Night Transmissions

Suspense is one of the classics of old time radio. Some fans have special favorites in the thriller/chiller/macabre genre, but most agree that Suspense is right at the top.

All the production values were first class. With Bernard Hermann, who had worked with Orson Welles on the Mercury Theater and would work with Alfred Hitchcock, doing the musical scores.

Suspense – “Sorry Wrong Number” aired on May 5 of 1943.

Now let’s see, how much did the producers of suspense and the entertainment industry think of this Lucille Fletcher play?

How high the Moon?

Between 1943 and 1960 Suspense produced eight versions of this play, each time starring Agnes Moorhead, of which only seven have survived.

In 1948 There was a movie starring Barbara Stanwyck with Lucille Fletcher expanding and  opening up her radio script. That year The Lux Radio Theater would produce a another radio version based on the movie with Barbara Stanwyck reprising her role of Mrs. Stevenson.

This particular episode is the first of the eight   and is at a slight variance from your normal run of Suspense in that it is taken  from an Armed Forces radio rebroadcast.  The only real difference being the opening and closing which differ slightly from the standard.

Violet Louise Fletcher`s (who was born in in 1912 and died in 2000) long list of credits include another very famous radio play, The Hitchhiker. Originally Performed by Orson Welles on his Mercury Theater  Of The Air then later adapted for an episode of, The Twilight Zone. Much more recently  served as the inspiration for an episode of Supernatural.

If this one episode is insufficient for you here is a link to all seven surviving episodes of Suspense featuring, “Sorry Wrong Number” as well as the Lux Radio Theater’s version.

The CBS Radio Mystery Theater was an ambitious effort by veteran radio producer Himan Brown to revive interest in American radio drama. Every night from 1974 to 1982, host E.G. Marshall (laterTammy Grimes) ushered listeners through a creaking door — for 52 Min of “the fear you can hear.” Brown produced nearly 200 new episodes of Mystery Theater every year, using both original scripts and adaptations of classic stories by Edgar Allen Poe, Mark Twain,Robert Louis Stevenson and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The Mystery Theater brought many veterans from radio’s golden age back before the microphone, including Agnes Moorehead, Richard Widmark,Celeste Holm, Mercedes McCambridge and Howard Da Silva. The show also featured performances from many up-and-coming stage and film actors, including Tony Roberts, John Lithgow, Morgan Fairchild, Mandy Patinkin and Sarah Jessica Parker.

The CBS Radio Mystery Theater won the George A. Peabody Award in 1974.

After eight years and 1,399 shows, the show ended its run on December 30, 1982. And was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 1990.

CBS Mystery Theater – Two plus Two Equals Death Part 1 April 29, 1976.

Bare in mind that this was written by Alfred Bester so it may turn out a bit different.

CBS Mystery Theater – “Two plus Two Equals Death” part 2.

Also in this segment, What’s He Doing in There?

What’s He Doing in There? is a short story from Fritz Leiber and was originallypublished in Galaxy Science Fiction for December 1957.

“He went where no Martian ever went before—but would he come out—or had he gone for good?”

Originating from WKY in Oklahoma City Dark Fantasy was a short lived program (producing only 31 episodes) dedicated to tales of the unknown on Friday nights  for parts of 1941 and 1942.

Oklahoma City was far from alone in producing it’s own successful series. In point of fact many excellent programs were produced in places that today would seem surprising. Of course, thinking about it, the barriers to entry to radio production were and are much lower than for movies or television. All you really need is a little equipment and a few talented people of which there was then, and is now, no monopoly of in Hollywood.

Dark Fantasy  had a shoestring of a budget which the show was able to rise above through the creative establishment of an effective but spare atmospheric ambiance resulting in an excellent show that was, in some ways, well ahead of it’s time.

Dark Fantasy was written by Scott Bishop, who would later write for The Mysterious Travelerand The Sealed Book.

Keith Paynton served as announcer.

