Harry Heuser

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.

Well, before I continue packing my suitcase for a trip back to New York City, I am going to take a moment to consider the journey proposed in my second broadcastellan poll, now closed. Venturing to shed temporal fetters, I asked the following question: “If you could travel in time, when would you stop?” Here are the results (30 votes):

In the distant past (3% / 1 vote); One to three centuries into the past (10% / 3 votes); A few decades into the past (23% / 7 votes); I’ll stay put, thank you very much (17% / 5 votes); A few decades into the future (3% / 1); One to three centuries into the future (10% / 3); In the distant future (20% / 6). Since I always insist on the reader’s right to question a question, rather than accepting it outright, I added the to me valid response “I think it’s a waste of time to think this through” (13% / 4 votes).

Given the subject of this blog, I am not surprised that a chance to return to the recent past would be more welcome by those who care to read these words than any of the other time travel opportunities. I must confess to having expressed my preference for staying right when I am, even though I half regret my lack of daring. I am not sure whether I would be able to resist an offer to walk among the Victorians I have read and studied for so long.

My steadfast refusal to see myself as nostalgic got the better of me, I guess. Besides, I neglected to clarify whether this exploration into the fourth dimension would mean a return trip. The problematics of polling questions did not prevent me from creating a new and considerably less esoteric survey, which will run until my return from the US in early December. What might it yield? Time will tell.

The clinging to a supposedly happier past and the relentlessness of time’s onward march are very much at the heart of Emlyn Williams’s Night Must Fall, the theatrical thriller I saw yesterday in a production by Clwyd Theatr Cymru. The play opened with the amplified and hence ominous sound of a ticking clock in the home of the superannuated Mrs. Bramson, a self-righteous, imaginary invalid who derives pleasure ordering others about while seeking refuge in the orderly morality of Victorian melodrama. Her time has run out as surely as night must fall.

In Williams’s drama, the retreat into the past is exposed as a false comforter. It offers a superior vantage point, a chance to assign meaning, catalogue and judge; as such, it leaves us unprepared both for the daily negotiations the present in its contingencies demand and for the future that looms dauntingly vague, unfathomable to all who lack a sense of vision. Williams kills off the past as symbolized by the tyrannical Mrs. Bramson; but he offers no future to Dan, her killer, or to Olivia, the old woman’s deeply dissatisfied niece and companion who eventually strips her inhibitions to take his side. The past is not to be conquered by breaking with it violently, Williams suggests; instead, it is the responsibility of the living to dwell and progress in the present with the full understanding that night must fall on us all.

The formidable matriarch of Carlton E. Morse’s radio thriller “The Thing That Cries in the Night” has much in common with Mrs. Bramson; and her grandchildren are all as eager to escape her clutches as Williams’s miserable Olivia, even if it means having to resort to violence or side with their violators.

In the tenth chapter, as heard on this day, 11 November, in 1949, the unconscious Charity Martin is found naked, bound and gagged in front of the furnace down in the basement of the Martin mansion. Who brought her there—and why?

Reggie, one of the three investigators hired to deal with old Mrs. Martin’s “granddaughter trouble,” fears that the young woman was about to be tossed into the flames. Are the violent deeds committed in the house of Martin to be read as an attempt to bury a less than joyful or healthy past—a past whose rotten secrets are fiercely guarded by old Mrs. Martin? Who is playing Atropos? And who might benefit from robbing the Martin children of their future?

Playing by the rules of Morse’s radio serial, I shall have to wait until Monday to find out just what the future will hold. In the meantime, I am living in the now, packing my bags and taking off for New York City, my former home. Catching up with my past while making decisions about the future . . . it’s the adventure I call my present.

Well, here I am, a German in Britain’s wild Welsh west writing about American radio culture of the 1940s. And now that there are finally a few good reasons to follow some made-in-the-UK television programs, I am about to leave for New York City. Anyway. I’ll just have to catch up with The X-Factor, Bleak House, and the new season of Little Britain when I return in early December. I sure had a laugh looking at these pictures from Little Britain‘s forthcoming third season. In the meantime, enjoying a glass of brandy by the fireside, I will continue my daily visits to the Martin mansion, as I listen to the eighth installment of the radio thriller “The Thing That Cries in the Night.” Part of Carlton E. Morse’s I Love a Mystery series, it was originally broadcast in the US on this day, 9 November, in 1949.

Job Martin, a supposedly good-natured drunk, has been forcefully returned to the home of his grandmother, the formidable Randolph Martin. Was he just out for a drink? Or is he responsible for the murder of the Martin’s chauffeur? After all, Job’s gun was found next to the corpse and the chauffeur’s attempts to blackmail the less-than-saintly Martins would be motive enough. According to his sister Charity, however, Job is likely to become a victim himself. She claims that he is in grave danger of falling prey to “them,” mysterious and as yet unseen adversaries intent on killing off the Martins one by one.

Meanwhile, the three Martin sisters are locked up in their rooms. For their safety? Jack Packard, hired by Mrs. Martin to prevent further “granddaughter trouble” without being told just what this “trouble” might be, looks upon all of them as suspects in a case as muddled and bizarre as any yet tackled by Jack, Doc, and Reggie, the trio of the A-1 Detective Agency.

