Hume Cronyn is at the Suspense microphone once more, this time as a blackmailer. The scheme sounds like it could work, at least to his character. He plays a bank auditor who is assigned to do do surprise audits of tellers. He finds a long-term teller whom he discovers has been embezzling for quite a while. Cronyn’s character is thrilled for the wrong reason. He wants to be rid of his nagging wife, so he rather than reporting the malfeasance to the bank, he senses the opportunity of a deal. If the teller signs a confession to his embezzlement, he will hold it and not report the crime. In return, the teller will kill the auditor’s wife. They will trade their individual silence about each other’s crimes with no one the wiser.
The script is by James P. Keene, but there are no other records of an author with this name. That is believed to be a pseudonym of author William Everett Cook who used “James Keene” as a pseudonym. Cook would have been 25 at the time of the broadcast, so that makes sense in terms of age, if it is him. This script would have been an early venture and he might be considered as a "one-hit-wonder" writer if not for writing becoming his successful profession. His career bloomed in the 1950s for his western short stories and novels.
One network recording has survived. It is not known to which coast it was broadcast. At about the 25 minute mark, there is a disc noise that sounds like high frequency hiss. It does not affect the drama’s ending but increases somewhat as the recording ends. It is caused by obvious disc damage. The reason the coast cannot be identified is that the production is running behind time and the closing announcements are rushed as they go directly to network ID. If this was an east coast broadcast, the tease for The FBI in Peace and War would have been skipped because of the time slot pressure.
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP461114
THE CAST
HUME CRONYN (James Carroll), Hans Conried (Arthur Tillwer), Cathy Lewis (Ethel Carroll), Joe Kearns (Signature Voice / Dolan / Jury Foreman), Wally Maher (Judge)
Performer, classic radio researcher and fan Patte Rosebank notes that "Hume kept getting cast as bank employees on Suspense. This was an in-joke, because his father (Hume Cronyn, Sr.) was head of several financial institutions in Canada."
###
