Tag: I Love a Mystery (radio program)

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Listening to “The Thing That Cries in the Night”; (Chapter Nine): Destiny Is an Assigned Seat

Well, the scheduled power outage has been postponed due to regional flooding. I ought to be thankful, I guess, for one of the dreariest, wettest, and stormiest autumns ever to be weathered by the umbrella of a smile. Last night I was tolerably amused watching You’ll Find Out (1940), one of those star-studded Hollywood efforts whose chief purpose was to exploit and ostensibly promote the burgeoning radio industry by supplying listeners with images the mind’s eye could have very well done without. While the headliner of the movie, bandleader Kay Kyser, made my head ache with his bargain basement Harold Lloyd antics, the lavishly produced horror-comedy—co-starring Bela Lugosi, Peter Lorre, and Boris Karloff—nonetheless kept me in my seat.

You’ll Find Out makes much use of one of radio’s most intriguing technological novelties: the Sonovox. A patented sound effects device, the Sonovox could invest a trombone, a locomotive, or even a few raindrops (in short, anything capable of producing sound) with the power of human speech. Now, if only that deuced infant would speak up and let us know what it’s all about.

I am referring, of course, to the mysterious “Thing” in Carlton E. Morse’s I Love a Mystery serial “The Thing That Cries in the Night,” an old-time radio thriller I have been following for nearly two weeks now. On this day, 10 November, in 1949, the “Thing” made itself heard once again, announcing imminent death. When the Martin household’s peculiar baby alarm goes off tonight, another life is being claimed . . . the life of the prime suspect.

It is a thrilling twist in a story that, for two chapters, assumed the guise of a whodunit. In the previous installment, Job Martin, the heretofore good-natured drunk, was exposed as an ill-tempered cynic who showed little affection for his three tormented siblings. His youngest sister, Charity, promises to get a confession out of him, claiming that he was responsible for the murder of the Martin’s chauffeur. She urges Jack Packard, the man hired to investigate the mysterious goings-on, to round up all members of the household in the dining room.

Once they are assembled, Grandmother Martin insists on the observance of the family’s traditional seating arrangements. When the conference is just about to commence, the lights go out; yet no one has been within ten feet of the switch. The “Thing” begins to cry. It is not until the light is being turned on again that a gun goes off and Job is shot through the head.

This is the first murder committed in our presence. We are in the thick of it and, like the three members of the A-1 Detective Agency, left very much in the dark, despite the fact that the Martins and two of their hired investigators were standing right there in a brightly lit room when the shot was fired.

New questions arise: Was Job indeed the murderer of the Martin’s blackmailing hoodlum of a chauffeur? If so, he dodged the electric chair by taking that seat. Was he being silenced by one of his accomplices? If so, he must have been harboring a secret whose revelation is dangerous to another. Or is the “Thing” an otherwordly avenger of the sins committed in the house of Martin, a house doomed to fall?

Say, where were you when the lights went out?

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Listening to “The Thing That Cries in the Night”; (Chapter Eight): Suspicion Is a Frustrated Drunk

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?

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Listening to “The Thing That Cries in the Night”; (Chapter Seven): Agony Is a Child Heard, Not Seen

Well, here’s to the delights of absent-mindedness. In the pursuit of pleasurable thrills, it is only the forgetful, thoughtless, or ignorant man who is entirely self-sufficient. He never has to rely on others to maintain a cheerful state of glorious surprise. Last night, I was all prepared to see a touring production of Emlyn Williams’s Night Must Fall; but when I glanced at our theater tickets shortly before leaving, I noticed it was to be The Importance of Being Earnest, as staged by the Ridiculusmus company (you see, I had the date right at one point). As those not “born, or at any rate bred, in a handbag” will be undoubtedly aware, Ridiculusmus does Earnest (and Lady Bracknell, Miss Prism, Cecily and Gwendolen) with a cast of only two players and an assortment of ghastly costumes. Quite a romp, that! Night won’t fall until Thursday, and rather appropriately so, since that day the power is going to be cut off in our house (for maintenance, the “outage” notice read). It will be another blackout to misremember.

Anyway, let’s saunter over to the one house where power need never be in short supply—the theater of the mind. The stage is all set for the fall of the House of Martin. I am referring, of course, to the house that novelist-radio dramatist Carlton E. Morse built back in the late 1930s, an old-time radio serial that I am enjoying in the daily doses in which it was dispensed back when television was not yet ready for mass consumption.

