With more than 500 episodes of “The Whistler” in the Old Time Radio Researchers’ collection at the Internet Archive, you can hear its spooky-voiced narrator introduce suspenseful and ironic stories about people from many walks of life. For the story “Night Final,” Jan. 28, 1948, the main character was a newspaper reporter:

“She was a newspaper woman, and a good one. Words came easily to her — fresh new interesting ways of saying what she saw, or felt, or heard. Her critics and colleagues agreed that regardless of her shortcomings as a person, Helen Conover was a superlative reporter — holder of the guild award for on-the-spot reporting, the first woman to win such an honor.”

When she gets a divorce, her husband has another assessment of her career, with a slight echo of Hildy Johnson’s speech about leaving her editor husband in “His Girl Friday.” But Helen’s husband isn’t an editor, he’s just angry about her infidelity:

“You’re a great girl, a fine reporter. I resent losing you, I admit it. It’s just too bad you didn’t take enough time out from your reporting to learn to be a woman.”

Will she be the heroine, villain or victim of her own story? Be prepared with a “what could go wrong?” routine news story about the circus coming to town, the memorable image of an attractive, confident reporter in a “red bolero jacket” (This is not an undercover assignment!), and another newspaper woman involved in the kind of double-twist ending that the Whistler’s plots were famous for. Give a listen.

Note: The quotes are thanks to an online copy of  the script, via the Generic Radio Archive…