This is a curious drama-only recording that has an interesting backstory. The recording has been in circulation for many years, and it seems like a broadcast. Decades ago, a collector patched the opening of the 1957-10-06 recording onto it, editing out the mention of that episode’s guest, Jack Carson. That patch led into a marvelous production with William Conrad as narrator. It’s not that Jack Carson did a bad job, it’s that William Conrad was an exceptional talent, whether it be acting or narration.
Collectors were confused about the recording. The “patch” was an innocuous attempt at restoration that seemed to be appropriate in its time. We have much more information today that allows richer historical context. We know that the Robson era was using separate recordings of drama as its main practice, and recording other broadcast elements separately. Only the drama portion of this episode was finished, but the recording never had the other components, such as the George Walsh introductions and the William N. Robson monologue, were likely never done.
Because it was never broadcast, it still appropriate that it has a date. It is a good assumption that the episode was actually planned for 1958-09-28. It is believed that this broadcast was to be a “victory lap” and offer of congratulations for sound effects artist Tom Hanley, author of the script. It was his first, and won an award from the Writer’s Guild. Fellow practitioners Gus Bayz and Ross Murray wrote many scripts, but Hanley’s rookie outing earned a recognition they did not have.
For more details about the 1957 broadcast, resources are available at
https://suspenseproject.blogspot.com/2025/04/1957-10-06-misfire.html
https://archive.org/details/TSP571006 is where recordings can be downloaded or streamed.
These are the details about this production and how became a Suspense curiosity:
1) There was no Suspense broadcast on September 28, 1958.
2) The series was in process of temporarily shifting to Saturdays to allow for NFL Football. Sunday, September 28 was opening day; today it is 3 weeks earlier. CBS did not have a national football broadcast, but many of their affiliates were stations that carried games of their city's teams or the teams had a regional following.
3) Because Suspense was early in the Sunday schedule, it was the one to be moved because NFL games might not be finished in time for Suspense to be heard. The other shows like Indictment and Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, and others, remained in their Sunday slots.
4) September 28 would have been the final show of the 1957-1958. Newspaper publicity for the episode The Wait on Saturday, October 4, identified it as the beginning of the new season.
5) On Saturdays, in the East Coast schedule, Suspense was a 7:30pm show. It was preceded by a sports news shows and followed by national news program The World Tonight. That was followed by a New York Philharmonic program.
6) It was likely that Misfire was in the original plans to be the September 28 program. We have the drama-only recording which has a different cast and it has a slightly revised script. Hanley’s Writers Guild recognition was officially awarded sometime between September 21 and 25 at a Guild dinner event.
7) Newspapers and other listings may include Suspense in their timetables for Sunday September 28. Timetables were often out of date. They did not have the same update urgency or editorial scrutint that other sections of newspapers had. It was common for the timetable and the TV-radio columns on the very same page to disagree if there was late-breaking news. Few newspapers picked up the date change as a news item. The CBS publicity seems to have read “Suspense, CBS radio’s award-winning mystery series which as been heard on Sunday afternoons, will be broadcast at a new time – Saturdays from 7:35 to 8:00pm – effective this week… [and] will not be heard this afternoon due to the professional football broadcast.”
8) Some stations may have run a repeat Suspense broadcast of some type in the slot if they were not impacted by the football schedule. It was not Misfire. Many stations were recording their Suspense feed and playing it at another time. Others were picking up whatever CBS had on the feed or used some other program, perhaps locally produced, to fill in “the Suspense gap” on that day.
9) We know that the decision to move Suspense to Saturday was not made in haste, because the hard copy script for The Wait does not have any date revision markings that a last-minute change would indicate. It clearly shows a Saturday broadcast date. The Wait was recorded on September 24, meaning that the script hard copy was prepped a few days before that.
10) The 1958-09-21 No Hiding Place had a closing announcement that told the audience to listen "next week." Since that show was pre-recorded on September 17, the decision was likely made official shortly after that date. If they had known by that date, it is likely the closing announcement would have reflected the change in some way. This timing would place the CBS scheduling decision about 10 days before September 28.
Collectors did not know what to do with this recording in their Suspense collections. No hard copy script has been found. There is no script in the KNX Collection or at the Pacific Pioneers records at University of California at Santa Barbara. Because there was little reliable documentation available to collectors in the 1970s and 1980s, the recording “fell” or “backed into” the date because not much was known about the CBS schedule change. In fact, many of the shows that we now know as Saturday broadcasts were assigned Sunday dates by those collectors. These relatively innocent errors have been corrected over the years as scripts and other resources have become available and accessed more easily.
The surviving recording is in excellent sound. The patch of the 1957 broadcast has been removed as the recording is not contemporary to the drama recording or its originally intended broadcast date.
Now that we know this was never broadcast, it should not be numbered as a broadcast. Some collectors have a preference for numbering the episodes. There is precedent: the surviving recording of “Murder is a Twist” with Howard Duff that was not broadcast is not numbered by collectors. That episode later became A Murderous Revision, which was broadcast. Forecast had an audition of “Suspense” with a different concept than the series would come to have, and was a failure. That should not be included in the Suspense broadcast numbering, either, because the series was significantly reconstituted to earn CBS approval and capture the attention of sponsors. The Suspense Project log numbers Forecast as “000” and identifies this 1958 Misfire as “not applicable” (N/A). It is proper to sequence the recording with the date of 1958-09-28 because that was the original intent before the “football decision” and all of the elements of the program fit into the techniques and performers of that particular time.
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP580928
THE CAST
WILLIAM CONRAD (Narrator), John Dehner (Leigh Thurston), Barney Phillips (John Grant), Sam Pierce (Pierce, the reporter), others
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