 This episode of Dark Fantasy begins at a funeral where there is a bit of a commotion when somebody sees the corpse’s hand move. You see while his body is lying in the church Carl Fisher’s soul is in a much warmer place you can guess the place, another hint, the air is filled with brimstone. Don’t worry about Carl, well  on second thought, maybe you should worry about Carl. One thing is for sure though…

Carl, won’t be lonely not with the devil for company.   Maybe it’s not as bad as it seems. It seems that the devil has a offer for him .

I guess Carl has never read Faust.

May-hap it’ll work out better for him.

Produced and directed by Willis Cooper (Lights Out, Quiet Please) The Crime Club was a series that ran in 1946 and 1947, featuring murder and mystery stories.

The radio series opens as a phone rings and a voice answers, “Hello, I hope I haven’t kept you waiting. Yes, this is the Crime Club. I’m the Librarian…” (Actually it’s Raymond Johnson (best known as the host of Inner Sanctum).

Although there exists no evidence of a contractual arrangement between the Mutual Network and Doubleday publishing even a casual exploration of the titles in  this series makes it clear that the inspiration for the series has to be  the literary imprint, The Crime Club.  As most of the stories told were adaptations from this Doubleday series.

This imprint of books began in 1928 with the publication of The Desert Moon Mystery by Kay Cleaver Strahan (creator of one of the first female fictional detectives).

The imprint continued to publish until 1991.

Aaron Marc Stein (1906-1985), provided the novel of the same name (published in 1940) from which this radio play is adapted. Stein who specialized in mystery fiction enjoyed considerable success with many of his works being translated into German, French, and Spanish.

In this story an old man and his fortune are the subject of interest and, in the end, a motivation for murder. A murder and murder who are undone by shadows on a roll of film.

This program stars, Raymond Edward Johnson, Sidney Smith, Stedman Coles (adaptor), Roger Bower (producer, director).

This is a pretty good story, mostly quite well presented and reasonably well acted. It moves right along, but unfortunately, as often happens with attempts to adapt a full-length novel to a 25 or 26 min. format for radio shortcuts were taken. And I at least, end up not entirely satisfied with the pacing. The ending in particular feels rushed.

N.B.C Short Story was not a commercial success lasting as it did only one season in 1951..

That’s a hell of a way to start an introduction isn’t it? Well it is true. But then, we all know that commercial success and artistic success do not necessarily ride the same horse. That was certainly the case with this series.

One thing this series does do is to provide evidence of how compatible the short story and the half hour anthology format so common in radio was . Utilizing as it did the short stories of many of the best writers of the era, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, many others.

Very high on any list of suspense/horror writers would be Shirley Jackson. This is her timeless short story, “The Lottery”. A justifiably famous story that takes  place in a small town Probably one not unlike Bennington, Vermont, where Jackson lived  and worked.

The strength of this story lies in Jackson’s ability to expose the unexamined evil in everyday life that goes  right down to the root of human nature itself. There is a well produced reading of the short story provided by the New Yorker  magazine available Here.

Alien Worlds was an American syndicated radio show that produced 26 episodes in 1979 beginning on January 7th. With its excellent soundtrack and production standards The successful series eventually would play on over 500 radio stations all over the country. Between 1979 and 1980 the series found even more success internationally lottery justifiably famous story after it was picked up in New Zealand and Australia.

The stories involve the governing body for the development and exploration of space, the I.S.A. (International Space Authority). Organized by all earth nations, the ISA advances the interests of humans in interstellar space. Their base is officially named “The Arthur C. Clarke Astronomical Observatory” but is mostly referred to as, “Starlab”. From here a small cadre of scientists diplomats and explorers and a computer named after Sherlock’s smarter older brother Mycroft, undertake awesome responsibilities as humanities emissaries to the stars.

Aside from the 26 programs that were broadcast; there were four more produced but never aired.

Returning from a patrol, Capts. Graydon and Griff salvage a metallic space capsule that nearly collides with their ship. Alienologist David Ballin, while examining the capsule alone, is overtaken and transformed into a strange placenta that duplicates his DNA.

