Mary Jane Croft stars in a Richard Chandlee story about a schoolteacher on a Mediterranean cruise. During the ship’s stop in Beirut, Lebanon, she sees a murder on the dock. The script was used previously as the second broadcast of the series On Stage on 1953-01-08, a program that starred Cathy and Elliott Lewis.
The ship arrives in Beirut early in the morning and docks. She rose early to watch the sunrise. While enjoying the view of the city, she sees an injured man, an American sailor, walking erratically on the docks, collapsing. She leaves the ship to assist him, and hears him mumble “sultan’s turret, fifteenth step” before he expires. He had a knife in his back! She had no clue what the words meant, and would only figure it out later in the story. When she leads a policeman to the spot, the sailor is gone! The incident is dismissed and she returns to the ship and starts planning for the day’s excursion. When she leaves the ship for the day, gets stuck with a fellow traveler, Frank Grady, a man with a grating personality.
As she walks the city, she overhears a tour guide mention “sultan’s turret” and she recalls what the sailor said, and proceeds to that spot. She finds the stairs and counts the steps and finds a note. It says “ship six.” She sees the ship’s waiter, Haroun, there, too. She had befriended him on the cruise, and trusted him. He promises to show her the sights of the city for the afternoon, and in the process help her to avoid the loud and annoying Grady. He takes her to a room with a marvelous view of the city, but his demeanor changes. He asks her “What time is the meeting?” which confuses her… and he has the sailor’s body in the room! She flees, and after running, she is suddenly happy to see Grady. His attitude changes, too! He starts to ask her about the message she received. There is a blaze of gunfire, and she passes out. Then the story resolves and an espionage plot is revealed. It is explained how her innocent and well-meaning actions confused the participants on both sides of the plot.
The story is very impractical as docks are very busy places once cruise ships arrive, just in terms of docking and transferring ship supplies and materials. At the time of the story, cruise ships were much smaller than some of today’s gargantuan vessels, but even the docking of small ships would require the activities of crew and port personnel complete required tasks and interact with the destination’s port personnel to file documents and handle other matters. While the story fits the traditional Suspense formula of an innocent person caught up in a whirlwind of events not of their own making, it does not work well.
Is it “Beyrouth” or “Beirut”? It’s the former spelling on the script. There is a history behind it that was still playing out at the time of broadcast. The English spelling “Beirut” is a phonetic transcription of the Arabic name. The same name's transcription into French is “Beyrouth,” which was sometimes used during Lebanon's post-WW1 French mandate. That mandate was created by the League of Nations when the Ottoman Empire was partitioned and created develop a path to the country’s self-government. The French involvement ended in 1946 when Lebanon declared its independence. Gradually, the use of the “Beyrouth” spelling decreased and the “Beirut” spelling became more common in English use.
There are two surviving recordings of the broadcast and the network recording is the better of the two. The Armed Forces Radio Service recording (AFRS#754) is new, and has excellent sound except for the AFRS announcements which have some sibilance (“essing”) issues that the drama portions do not. Overall, both recordings are quite good.
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https://archive.org/details/TSP550531
THE CAST
Mary Jane Croft (Mildred Gideon), Ben Wright (Police Officer / Native), Hy Averback (Frank Grady), Jack Kruschen (Haroun), Don Diamond (Tour Guide / Sailor), Larry Thor (Narrator)
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