Interest in the supernatural and spirituality was very high in the early 20th Century. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had great interest in the occult, and Harry Houdini did his best to expose fraudulent mystics. Movies from dramas to comedies in the 1930s and 1940s would have scenes of seances where there was an attempt to communicate with the deceased.
That John Dickson Carr would use the darkened room of a séance as the scene of a murder by stabbing is no surprise. It fits his reputation of being a specialist in “locked room” mysteries. Having Peter Lorre in the cast makes it all the more entertaining. Wendy Barrie plays a niece who believe her aunt may be falling prey to a fake medium’s scheme.
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP430420
THE CAST
PETER LORRE (George Ravel / Flamond), WENDY BARRIE (Marjorie Grey), GEORGE ZUCCO (Alec Stevens), unknown (Ken Blake), unknown (Aunt Hester), Hans Conried (Train guard), Joe Kearns (Man in Black)
Wendy had some notoriety in the early 1940s for being the companion of gangster Bugsy Siegel. She was also a TV pioneer, as one of the medium’s first talk show hosts in the late 1940s and the 1950s.
###
