Silent film legend Gloria Swanson portrays a mystery writer who is asked to investigate the murder of her doctor. Why is she so reluctant to help? Perhaps her subconscious is burying the memory that she did it. She eventually agrees. Spoiler alert… and perhaps a subpar acting alert, too. As Tony Shaloub used to say in the television series Monk, “you’ll thank me later.”
Swanson was not the first guest star to be on Suspense to have problems with lines and expression through voice, and she wasn’t the last. She was living in New York at the time, and she was a “big Hollywood” name Suspense could publicize, especially since her radio appearances were rare.
According to Suspense researcher and film documentarian John Scheinfeld, the script was written by Pamela Wilcox, though not credited. Credit is given to Robert L. Richards, but he adapted the Wilcox script.
The story may have a genesis in an incident with S.S. Van Dine, the creator of Philo Vance. The “Van Dine” name was a pseudonym of Willard Huntington Wright. He and his wife used to spend summers on the beach of a New Jersey town. He was made police commissioner there, a light duty job in a small town where nothing ever happened. That is, until something actually did, and he was (technically) unable to solve the case. https://thepassingtramp.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-pajama-murder-case-s-s-van-dine.html There is always speculation about how mystery fiction novelists would do in real-life investigations. Their plots are their own contrivance, and they often rely on details about real-life investigations for their inspiration and adaptation. The fact that so many crimes are unsolved every day implies that they would be less successful than those whose life is detection and are trained in the latest tools of the craft. The idea of having a writer do an investigation has always been a theme of mysteries and entertainment. Murder, She Wrote is one of the more recent ones.
June Havoc appears in the broadcast. It seems her engagement at the Westport Playhouse in Girl of the Golden West was over by this time. Bill Spier and June headed back to Hollywood, with others, after the broadcast. Joe Kearns stayed in New York for some vacation.
Both east and west broadcasts have survived. The east broadcast is 12 seconds to the network ID after the closing announcements. The west is one second. The east is the better recording. The recordings are likely professional airchecks.
The next broadcast from Hollywood was Beyond Good and Evil. It starred Vincent Price in another performance of this script. It is unfortunately missing. There were reports of a home dictation machine recording of it a few years ago, but it has never surfaced. Perhaps an Armed Forces Radio Service recording will appear at some time.
Swanson was not on radio often. She was in the cast of some early Lux Radio Theatre, and later in some other movie-related shows. She was on a few variety programs as herself. Her line in the 1950 movie Sunset Boulevard is as legendary as she was: “I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. de Mille.” In that film, she had the confidence to play an almost cartoonish forgotten actress of another era. The appearance renewed her celebrity status at that time. Her long life and career are summarized at Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloria_Swanson and in a very good article at the Library of Congress website https://blogs.loc.gov/now-see-hear/2022/03/gloria-swanson-a-woman-of-invention/
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https://archive.org/details/TSP470710
THE CAST
GLORIA SWANSON (Emily Carlyle), Joe Kearns (Signature Voice / Lieutenant Hahn), Berry Kroeger (Harry Bailey), Julie Stevens? (Cora Wales), June Havoc (Clara), unknown (Store clerk), unknown (Morton the mechanic)
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