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.
Charles Turrell McNair wrote the script. At age 20 he one of the youngest men to be assigned to a command post in the Canadian Navy. At the end of WW2, he was demobilized, but remained with the Navy and became a public relations officer. He had some journalistic experience but also wrote radio plays that were performed on the CBC. He submitted “Murder by the Alphabet” to Suspense and was paid $350. If that was in Canadian dollars, that would be C$5900 in 2024. The equivalent in US$2024 would be about $3900. He had a successful academic leadership career in the growth of Mohawk College. He passed away in 2000. His obituary is at https://www.legacy.com/ca/obituaries/theglobeandmail/name/charles-mcnair-obituary?id=41829405 but it is worth seeking some of the more detailed ones online that were published at that time.
Is this Agatha Christie’s ABC Murders on the high seas? Not really, but the gimmick is obviously similar.
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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