Oddly enough this turns out to not be as bad as it would seem.

Produced in New York, Murder At Midnight was heard over the Mutual Network starting on Sept. 16th of 1946 until Sept. 8th of 1947. Produced by radio station WJZ. The show was known to occasionally reproduce scripts that had been performed on Inner Sanctum. This practice allowed the show to feature tales of murder most macabre by some of radio’s top writers without paying top dollar.

The show was filled with tales of death and mayhem, not always at midnight. The show was hosted by Raymond Morgan with his memorable introduction, “… The witching hour, when night is darkest, our fears the strongest, our strength at it’s lowest ebb. Midnight when the graves gape open and Death strikes”.

The cast featured Elspeth Eric, Mercedes McCambridge, Barry Kroeger, Betty Kane, Carl Frank, Barry Hopkins, Lawson Zerbie. Charles Paul played the creepy organ music, and Anton M. Leader directed.

I have grown to love “Murder at Midnight”. Certainly I Know that the show is often silly. But it has cultivated the grace of becoming Camp. The program is far more “Noir” than it’s sister program Inner Sanctum taking as, it does, a more hard-boiled approach to the supernatural.

A man just out of jail after fifteen years, kills those who sent him there…one at a time. The program has a good grisly ending which of course adds to its pleasure for me.

Robert Newman was the writer  and Louis G. Cowan produced.

There is a short story from Philip K Dick, “The Eyes Have It”.This story was published in Science Fiction Stories #1 sometime in 1953 (I think this is probably wrong. At least this story is not cited as being among the contents of this collection in the Wikipedia article). It is in public domain and is  available here.

We will be going out with a song from Thomas Edison Records  recorded in 1901, Silas Leachman’s, Fortune-Telling Man.  

This song  might be considered racist today as it was performed by a white performer in black-face. On the other hand while the practice of performing in black-face is very much frowned on today. Silas Leachman (1859-1936) was a very popular performer who often performed music composed by black artists who regrettably had few outlets for their creativity. Yet I am uncomfortable in suggesting any positive side to this practice.

However I feel about it, it is also undeniably a historic cultural artifact.

A spin off from Suspense, Escape ran on CBS from 1947 to 1954, and dealt in a wide variety of stories: science fiction, horror, murder.

“Bird of Paradise” was adapted from the short story of the same name by John Russell, first published in Colliers, August 19, 1916.

Andrew Harben, a want-a-be  fortune hunter, arrives at one of the spice Islands. Once there he makes his way to a dealer in rare birds. Then with more muscle and ambition than good sense, attempts to muscle his way into the trade.

Success, after a fashion, he does find. While wandering the Solomon Sea he succumbs to an illness. Barely alive he and his boat make landfall. Uncertain of where he is, it is nevertheless here that he finds this opportunity and his nemesis. Oh, and the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. Well, there’s always a Dame. Ain’t there?

Held prisoner on the island by a huge man.  He is nothing more than a slave.

This is not what he intended for himself. It does not fit in with his plans  at all!

The story was adapted for radio by John Meston and produced/directed by Norman MacDonnell. John Dehner starred and the cast included Andrew Harbin and Lawrence Dobkin.

Inner Sanctum presents a marry tune, ” Song of the Slasher”; Which originally aired on April 24 of 1945.

Taking its name from a popular series of mystery novels, Inner Sanctum Mysteries debuted over NBC’s Blue Network in January 1941.

 Inner Sanctum Mysteries featured one of the most iconic openings in radio history. First an organist hit’s a dissonant chord. Next a doorknob turns, and the “creaking door” slowly began to open. So impressive was this opening that when South African radio ran its own version of the show it was called The Creaking Door

Every week, Inner Sanctum told stories of ghosts, murderers and lunatics, with a cast consisting of veteran radio actors. Although Produced in New York, there were occasional guest appearances by Hollywood stars such as Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre and Claude Rains.