This particular instalment plays more like a conventional whodunit, and Job, who is rather nasty when sober, comes across as a prime suspect. “Look,” he sneers, “we got a motto in this house. You mind your business and I mind mine.” He sure shows little concern for his three sisters. He dismisses Hope’s near-death by chloroform as an attempted suicide and, when reminded of the bloody attacks on Charity, remarks disdainfully that “somebody scratched her with a pin.” And if something happened to Fay, he would “send flowers to the funeral.” Besides, Job reminds his interrogator, “nobody is dead, except for the chauffeur, and he doesn’t count.” In vino veritas? Or does the truth come out when the booze runs out?

Having wavered between hard-boiled action and neo-gothic thrills, Morse’s mystery commits itself to one genre for once, putting in place one of the genre markers it previously tossed about in willful abandon. We are in whodunit territory now, with a line-up of suspects or at least some clarification of motives in a murder case whose killings seemed rather arbitrary so far. We have gotten to know all the members of the Martin household, and we have learned enough about them to find them sufficiently suspicious to allow that keeping whatever secret their home is harboring might well be worth a few more murders.

One aspect of the case remains as puzzling to me as it is to the impatient Doc Long: why has Mrs. Martin engaged the three adventurers-for-hire to take care of her troubles if she is so unwilling to disclose just what those troubles might be?

Before heading out to see a touring production of that crowd-pleasing Emlyn Williams potboiler Night Must Fall, I am going to keep us all up to speed on the latest happenings involving “The Thing That Cries in the Night.” For those stopping by here unawares: I am currently tuned in to a fifteen-chapter adventure story by novelist-radio playwright Carlton E. Morse. For three weeks, I am recreating the experience of listening to an old-time radio serial as such melodramas-on-installment-plan were enjoyed by millions of Americans in the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s—one chapter at a time.

Morse’s I Love a Mystery, of which “The Thing” is a particularly memorable storyline, was first heard in the US in 1939; the series developed a large following over the course of its run and was later referenced by authors as diverse as Stephen King, Philip Roth, and Anne Sexton. After a five-year hiatus, during which I Love a Mystery was turned into a short-lived series of motion pictures and an episodic radio thriller titled I Love Adventure, the serial was revived in the fall of 1949. So, let’s pick up today’s piece of the puzzle, as it was broadcast over the Mutual radio network in the US on this day, 7 November, in 1949.

“Unhealthy ideas grow in darkness,” adventurer Jack Packard cautions during another talk with Mrs. Randolph Martin, the old woman who called upon him (and his two comrades, Doc Long and Reggie York) to solve or cover up the strange and dangerous goings-on in her posh L.A. mansion not far from Tinseltown. It’s a great line that almost serves as an advertisement for the sex, violence, and neogothic thrills only the theater of the mind could mass-produce with quite this immediacy. The Martin’s chauffeur has been found dead in the hallway.

As we learn today, he was hoodlum whose racket was blackmail. Apparently, he had been in a shootout at a sleazy nightclub. Much to the vexation of haughty Grandma Martin, one of her troublesome offspring was on his arm when it happened. Her name is Hope, and all she ever hopes for, it seems, is to get undressed and have a good time with anyone—even with a guy who is “putting the screws” on her own family.

Hope seems to have a killer instinct when it comes to picking Mr. Right-for-now. The dead man is still clutching one of her “slip-on, slip-off” numbers, covered in blood. There’s a gun on the floor—and it might be her brother’s.

What is going on in this house? Mrs. Martin is not telling. She seems to have hired Jack, Doc, and Reggie for the sole purpose to protect her offspring—not from mischief or murder, mind you, but from the blight of a bad reputation. The Martins have had fair warning—or make that unfair warning. They have a peculiar alarm system installed in their house: whenever something awful is about to happen (such as a murder, or an attempted one), a baby begins to cry. Thing is, there ain’t no baby in the house—it’s the “Thing,” the mysterious “they” Mrs. Martin’s granddaughter Charity (or Cherry) keeps muttering about in a hushed, trembling voice.

The formidable matriarch of the Martin household dismisses the thought of an oracle in diapers as “a lot of romantic nonsense.” “Twice slashed and thrown downstairs,” Jack scoffs (referring to Charity’s recent experiences), “and you call that romantic nonsense?” Hoodlums and hooey—the clash between hard-boiled thrills and gothic terror continues in this chapter, which ends in another sounding of the Martin’s Delphic alarm.

On this bumpy night, someone has tried to bump off nymphomaniac Hope by taking her breath away with a generous dose of chloroform. “Murder sure is on the loose in this man’s house,” Doc exclaims, putting an end to this installment of Morse’s serial.

Whether just careless in his writing, attempting to spice up the script, or eager to clear up something suggested previously, Morse has Mrs. Martin’s grandson Job recall a dream about a dame in a swimsuit; in an earlier chapter, however, we were told that Job—a lovable loser who reminds me of James Dean—”hates girls.” Are we to assume that he was having nightmares?

As if to make up for an unexceptional entry in his serial, Morse himself steps in front the microphone for a curtain call. In an appeal to the listener, he (pictured above), along with actors Russell Thorson and Tony Randall, requests donations to a charity called Foster Parents Plan for War Children. More than four years after the end of World War II, millions of children in Europe were starving or suffering from malnutrition (my rubble-rebel of a black-markets haunting father, then aged 8, being one of them).

“Remember,” Morse concludes, “that you too can be a Santa Claus for all god’s children.” Hoping for a few thrills this season (or, for that matter, tomorrow), Mr. Morse!