George Coulouris portrays a professor of criminology who is lured by a gangster who is says he is doing research on criminality. The professor is really kidnapped, and the gangster wants to frame him for a crime. It fails The professor contrives to escape the murder charge, but gosh, it seems like he had a Back for Christmas thing going on. It’s set up when he says his wife is away. Sorry, that was a spoiler, but it’s an entertaining story, especially when some thugs knock on the professor’s door and pretend to be doing a survey. Suspense has had much better scripts, but even lackluster Suspense still has the music, the direction, the ensemble cast, so it still works out. Listen for Howard McNear as a homicide detective.
The author was Eleanor Beeson who wrote other Suspense scripts as well as The Whistler, Harriet Crouse is mentioned as co-writer, but no information can be found about her. When this kind of thing happens, it usually follows a pattern of someone like Helen having a good story idea and someone like Eleanor turning it into a script. The script was used again on Murder by Experts 1949-10-03.
Two network recordings and an Armed Forces Radio Service recording have survived. It is not known which of the network recordings were for which coast. The best sounding recording is the network one that has a two-second pause (“2s”) before the network ID. The other network recording goes directly to ID “(dirID).” The AFRS version is drawn from the direct-to-ID version; times are approximate:
Network 2s 25:02: “My...my...my cellar?”
AFRS 24:30 and dirID 25:02: “What...what...what...in my cellar?”
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP450705
THE CAST
GEORGE COULOURIS (Professor Leland Moffett), Harry Lang (Pete), Howard McNear (Homicide Detective), Frank Graham (Signature Voice / Nosey / 2nd Homicide Detective), Joe Granby (Antony Carlotti), Jack Moyles (Sam Schwartz)
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