Raymond”, the host, had a droll sense of humor, and an appetite for ghoulish puns. Raymond’s influence can be seen among horror hosts everywhere, from The Crypt-Keeper to Elvira, and even more so among his contemporaries on radio .”Raymond” was played until 1945 by Raymond Edward Johnson. Then Paul McGrath took over and played “Raymond” until the show ended production in 1952 .

Producer Hiram Brown was so taken with the creaking door that when he produced and directed The CBS Radio Mystery Theater in the 1970s he would use it again.

Inner Sanctum Mysteries was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 1984.

MindWebs, was a program of Science fiction stories that ran on WHA radio in Madison, Wisconsin from 1976 to 1984. The programs are actually more like audio books than audio drama, or really, maybe, someplace in between. The producers of the show took some of the very best science fiction short stories and gave them a dramatic reading with multiple performers taking the parts of various characters. These performances are rounded off with the addition of good, atmospheric background music and excellent, realistic sound effects.

Edmond Hamilton was a pulp science fiction writer of the highest reputation, a veteran writer who was not only popular with readers, but also a very prolific writer who managed his prodigious output without sacrificing quality (according to Jack Williamson, in his biography Wonder’s Child, Hamilton sent 40 stories to Farnsworth Wright at Weird Tales without a single rejection or request for revision). And on something of a personal note; He was one of my absolute favorite writers of all time, beginning in about 1960 with his novel , The Haunted Stars. 

I think I’ve read every one of Hamilton’s novels.

The Man who Returned” was first published in the February 1934 edition Of Weird Tales.

Is he dead, or is he not dead? That is the question.

***

I have posted links to some of Edmund Hamilton’s works that are in the public domain. This includes both E-books and voice recordings as done by Various people at the Librivox Project.

Segment four is an episode of Strange As It Seems about, “The Author Who Ate His Book” From somewhere in between 1935 and 1939. 

Well, the title of the episode tells a part of the story but not all. There are four or five segments in this 15 min. episode, not all of them amazing.

I did not, for example, know that  Calvin Coolidge was never a governor.  But  I must say that I do not find this fact  to be particularly strange.

Crime Classics is sometimes called a, “Docudrama“( I know I’ve been guilty of that myself).  But I have come to think that this is a bit too grand a claim. To start off with you have, in the person of the host, a completely fictional “expert”. There is not now nor was there ever a ,”Thomas Hyland” (played by Lou Merrill ). Also, I have found while researching backgrounds of individual programs the historical content to be a bit dodgy; with the show willingly repeating legends and interesting anecdotes as well-established facts. Nonetheless, I will rise in defense of the program (of which I am very fond), to remind you that the entertainment industry of the 1950s was not different from that of our own time when inconvenient facts are simply not allowed to interfere with a good story. 

I do not think that producer/writer Elliott Lewis intended for these shows to be taken as historical documents. He was, after-all, a producer of popular entertainment using the vehicle of tongue-in-cheek re-creations of some of history’s more interesting crimes.

The fact is Crime Classics freely mixes fact and fiction and tosses in apocryphal and anecdotal details as garnishments. I don’t think the producers were attempting to create an historically accurate account but entertainment. In this they succeeded, for entertaining they were and are.

And so we are off…

“The Boorn Brothers and the Hangman–A study in Nip and Tuck” which takes place in early 19th-century New England presents itself as the true tale of a wife who, with her two brothers, plot to dispose of her rather lack-wit husband.

I Have to say that the series, in this case, exhibits a somewhat loose connection to the facts. The story is based on something that actually did happen and it happened to the people named in the location given. But, in several of the details should not be trusted.

If you’re interested in knowing more about this case I ran into a pretty good, not overly verbose discussion:

Here.

 Light’s Out, is one of the most famous radio shows of all time. Pretty much everyone has heard of it. Although , I admit sometimes this awareness is limited to Bill Cosby’s Chicken Heart routine.

“Knock at the Door” is a fairly decent ghost story that starts with a woman who drowns her mother-in-law in a basement well.That’s pretty bad but soon she hatches a plot to dispose of her not too bright husband in the same way.