If you’d like to join me in my daily inspections of that other bleak house (I am still following the BBC’s adaptation of Dickens’s thrilling story with great interest), you can find recordings of it in the Internet Archive. In chapter seven (as heard on this day, 8 November, in 1949), “The Thing That Cries in the Night” takes an unnerving turn.

“There ain’t no sense to nothing,” Texan adventurer Doc Long grumbles during a conference with his British pal, Reggie York. Jack Packard, the third member of their A-1 Detective agency, is merely giving instructions, but shares little about what he surmises with his fellow soldiers-of-misfortune. With questions piling up like dirty laundry in a bachelor’s pad and little opportunity to roll up one’s sleeves for some action, Morse’s adventurers—and his listeners—may have cause to be frustrated.

Something’s rotten all right—but just from where is this “stench of a decaying family tree” wafting? What is needed, for the sake of sanity, is empirical evidence. After all, the three amigos do not only have to find whoever murdered the Martin’s chauffeur and attempted to do away with or implicate the Martin siblings; they also need to solve the puzzle of the ominous “Thing,” the cries and giggles of an invisible infant foretelling each violent attack.

“That baby gag gets me down,” Fay Martin sneers, “A houseful of widows, spinsters, and neurotics. What’s a baby doing here?” Now, the permanently distraught Charity Martin warns that her brother Job is in imminent danger of adding to the body count. The murderous entity in their midst, she insists, is intent on rooting out the family tree altogether, killing off the Martins one by one. For now, however, Job has disappeared; and, as Doc, Reggie, and Hope stand by, it is Charity whose skin receives a few new slashes.

To the impatient Doc, the lack of certainty sure puts a damper on the prospect of being in a place where “all these female women are running around in flimsy wisps of lace, wanting to be rescued.” Who among the Martins really wants to be rescued—and who is in pursuit of them? It is an ill-defined chase in which clues are in short supply and alliances dubious.

To those listeners who align themselves with the benighted Doc in an effort to solve the case of a terrorized maiden whose mind does not appear to be altogether sound, “The Thing That Cries in the Night” may be little more than an overwrought mystery of the Gaslight school. The audience, of course, is encouraged to consider Doc’s momentary loss of brio as an act of misreading and to side with an imaginative fellow like Reggie, who is convinced that the puzzle will be solved eventually but declares the present state of confusion to be “deucedly interesting.”

Doc’s momentary frustration is a reminder that Morse, like many storytellers in the gothic tradition, felt compelled to offer his impatient audience, namely that ambiguity is its own reward.

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Listening to “The Thing That Cries in the Night”; (Chapter Six): Urgency Is an Opened Curtain

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!

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Listening to “The Thing That Cries in the Night”; (Chapter Five): Reality Is a Dead Chauffeur

Well, my sojourn in London was cut shorter than the hairs on the bald spot of a follicle-challenged skinhead. Turns out, I am even more allergic to cats than I thought and got the bloodshot peepers to prove it. We were supposed to stay with friends for the weekend; but their feline companion very nearly cut off my oxygen supply. Exhausted as I am, it seems I escaped breathing my last by a cat’s hair. Now I’m back in the old British west, seeking solace in listening anew to Carlton E. Morse’s radio serial I Love a Mystery thriller “The Thing That Cries in the Night.” So, what’s going on in the fifth chapter, as aired on 4 November 1949?

A few days ago, I made the distinction between the realism of hard-boiled detective fiction and the romantic melodramatics of gothic tales of terror. Does Morse draw the same line or isn’t he rather intent on blurring it? There has been a lot of tough talk in the previous chapters of “The Thing”; and the current installment continues in the hard-boiled vein.

Considering the Martin’s decaying family tree and the nightly outbursts of an invisible infant foretelling doom, it appears that Morse prefers to shift and waver between established genres. He does not quite invite his listeners to believe that anything goes (which would make it necessary for his three central characters either to prove their mortality or assume the roles of superheroes); yet, despite his Chandlerian realism, Morse does not want us to rule out the supernatural altogether. Daring us to pin down his outrageous fictions, he straddles or defies genres—much to our confusion, irritation, and delight. In this particular chapter, realism wins the day . . . almost.

