John Lund stars in a sea-faring adventure with Joe Kearns as a ship captain with obsessive compulsive disorder. He demands that ship maintenance and operations be performed in alphabetical order. He may be murdering crew members in alphabetical order. Crew members are terrified and look to Lund’s character to keep the captain in line and perhaps lead a mutiny.
Lund is good in his role, but Kearns steals the show as the captain.
Charles Turrell wrote the script. He may be a Suspense “one hit wonder” scripter whose only successful effort for national broadcast was this very episode. He does not appear in any movie or theatrical data bases, nor does he appear in any magazine and pulp data bases, or any industry resources. Is this Agatha Christie’s ABC Murders on the high seas? Not really, but the gimmick is obviously similar. The original title of this script was “Murder by the Alphabet.”
Lund was originally scheduled to perform in “One and One's Alonesome” on this date. That’s not a typographical error and is a play on words. That script was re-titled as “One and One's a Lonesome” and held until 1950-03-23.
One network recording has survived, and it is not known to which coast it was broadcast. You can hear clearing of throat by Joe Kearns during the closing theme prior to the final announcement to listen to next week’s broadcast. It can be heard at about 28:30. This may be a marker to identify the other network broadcast.
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP470821
THE CAST
JOHN LUND (First Mate Marshland), Joe Kearns (Signature Voice / Captain Godfrey Walker), Raymond Lawrence (Higgins), Bill Johnstone (Chief engineer Alec McTavish), Sidney Miller (2nd mate Harvey Goodrem), Jerry Hausner (Chadwick)
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