Ah, but mothers love takes a hand from beyond the grave, or maybe it’s just from the grave. Whatever… mama loves her boy.

It’s a fun little ghost yarn that has everything you’d want from old-time radio horror. Oh, and on what I consider to be on the positive side. The three main characters are completely unlikeable.

I enjoyed this episode where once again Oboler displays his ability, his facility, with dialogue.  …

X Minus One is considered the finest science fiction drama ever produced for radio. It was  not the first. That honor belongs to 2000+. It wasn’t the second, That would be Dimension X. In fact the first 15 episodes of it’s  1955 to 1958 run on NBC were new versions of Dimension X episodes. The remainder were all most entirely adaptations of recently published science fiction stories (Mostly from Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine) usually written by the leading writers of the time, including  Philip K. Dick, Fritz Leiber, J.T. McIntosh, Robert A. Heinlein, Frederik Pohl and Theodore Sturgeon.

This episode of X minus one is the adaptation of a Robert Sheckley story, “Early Model”, which first appeared in “Galaxy Science Fiction” for August of 1956.

It’s the story of a first contact specialist saddled with this bulky device called a, “Proteck” for its test run.

Well wouldn’t you know it! It turns out that the, “Proteck” isn’t quite up to the job. Well, afterall it’s just a “Early Model”.

Robert Sheckley (July 16, 1928 – December 9, 2005) was a Hugo and Nebula nominated American author. First published in the science fiction magazines of the 1950s, his numerous quick-witted stories and novels were famously unpredictable, absurdist and broadly comical.

A few quotes:

In 1939, with his own money, Oboler recorded an audition record of his play The Ugliest Man In the World, from which he hoped to launch a new radio series of idea plays. He brought the recording to his network, NBC. At the time, NBC was looking to launch an experimental radio series to rival CBS‘s Columbia Workshop. NBC was also looking for a radio writer and director to rival CBS’s Norman Corwin. NBC gave Oboler his own series, without a sponsor and with complete creative control. It was NBC that named the series Arch Oboler’s Plays. It was an almost unheard of honor. The time slot was less auspicious, the series occupied the Sunday 7-7:30 period opposite Jack Benny. An impressive roster of actors worked for scale to appear in Oboler’s plays, actors such as Bette Davis, Ronald Colman, Edmond O’Brien, Elsa Lanchester,James Cagney. Perhaps the most memorable broadcast was Oboler’s adaptation of Dalton Trumbo‘s Johny Got His Gun, starring James Cagney. The harrowing story of John Bonham, a World War I casualty with no limbs, eyes, ears, or mouth, was particularly suited to radio. Oboler created striking sound effects for the play, including the eerie vibration of bed springs, which Joe Bonham learns to recognize as the movement of people entering and exiting his hospital room.

Oboler’s series was so successful that it attracted the sponsorship of Proctor and Gamble. The new series was titled Everyman’s Theatre. Everyman’s Theatre was essentially Arch Oboler’s Plays with commercial sponsorship. The series ran from 1940 to early 1941. Oboler lost patience with the series because of the middle commercial interruption that came during his plays. After the series ended, it took almost a year before Oboler’s services were called on again.

Arch Oboler’s Plays was Oboler’s breakout dramatic showcase over Radio. Everyman’s Theater further established Oboler’s versatility and range, while underscoring Oboler’s growing appeal to a far wider audience than he’d already established with Lights Out!. Though eight years his senior, the diminutive Oboler, while never as widely popular as Orson Welles, invites comparison to the other great young playwright-actor-director. Their skills were clearly each other’s equal, their versatility had already been amply demonstrated by 1940, and their genius was indisputable. It’s also clear that both Wyllis Cooper and Norman Corwin served to influence and inform Oboler’s growing, wider appeal.

The Clock:

Reference Please(01/05/47)

Tales From The Morgue:

Elmer Versus The Mutant Mole Rats.