There is a corpse in the entrance hall of the Martin mansion. What’s more, there are perfectly reasonable explanations for this death by gunshot: his employers, the Martins, feared and hated him (even though Hope, “the family wench,” did not mind the excitement of an occasional jaunt with the liveried blackmailer).

We know that the chauffeur was up “putting the screws” on the Martin family by threatening to divulge their dirty little secrets. Meanwhile, Fay confesses to having burned personal letters in an effort to protect hers. We don’t know quite what these secrets are. We cannot even be sure about Job’s evidence—he might just be too drunk to tell the truth about the whereabouts of his gun. We can only be certain that the troubles won’t come to an end in this chapter. After all, there are ten more to follow.

Morse guards many of his secrets, telling us only so much as not to frustrate and keep us wondering instead. Listening to I Love a Mystery, I sometimes feel like Job Martin, the drunkard brother of troubled Faith, Hope, and Charity. I am not in the know, but appreciate the intoxication of twilight. Just lucid or elucidated enough to realize that there is danger ahead, I stumble forward, groping for clues, or amuse myself failing to make much sense of it all. Perhaps I’ve even given up on the mystery as solvable puzzle and enjoy being taking for a ride.

It is time to bid farewell to Jack, Doc, and Reggie for the week. Tune in on Monday for more melodrama! Say, how satisfying (or necessary) is a solution if the mystery is as suspenseful and unpredictable as “The Thing That Cries in the Night”?

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Listening to “The Thing That Cries in the Night”; (Chapter Four): Hope Is a Wisp of Lace

Well, I’m off on a short trip to London this morning, but I will try to continue my scheduled serial reading of Carlton E. Morse’s old-time radio thriller I Love a Mystery while there. How this will work when I’m in New York City later this month I am not quite sure. We’ll see. Now, let’s hear what is going on in the Martin Mansion.

Not much . . . at first. Sibelius’s “Valse Triste” seems an apt theme for Morse’s mysteries. After every two steps forward, we are forced to take one step back. And here we are on a Thursday, recapitulating the events thus far. Such synopsizing is something a serial writer might best reserve for a Monday, when audiences, returning to their radio stories after a weekend elsewhere, could do with a little refresher discourse. Morse did not favor narrators and was dissatisfied with plot summaries or lead-ins read by the announcer, conventions he called “the greatest bugaboo the serial writer has to face.”

While bound to adhere to such techniques, I Love a Mystery otherwise shuns omniscient and retrospective narration. Instead, Morse creates scenes in which the experiencer of an event relates to other characters what the radio listeners have already overheard or undergone themselves.

There’s a knock at the door. In steps a woman dressed in little more than silk stockings and “wisps” of imported French lace. It is Hope Martin, who appears to be fully deserving of the epithet her sister Fay used when she called her “the family wench.” Intoxicated without being drunk, Hope just got out of a “slip-on, slip-off dress,” returning from a date with the family chauffeur, a date that ended in gunshots at some nightclub; she dropped the dress somewhere, because bloodstains just don’t “match the color scheme.”

Not quite Leave It to Beaver material, is it? As a dramatist writing in the shelter of invisibility, Morse could get away with more sex and violence than any pre-cable television writer. His fictions, while subject to censorship, resounded with “violence, blood, tough talk, and overtones of sex,” as cultural historian Russell Nye remarked in the early 1970s. Now for the violence.

While Hope is still showing off her scant attire, the “Thing” begins to cry again (a “baby ghost,” Doc suggests). There are screams. As the three men rush downstairs, they are greeted by Fay, who tells them, with considerably less of the proud “vulgarian” in her voice, that she just found the Martin’s chauffeur lying dead on the floor of the hall entrance. “And he’s got Hope’s dress . . . all over with blood.”

Say, just who’s got the dirtier mind: Morse or his listeners?

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Listening to “The Thing That Cries in the Night”; (Chapter Three): Faith Is a Secret Sharer

Last night, as the winds were yowling and pushing against the window panes with autumnal ferocity, I dug deep into our video library and retrieved the threadbare but engaging Dressed to Kill (1946), the final entry in Universal’s long-running series of Sherlock Holmes mysteries. I dropped off toward the end, truth be told; but, as my eyes closed in spite of myself, I thought what a fine radio thriller this particular picture would have made. Not that there wasn’t anything to see or worth watching; but the plot, involving a treasure hunt for three plain-looking music boxes whose tunes contain secret messages, is ideally suited to audio-dramatization.

