The first performance of this script on 1943-03-16 is missing; this is the second and final performance of the script. The script was used in BBC Appointment with Fear series on 1943-09-11; no recording has survived.
John Dickson Carr builds this story on an urban legend of “the vanishing lady” or “the vanishing hotel room” that began with a newspaper story in 1897. A mother was sick and she sent her daughter out for an errand, but when she returns there is no such hotel room and no trace of her mother. The story concludes with the authorities saying that her mother died of the plague and they needed to hush things up so there would not be a panicked mass exodus from Paris and the international exposition that was being held there. The concept was used in many stories, radio programs, television programs, and movies; this time the story takes place on a ship, but authors have used the plot on planes, trains, and land locales.
For Cabin B-13, the story begins with newlyweds taking a cruise to pre-war Europe for their honeymoon. They bring their gifts and savings amounting to $10,000 in cash ($170,000 in US$2023!) and will spend three months traveling about Europe. Today, no one would bring that much money with them, and they would use credit cards and electronic funds transfer. Such things were not available at the time in the format we are so used to them now. The money is to be locked in the ship’s safe, but the husband disappears and so does the money.
The bride has been ill. We’re told that she is recovered from “brain fever,” which is an unsophisticated name for meningitis. She is getting her strength back, but this is Carr’s story device to indicate that she is vulnerable and subject to some nefarious deed, building sympathy for the character, and laying the groundwork for others to say she is prone to memory loss and misunderstanding of reality. That nefarious deed is, like the “vanishing lady,” that no one believes that the husband has been with her on the cruise, and that the room she thought she had doesn’t exist!
Blogger Christine Miller says that the name of the ship in the story is SS Maurevania and the name was derived from a real ship, Cunard's Mauretania or Mauretania II.
Philip Dorn plays the role of the ship’s doctor. He was born in the Netherlands and started his career there and continued it in Germany. He came to the US two weeks before WW2 began, and started his Hollywood career. He was usually a supporting player, often in roles of European characters from Nazi officers, to members of the French Resistance, and everything in between. After the war, he appeared in theater and film in the US and in Europe. A stage accident in the mid-1950s limited his career. RadioGoldindex lists Dorn in only two surviving radio appearances, both for Suspense.
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP431109
THE CAST
PHILIP DORN (Dr. Karl Heinrich), MARGO (Anne Brewster), Dennis Hoey (Captain Wainwright), Hans Conried (Marshall), Joe Kearns (Man in Black), Bill Johnstone (Ricky Brewster)
Three recordings of this episode have survived. The network recording is the best of the three. There is an AFRS release, and a late 1970s/early 1980s AFRTS release. Those recordings were stripped of cast information and often their script titles to make them seem “less dated” for the audience of that period which included service personnel and their families and civilians in the area. Even at that time, AFRTS stations were in areas that had limited television services, and sometimes none, and radio drama was good entertainment for those areas.
CBS created a Cabin B-13 series around the characters in 1948, but Carr would have trouble keeping up with the weekly deadlines. He ended up re-using Suspense scripts toward the end of its run to catch up with time. The series proved too much of a burden and was cancelled.
The script was adapted to the movie "Dangerous Crossing" in 1953 starring Jeanne Crain and Michael Rennie. It can be viewed at https://youtu.be/gjk6v3dee0c or https://archive.org/details/dangerous-crossing-1953
The announcement about the two different days for east and west broadcasts is reiterated from the prior week.
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