Vanishing Point:

Strange Child (12/22/86)

Whitehall 1212 :

The Heathrow Affair (12/23/51)

The Clock: Reference Please (01/05/47).

Produced in Australia by Grace Gibson Productions The Clock was a  thirty-minute series featuring  stories of suspense and mystery . The introduction to each show was always the same; “Sunrise and sunset, promise and fulfillment, birth and death the whole drama of life is written in the sands of time”.

Although the series was produced in Australia the locales for the stories were rather generic.

The actors and actresses spoke without a perceptible Australian accent which caused the program to sound, “American”. This marked the program as a natural for export to the American market where it would be  picked up by ABC.

The show must have been reasonably successful because ABC then continued for another 13 weeks with an All-American cast and crew producing 13 new scripts bringing the series to a total of 78 episodes.

This is a bit like Charles “Dickens Christmas Carol”. It is clearly some sort of derivative. I mean when an unpleasant rich old man, finds himself traveling in the company of a spirit to find out what people really think of him. Well suspicions should  be aroused, don’t you think? But still, it’s rather fun.

Tales From The Morgue – Elmer Versus The Mutant Mole Rats.

Chet Chetter’s Tales from the Morgue is a series of short stories as told by an old obliging morgue attendant, licensed embalmer and resident story teller named Chet Chetter to a passing stranger of the night played by you the listener. The stories Chet relates to us are all quite fanciful. They deal with topics that would be classified supernatural and science fiction. They border on outrageous but that is how they are meant to be. Roughly half of the shows feature a nice, likable, rural southern manure hauler by the name of Elmer Korn who always finds himself involved in some inane predicament. The creators of the series themselves admit the show is rather off-beat but, you will find, not without it’s own charm which lies within the humorous writing and the recurring characters.

“Where-in Elmer Korn and other residents of Biloxi, Mississippi are troubled by Mole Rats the size of cats and dogs.

Soon enough Elmer goes down the rat hole to find that the trap has turned. It all turns out okay for Elmer.

Vanishing Point – Strange Child (12/22/86). 

Vanishing Point is a science fiction anthology series that ran on CBC Radio from 1984 until 1986. Declared by the shows introduction to be, “The point between reality and fantasy.
The series was produced by Bill Lane in the C.B.C.’s Toronto studios and produced some excellent radio.

This is one of those.

The story seems rather Bradberryian (with a dash of Stephen King thrown in for good measure) with it’s conception of the story of a Science Fiction writer and his family, who have taken, what is for the father, a working vacation to the beach.

The children spend their time playing with sand castles on the beach. Well the Girl calls them sand castles. The boy insists they are, “Space Castles”.

In the blink of an eye something terrible seems to happen. The boy shows up at the cabin screaming, and claiming they were visited by a space ship that his sister is dead! Almost as quickly the girl comes back.  But in the coming back. She came back strange.

NBC was the first network to  capitalize in 1952 with it’s  44, or maybe it’s, 52 episodes of  Whitehall 1212 (the exact number is in dispute. So far I have found 43. ). On what was at the time the recent opening of a raft of Scotland Yard’s files.

Whitehall 1212 was a thoroughly American production. Despite being both written and directed by the American Wyllis Cooper (Lights Out, Quiet, Please and a whole lot more). The production would be billed  as if it were a completely British undertaking.

I suppose this was an attempt to underscore it’s  authenticity.

Not that NBC was alone. By the time Whitehall 1212 was well under way the Orson Welles-narrated Black Museum had began airing. So,when I said that NBC was the first network to present crimes from the annals of Scotland Yard I did not mean to imply that they were the first radio show to do so. That was actually, The Secrets of Scotland Yard in 1950. But this was not a network program. In fact it was first broadcast from a pirate radio station in South-Eastern Africa, Mozambique to be exact. This was a production of  Harry Alan Towers and the Towers of London syndication company.

Later  (1952 to 1953) Harry Towers would produce, The Black Museum which he also, at first, aired out of a pirate station, Radio Luxembourg.