I was reminded of a discussion I had a few years ago with a friend of mine who starred in the off-Broadway production of Perfect Crime. To what extent does or should a mystery depend on the medium in which it is played out? How much does its unraveling rely on visual clues, how much on the spoken word? Hush now, here comes the third installment of Carlton E. Morse’s radio thriller “The Thing That Cries in the Night” (originally aired on 2 November 1949).

Jack is in conference with Mrs. Randolph Martin, the formidable matriarch who previously confessed to “granddaughter trouble” but is unwilling to expound on the subject. “The Martin girls can do no wrong,” she declares. Yet one among her troubled charge prefers plain talk to false pride and etiquette. She is Faith Martin, the self-professed “vulgarian” of the family. And when she’s through flinging her nasty little character sketches at Jack, we can no longer doubt that the Martins are virtuous in name only.

According to Faith (who, eager to drop the misnomer, insists on being called Fay), the other members of the household are Hope, “the family wench,” and Cherry (Charity), a “plain dope, afraid of her own shadow”; there’s also a brother, Job, who seems to drown his sorrow in a steady stream of potent liquor. They are all very devoted, Fay explains—just not to staying on the path of righteousness:

. . . one day Job found out about firewater, and now he’s devoting his life to it. And one day I found out that there are some wonderfully disgusting words in the English language for self-expression. I’m devoting my life to them. And Hope discovered chauffeurs, and she’s devoting her life in that direction.

And Cherry, the “whispering mouse”? According to her sister, she “hasn’t discovered much of anything yet. So, she’s devoting her life to being afraid.

The “stench of a decaying family tree” which Jack senses to be “permeating the environment” is released at last in a barrage of epithets; but are these labels the real article? Are they any more apt than the names they denounce as ill-fitting, any more precise than the pronounced “they”—the menacing entities Cherry claims to be slashing her skin.

Even Fay feels compelled to revise her candid assessment of the Martin clan when she notices those marks on her sister’s arms. The wounds, at least, are concrete signs of danger; but how much value can we give to “ocular proof” if it only proves that someone is suffering?

Jack insists on evidence, on verifiable facts: “Who is the parent of the baby we heard crying?” he inquires. “Nonsense,” old Mrs. Martin protests. “There’s not a baby in this house. There hasn’t been for years,” Fay adds. Yet they all heard it—the eponymous “Thing.” And, as Cherry tells them in a tremulous whisper, “every time it cries, something horrible happens.”

What a way to end a chapter! Charity Martin’s prophetic tease leaves us dangling, defying us not to hang on; it undermines the certainties we thought we were dealt by Fay’s refreshingly plain talk. Now, this airing of family secrets, the gossipy revelation of a multitude of sins, makes way for a mystery decidedly more dreadful and dark . . .

Say, do you prefer your mysteries hard-boiled or gothically embroidered?

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Listening to “The Thing That Cries in the Night”; (Chapter Two): Charity Is a Wounded Stranger

Twenty-four hours have elapsed since last I caught up with Jack, Doc, and Reggie. After leaving them at the airport, in front of that mysterious limousine, I took a little Halloween detour and screened Charlie Chan at the Opera (1936), starring Boris Karloff. It is a neatly spun yarn, recycling threads of the Gaston Laroux classic, tossing in references to Faust and Frankenstein, and boasting an operatic score by Oscar Levant. Like I Love a Mystery, the film borrows freely from its literary ancestors, rather than stealing from them. The difference is in the wink, the knowing smile it produces on the lips of an audience who will not only pardon the borrower but appreciate the sharing. Genre-defying yet enriched by his artistic influences, Morse understood well to be tongue-in-cheek without losing his bite. And there is plenty of bite in the second installment of “The Thing That Cries in the Night.”

The stalling is over (don’t you agree?) and things, however intangible, are developing rather rapidly. Jack, Doc, and Reggie find themselves in the mansion of a certain—or rather uncertain—Randolph Martin, a host who does not deign to greet them. The house, as Jack describes it, is “overflowing with the refinements and niceties of an old family,” with “signs of the family tree almost everywhere.” Before they can continue with their inspection and speculations, the three adventurers encounter a distraught young woman who appeals to them in a tremulous voice: “Look. Somebody slashed me.”

