A young bachelor returns from dinner with friends and finds his apartment has vanished into thin air. He enters another apartment using his key to his and finds five happily singing canaries. Then he sees the body on the floor, a murdered financier. This can’t be good; and that’s just the start. He is struck on the head and falls, unconscious. When he recovers, it seems none of this, the apartment or the body, can be found. See… sometimes even two drinks can be too much.
Originally a Colonel March of Scotland Yard short story, The Crime in Nobody's Room, this is a John Dickson Carr creation written under his pseudonym “Carter Dickson.” It was published in The Strand in 1938 and then in a collection of March stories a couple of years later. This Suspense production has been “de-Marched” with the character replaced by the generic “Inspector Braddock.”
Lee Bowman leads the cast, replacing the originally announced Vincent Price. Bowman was one of the actors Spier could call on as a last minute replacement, as was Joseph Cotten. This was a challenge of live radio productions. The substitution of Hollywood guest stars was often related to studio schedules suddenly having problems on set and conflicting with radio broadcasts, especially radio rehearsals. Not every actor could take to the microphone on short notice. Many film actors had difficulty adjusting to radio’s demanding performance of only a single “take.” Film production allowed for “re-takes” and often had multiple shots of scenes to get close-ups or different camera angles of the actors. Bowman, Cotten, and some other Hollywood stars had particularly good radio instincts. Vincent Price happened to be one of those. He was exceptionally skilled in the craft and enjoyed performing in radio. He may not have been in this scheduled performance, but would be on Suspense many times in the future, and even starred in his own series, The Saint.
Ona Munson plays Anita, and was a star of radio’s Big Town series with Edward G. Robinson. Nearly every one of Osa Massen’s biographies and obituaries has the phrase “femme fatale” describing the kinds of film roles she played over the years. Here she plays “Fifi LaTour”; there has to be an inside joke in there somewhere. Congratulations to the announcer who read the names “Ona Munson” and “Osa Massen” correctly and did not stumble over their phonetic and meter similarities.
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP430608
THE CAST
LEE BOWMAN (Ronald Denham), ONA MUNSON (Anita), Osa Massen (Fifi LaTour), Joe Kearns (Man in Black / Party guest / Driver), Cy Kendall (Uncle Rufus Denham), Byron Kane (Pearson), Horace Willard? (Uncle Cato), Ted Von Eltz (Inspector Braddock), unknown (Jimmy Westlake), Jack Edwards? (Thomas Evans)
Note that Joe Kearns triples in the cast, playing the Man in Black, a guest, and a driver. He did this often, and was an exceptional talent that Spier had great confidence in and came to rely on.
A portion of the program survives as an aircheck from station WHAS of Louisville, Kentucky. It starts at about the 15 minute mark of the program and ends at about the 28 minute 40 second mark. It is lower than typical audio quality.
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