The three shows are very  similar using so many of the same cases that the episodes are often conflated, intermixed, in the memory of even the most knowledgeable Golden Age Radio collectors. The main difference seems to be  that Whitehall 1212 has a more police procedural  take on the cases. Focusing mostly on the day-to-day events surrounding the crime as it affected the police. The other two are more heavily dramatized and usually involve a recreation of the crime itself, whereas Whitehall 1212 did not.

What made Whitehall 1212 stand out from the other two is the presents of  the actual superintendent of the Black Museum (Chief Superintendent John Davidson) as the host. He may not have sounded as dramatic as Orson Welles or Clive Brook, but he didn’t have to pretend to know what he was talking about. He was, after all, a veteran of the force. Likewise, the researcher for the series was Percy Hoskins, the chief crime reporter for the  Daily Express. Hoskins was sometimes the newspaperman who had initially reported on some of the crimes being dramatized by the show.

Like Joe Friday on Dragnet, Cooper tried to “stick to the facts”. Oh, there was still plenty of blood and guts, but, only eluded to as the detectives stepped over the bodies looking for clues. So, although all three series are similar, Whitehall 1212 was oriented toward mystery rather than horror with a more intellectual approach to each crime.

But still there is plenty of satisfaction in listening to the  investigators as they gradually tighten the noose.

Murder By Experts was  an  anthology that ran in the United States between 1949 and 1951 on the Mutual Network. The program was at first  hosted by mystery writer  John Dickson Carr. Who would leave the show in 1950 to be replaced by Brett Halliday.

With a catalog of 130 episodes (unfortunately only a handful are known to have survived) the show revolved around the premise that each week a guest mystery writer would select a story from another writer (as in not themselves) to be presented as that  week’s show.  Sometimes at the end of the show (I guess as time permitted)  there would be a  critical postmortem of the episode, sometimes featuring well-known personalities.

Murder by Experts  was created by David Kogan. A man who is well remembered in old-time radio circles as the writer/creator of The Mysterious Traveler, The Strange Doctor Weird and, if not countless then at least numerous, other radio programs dotting the landscape the radio’s “Golden Age“.

The Weird Circle was a syndicated series produced in New York and licensed by Mutual, and later, NBC’s Red network (Digital Deli Too). For two seasons, it cranked out 39 shows (78 total) consisting mostly of radio adaptations of classic horror stories.

Contradiction Alert: Some sources date The Weird Circle as being produced from 1943 – 1945 (Digital Deli). Others state it was produced from 1946 – 1947.

This adaptation strays considerably from Honore de Balzac’s 1830 short story. It’s a tale about a man who encounters a leopard in the desert with which he develops an uneasy relationship.

Serious  consequences entail.

I thought inasmuch as this story differs rather considerably from the original story. And since the original story is now safely in the public domain, I thought I would provide links to either read online, or download the story from the Internet.

I have had, in the past, some difficulty providing ancillary material in a manner that remains axillary. That is to say, I do not want the RSS feed to scrape this particular material and send it along. After a little bit of thought it seemed to me the best thing to do would be to create another blog at WordPress which I have called, “The NightTransmissions Annex”.

Here is the first entry…

The CBS Radio Workshop was an experimental dramatic radio anthology series that aired on CBS from January 27, 1956, until September 22, 1957. Subtitled “radio’s distinguished series to man’s imagination,” it was a revival of the earlier Columbia Workshop, broadcast by CBS from 1936 to 1943, and it used some of the same writers and directors employed on the earlier series. The CBS Radio Workshop was one of American network radio’s last attempts to hold onto, and perhaps recapture, some of the demographics they had lost to television in the post-World War Two era.

Music for the series was composed by Bernard Herrmann, Jerry Goldsmith, Amerigo Moreno, Ray Noble and Leith Stevens. Other writers

Adapted for the series were the likes of Robert A. Heinlein, Sinclair Lewis, H. L. Mencken, Edgar Allan Poe, Frederik Pohl, James Thurber, Mark Twain and Thomas Wolfe.