It is a voice of someone not quite there—of someone forlorn, longing, or haunted. It is an anemic voice, but the speaker’s blood is flowing freely. It is the voice of a victim, all right, but who is her attacker? The woman’s reply to this pragmatic question is as insubstantial as the volume of her speech; “they” did it, she whispers, and “they” are trying to kill her.

Having dressed her wounds, Jack observes that it is “apparent that the family tree is beginning to show signs of decay.” “Rotten clean down to the root,” Doc agrees. Might the Martin residence be another House of Usher? Is the “family tree” of “The Thing” chopped from the same wood as Poe’s Gothic?

The wounded one is Charity, one of three sisters living in the stately home of the elusive Randolph Martin: Faith (the “armful” in the limousine), Hope, and Charity. “Whoever heard of naming girls Faith, Hope, and Charity?” Doc protests, “Sounds like a Texas camp meeting.” What’s in a name? With little more than proper nouns to go by, the listener is invited to put the Martin clan to the test, to determine whether the names rightly adhere to their bearers like a Dickensian label or whether the three women are virtuous in name only.

Suddenly, the air is filled with the cries of an infant, followed by sounds of a body taking a tumble. The noise subsides. A voice, stern, elderly and female, demands to know what happened. Before the perplexed guests can utter her name, the woman introduces herself as Randolph Martin.  “And I need help, she adds, “I am having granddaughter trouble.”

What might be the trouble? Blood on the carpet and secrets underneath? Having already been fooled once by a name—a woman called Randolph—listeners are advised to approach the ladies of the house with some trepidation. It is an intriguing naming game that Morse plays with us; after all, in radio drama, there is little more concrete to be had than uttered sounds.

Without an omniscient narrator to guide us, without any tangible clues in sight, we are at the mercy of each speaker. Well, you might argue, reality is a baby crying—but should we believe our ears?

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Listening to “The Thing That Cries in the Night”; (Chapter One): Danger Is a Block-Long Limousine

Today, as I have been announcing for quite some time now, broadcastellan will commence an experiment in shared listening. Perhaps, “experiment” is rather too scientific a term. It’s the sharing that matters. My idea was to listen to a popular American radio serial as audiences would have done in the 1940s—that is, in week-daily doses, rather than an omnibus edition. I have always wanted to experience Dickens’s fictions that way: not as stories all wrapped up in one complete volume, but as an adventure in reading that unfolds in installments. That is why I appreciate the current BBC TV adaptation of Bleak House, which recreates the cliffhanger sensation Victorian readers enjoyed as, week after week, they followed their favorite stories in the issues of periodicals like Household Words.

An expert storyteller in this tradition was Carlton E. Morse, whose radio thriller serial I Love a Mystery continued on this day, Halloween, in 1949, with a sequence bearing the invitingly penny-dreadful title “The Thing That Cries in the Night.”

Yes, even though it tossed listeners a new storyline on that Monday night, I Love a Mystery nevertheless continued where it had left off on the previous Friday. So, the first chapter of “The Thing That Cries in the Night” is best read not so much as a beginning than as a connecting piece in a continuous puzzler.

Following I Love a Mystery‘s sonic signature of train whistle, screeching tires, the strains of Sibelius’s “Valse Triste,” the chimes of a clock (and a narrated prologue no longer extant), “The Thing” takes off in mid-air.

The first sound we hear is the noise of a plane engine. The three central characters—adventurers-for-hire Jack (voiced by Russell Thorson), Doc (Jim Boles) and Reggie (Tony Randall)—are on their way. Up in the clouds and high on adventure, they recall the thrills and challenges of their last mission and debate what is to be done with the reward money they just pocketed.

During the ten minutes we spend with the trio, we witness little more than an exercise in comic deflation, as Texan “he-fighter” Doc Long is being joshed by his comrades (as they used to be called prior to the excesses of late 1940s anti-communism) and cut down to size by a stewardess immune to his macho charms.

