This story might seem a bit familiar because variations of the plotline can be found in many other stories. In this one, a young man who needs money to continue a failing venture makes a bet with his uncle that he can escape being murdered… directly or indirectly... by his uncle. The prize is $25,000 and his life. In today’s US dollars, that’s almost $475,000.
The script was used again in the BBC’s Appointment with Fear radio series 1943-10-14.
This is one of the few Carr stories that was repeated after he left the series. There is a missing hour-long Suspense version of the story broadcast in 1948. That 1948 script was re-worked by Les Crutchfield, who would become better known for many of his 1950s CBS scripts for many series, but especially for Gunsmoke.
In 1952, Carr’s novel The Nine Wrong Answers was an expansion of this script.
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP421110
THE CAST
Michael Fitzmaurice (Bob Penderel), Lesley Woods (Betty), Nicholas Joy (John Destry), Ted de Corsia (Police sergeant), Charles Slattery (Inspector Mullen), Ted Osborne (Signature Voice)
Keith Scott notes that Marx B. Loeb directed, substituting for CBS staffer John Dietz. Over the years, Loeb directed programs such as Columbia Workshop, MGM Theater of the Air, Counterspy, and Crime Does Not Pay.
This story was in the first Suspense comic book as “I Bet with Death!” The comic version is likely based on the aforementioned longer script used in the still-missing 1948 broadcast. A PDF of the story can be found at the same Internet Archive link noted above. Here is a panel from the story:
The Suspense comic book, published in 1950, failed just as the Suspense Magazine did. The comic title continued after its second issue but the stories were no longer based on Suspense episodes. The magazine lasted four issues and was discontinued a few years earlier. The only media spin-off of the radio series that succeeded was the television series that began in 1949 and lasted until 1954. There was always an interest in expanding into a series of Suspense movies, rivaling the successful Whistler movies, but those desires never materialized.
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