This episode features two Ray Bradbury’s character studies both introduced by Ray Bradbury himself, and narrated by John Dehner and Stacy Harris respectively. The musical accompaniment for both studies was scored and conducted by young Jerry Goldsmith.

The Origin of Superstition, witch was also known as Superstition On The Air, ran in 1935 for 39 episodes (At least that’s all that are known to have survived,) offers interesting and enlightening tales grounded in folklore and common Superstitions.

They were really there, they were making real radio.  And now, they are gone, faded into the sepia shades of another time.

As the title suggests this particular Episodes of,  (well in this case, Superstition on the air) deals with Rabbit’s feet. Or why they are considered “lucky” by those who possess  them.

Although perhaps they are only lucky for rabbits when they manage to use them to get away from humans intent on culling a bit of “good luck”.

Creeps by Night:

The Final Reckoning” – May the 2nd of 1944

Creeps by Night Was A 1944 horror series with two hosts, one for each coast. in New York it was hosted by the anonymous, “Dr. X” who, as near as I can find, is anonymous to this day. From Hollywood it was hosted by Boris Karloff.

Creeps by Night did not, “Live long and prosper”. It was a short lived series and only a few episodes seem to have survived. Too common a story in the annals of old time radio.

“The Final Reckoning” an episode starring Boris Karloff which aired first on May the 2nd of 1944. This is the story of George Miller, who was played for a Patsy by an associate. For twenty long years Miller had only one dream… a dream of murder, only one aspiration, his revenge. Then one day Miller, through careful planning and unbelievable patients, finds his chance when he manages to take the place of a barber giving the villain a shave.This turn of events creates the chance to play out a fine scene with Miller carefully, almost lovingly, tracing the contours of his victims throat with the edge of a straight razor. It’s heady stuff.

Suspense – “Menace In Wax”  from Nov. 11th of 1942.

Suspense is one of the classics of old time radio. Some fans have special favorites in the thriller/chiller/macabre genre, but most agree that Suspense is right at the top.

“Menace In Wax”. This is a world war II drama set in the city of London involving… I’ll bet you already know… Nazis! Better yet despicable Nazi spies! Do I need to say anything else? Nazi spies! What more could you want?

X Minus One , “And the Moon Be Still as Bright” April the 22nd of 1955.

X Minus One is considered the finest science fiction drama ever produced for radio. It was  not the first. That honor belongs to 2000+. It wasn’t the second, That would be Dimension X. In fact the first 15 episodes of it’s  1955 to 1958 run on NBC were new versions of Dimension X episodes. The remainder were all most entirely adaptations of recently published science fiction stories (Mostly from Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine) usually written by the leading writers of the time, including  Philip K. Dick, Fritz Leiber, J.T. McIntosh, Robert A. Heinlein, Frederik Pohl and Theodore Sturgeon.

X Minus One and Ray Bradbury with one of his stories set on Mars, “And the Moon Be Still as Bright”. This story was first published in the Thrilling Wonder Stories issue for June of 1948 and would later be included in The Martian Chronicles as the opening story about the Fourth Expedition. Back in show eight we ran X Minus One’s adaptation of “Mars is Heaven”( AKA, “The Third Expedition”), you may want to check that out. This Episode aired on April the 22nd of 1955.

The Mysterious Traveler – Murder Goes Free (7/14/46).

A close cousin to the Whistler and the Strange Dr Weird, the Mysterious Traveller was another memorable radio host. Easy to imagine yourself on a train, at night, seated next to a curious gentleman who invites you “to join me on another journey into the strange and terrifying. I hope you will enjoy the trip, that it will thrill you a little and chill you a little. So settle back, get a good grip on your nerves and be comfortable — if you can!”

When a man fails in his attempt to buy off a gold-digger, he decides to just kill her. He manages it, much to his sorrow! This show aired on March the 31st of 1945 and for some reason it was identified as the last show of the series. It wasn’t, the show actually closed after the July 14th show of 1946.