Boris Karloff stars in a Harold Swanton story about amnesia and murder with a strange twist where the amnesiac might be the murderer and is assigned to solve the twenty-year old crime!
A confused man is found in a London office building. Injured, he is taken to a doctor, and he can’t remember his name. Eventually, “Terrence Drury” is the name he is assigned because he had tickets to the Drury Lane Theater. He is given a job in the London office of Scotland Yard. He excelled in that job and became an inspector… but never learned his true name as twenty years pass. He is assigned to a case involving a skeleton found in a backyard of a home in Devon. He begins to realize the skeleton and the circumstances of the person’s death may involve himself as the murderer of his own wife twenty years ago!
Harold Swanton was a prolific radio scripter with much of his work for The Whistler for both radio and television, as well as Philip Morris Playhouse, and Hopalong Cassidy. For television, he wrote for Perry Mason, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Little House on the Prairie, and others.
There are three surviving recordings. One is a network recording which is not yet identified as to its east or west broadcast. There is an Armed Forces Radio Service recording (AFRS#88) that is from the missing network recording; it has a teaser for the next episode Most Dangerous Game after Drury’s Bones concludes. There is also an Armed Forces Radio and Television Service (AFRTS) recording from the 1970s or thereabouts that matches the network recording!
Surviving network at approximately 23:47 “Oh, that so? You’ve been on a case…murder, wasn’t it? Did you, uh, catch the fellow?”
AFRS recording at about 19:34 “Oh, that so? You’ve been off on a case…uh, murder, wasn’t it? Did you catch the fellow?”;
AFRTS recording matches the surviving network copy with same dialog at 19:41
The network recording goes straight from the final announcement to the network ID, and is therefore marked “(dirID).” The network recording is the best recording of the three. The AFRS and AFRTS recordings have flaws, with the latter having some harsh sounding segments.
The AFRTS reissues from the 1970s and 1980s have a strange amalgamation of clips for opens and closes from throughout Suspense history. How fitting its “Frankenstein’s Monster” assemblage of dissimilar audio is on this recording of a Boris Karloff appearance.
Karloff had an amazing career; a good overview is at Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Karloff
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP450125
THE CAST
BORIS KARLOFF (Roger Ashley-Norton, alias Terence Drury), Bill Johnstone? (John Stannup), Joe Kearns (Man in Black / Doctor / Driver), Colin Campbell? (Blind Ben Sykes), Raymond Lawrence (Chief Inspector Terence Carruthers), Wally Maher (Peters), Janet Scott? (Sarah), Ann Morrison (Mrs. Tumbley)
The Drury Theatre is a real place https://lwtheatres.co.uk/theatres/theatre-royal-drury-lane/about-theatre-royal-drury-lane/
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