Much to Doc’s chagrin, the young woman (portrayed by radio drama stalwart and I Love a Mystery regular Mercedes McCambridge) is entirely unimpressed by the newspaper account of Doc’s fight with a mountain lion, lines the “modern Tarzan” can’t help rereading with great relish. “Pooh!” she taunts him, “My folks live on a mountain ranch up in Washington. My mother scares mountain lions out of her chicken yard by shushing her apron at them.” To Doc, those are fighting words—and the downsized daredevil must find another fight to prove he is still all that.

When I first heard this banter back in the mid-1990s, I was as yet unfamiliar with the codes of Morse’s writing. New to radio dramatics and still bewildered by speech unsupported by visuals, I was pleased to realize how effortless it was for me to get acquainted with the characters and take part in their adventure; at the same time, I was frustrated that there was so little of it (adventure, that is) in this lighthearted vignette. All talk, no action.

Revisiting this first installment of “The Thing” now, listening to it as a transition, rather than an opening chapter, I can appreciate more fully the skill with which Morse developed his multi-part thrillers. Those three amigos are not, as Doc has it, “a bunch of doggone heroes.” Despite their daily derring-do, they are decidedly not super-human; they talk themselves into our everyday and become real to us in their foibles and shortcomings.

As Morse made clear, life’s adventures can await anywhere—in the jungles of South America and the streets of L.A. So, when Jack, Doc, and Reggie are surprised by a black limousine, “a block long,” waiting for them at the airport, something wicked and perilous is bound to come our way. Unable to resist the pretty “armful of girl” in the back seat, Doc exclaims: “Let’s climb in. What are we waiting for?”

In the economics of radio writing, I argued in Etherized Victorians, the comic deflation of Doc’s ego serves to counteract the “potential erosion of the serial’s thrill value. To characters so puerile and vulnerable, hopping into an unsolicited auto may be as hazardous as hunting werewolves and vampires.”

Of course, “What are we waiting for?” is the very question on the minds of Morse’s listeners. Whose car is this? Why is it there? Where will it take us? The chief benefit of a serial is that such unanswered questions linger in the imagination of the audience. The stalling is over—and the next installment will have to prove worth the wait.

Say, don’t just wait for the next installment of my blog. As Sibelius’s waltz fades out, tell me how “The Thing That Cries in the Night” keeps swirling round in your mind’s eye!

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Loving Mysteries: Between the Martin Mansion and Bleak House

Well, I am still hoping other internet tourists will join me in rediscovering I Love a Mystery beginning this Halloween (see previous post for details). I know, it might seem sacrilegious to ignore the anniversary of that most famous of all Halloween pranks, “The War of the Worlds,” in favor of Carlton E. Morse’s serial thriller. Actually, “The War” was waged on the night before Halloween (30 October 1938), which means that I can listen forward without remorse to reviewing the first installment of “The Thing That Cries in the Night,” a neo-gothic mystery starring Mercedes McCambridge (as the tortured Charity Martin) and Tony Randall (as Reggie Yorke, one of the three intrepid investigators, pictured above, who are called upon to examine the Martin’s rotten family tree). So, consider tuning in and coming along for the ride.

In the meantime, I am also looking forward to the new adaptation of Bleak House starring Charles Dance (as Mr. Tulkinghorn) and Gillian Anderson (as Lady Dedlock). It has been nearly ten years since last I read the novel, my favorite among Dickens’s works; so perhaps I won’t notice the liberties taken with the original. Beginning this Thursday on BBC One, the complex melodrama will be played out in fifteen parts, just like Morse’s “Thing.”

Not that the comparisons end there. There are deadly secrets, the proverbial skeletons in the closet, and a curse on both of those decidedly bleak houses, the Martin mansion and Dickens’s eponymous edifice. The overused label “soap opera” has been attached to the BBC production, along with other disclaimers, such as the introduction of new characters; whatever the terminology, serialization and bowdlerization are quite in keeping with Victorian practices.

I might put aside my copy of Don Quixote for the duration and reread Bleak House, now that the days are getting shorter and the winds are a-wuthering, if only to re-encounter the carefree Harold Skimpole and the careworn Richard Carstone, two characters of whom I once fancied myself some kind of composite.

Perhaps I’m someone else among the dramatis personae now; that’s one of the pleasures of rereading. As long as I won’t turn into Mr. Turveydrop. . . . Say, what kind of Dickensian character are you?