryptic instructions (such as peeling off the three top layers of the wallpaper in the bedroom of Charity Martin), to be carried out in the case of his demise.

Having sent all to their rooms, Jack remains behind in the sepulchral stillness of the deserted library to confront the “Thing.” Knowing less than our guide—who, for the first time, is keeping a secret from the audience—we cannot but cling to his every words as we try to determine whether Jack is facing a deathly adversary or dead air, whether the verbal sparring in the library, the repository of words, spells reasonable maneuvering or hapless fumbling.  Is the “Thing”?

Delivering his speech, Jack is interrupted by Doc, who staggers into the room, stammers that he has been hit over the head, and then collapses. The “Thing” makes itself heard once again, and Jack cries out for Reggie.  Things are getting frantic again; but it is that confrontation with nothingness in the library that, to me, is the most disturbing moment in “The Thing That Cries in the Night.”

And now, from the Martin library to Manhattan’s bookstores.  Perhaps I’ll find a used copy of Martin Grams’s I Love a Mystery companion.

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Listening to “The Thing That Cries in the Night” (Chapter Twelve): Pride Is a Fierce Old Lady

We are experiencing technical difficulties. I arrived in New York City yesterday after what seemed a well-nigh interminable journey by train and plane, prolonged rather than relieved by a sleepless stopover in Manchester, England. Now I can’t seem to get wireless access long enough to update and edit this journal. So far, I resisted having to consume cups of overpriced coffee for the privilege of keeping the silent few abreast of my adventures in living and listening.

Right now, this means resting my laptop under a scaffold while waiting for the rain to ease. Not quite the walk in the park I enjoyed yesterday (as pictured above). I am determined, though, to continue my three-week mission to explore strange goings-on, seek out new death and old civilization, to boldly venture deeper into the house of Martin, whence I’ll be reporting back as regularly as technology, weather, and footwear permit. Today’s installment, the twelfth in the fifteen-part radio thriller “The Thing That Cries in the Night,” was first broadcast during the East Coast revival of Carlton E. Morse’s I Love a Mystery program on this day, 15 November, in 1949.

Jack Packard, one of the three investigators hired to rid the formidable Mrs. Randolph Martin of her “granddaughter trouble,” makes a startling statement. He claims to know the identity of the mysterious “thing,” the menacing no-show that bawls like a baby, supposedly to warn the Martin’s of death and destruction.

It is unclear whether we are to regard the “thing” as a neo-gothic alarm system or as the destructive force that has already caused the death of two people and the injuries of other members of the Martin clan. So, Jack is in a position not only to put an end to the mystery but to prevent further crimes. Yet instead of sharing his knowledge, he keeps his two fellow adventurers, Doc Long and Reggie York as mystified as most of Morse’s listeners are likely to be at this point.

The rules of the game have changed: we are no longer Jack’s secret sharer. A compact has been broken. The police are on the scene of the crime; they, too are being left in darkness. Morse does not as much as give them a voice. They are figures of no consequence; and since they are not given a voice, we cannot expect any assistance from such muffled authorities.

Mrs. Martin is about to go back on another agreement. Just when the case shows promises of being solved, the old woman dismisses the men whose services she had been anxious to secure. So eager to protect whatever secrets are cloistered in her less-than-happy home, she even expresses herself pleased at the prospect that cracking this nut of a case might be the death of Jack.

Is Jack willing to pay so dearly for his supposedly superior position, a fiercely contested vantage point from which he is now able to threaten Mrs. Martin with the disclosure of her deadly secrets? Will the price of knowledge prove higher than the cost of ignorance? And will I manage to post again tomorrow? Please stay tuned.