The Mysterious Old Radio Listening Society · Ghoulish Delights

Episode 385: Bury Your Dead, Arizona, Parts 1 and 2

September 8, 2025·54 min·4 clips

The Maestro strokes Nasha's hair and commands her to become a tigress, her eyes glowing green and yellow in the dark boxcar.

1. The Mysterious Old Radio Listening Society's Episode 385 covers Parts 1 and 2 of 'Bury Your Dead, Arizona,' a 1949 Mutual Network serial from I Love a Mystery. 2. Hosts Eric, Tim, and Joshua introduce the episode; Jim Harmon, author of The Great Radio Heroes, is credited with preserving the serial from transcription discs given to him by Carlton E. Morse in the 1960s. 3. The episode asks how the surviving fragments of I Love a Mystery — two complete serials out of an almost entirely lost run — hold up against the best of golden-age radio. 4. Part 1 opens with Jack, Doc, and Reggie hiding in a Hollywood freight yard boxcar, wanted by police as witnesses in 'the Martin case' while also hunted by gangsters after Doc's gunpoint recovery of $25,000 in reward money from a crooked poker game. 5. Gang enforcer Lefty and four men confront the trio in the dark boxcar, announcing they have knives and intend to kill without gunfire to avoid alerting yard guards. 6. Doc stalls Lefty with boastful banter, buying time for Jack and Reggie to maneuver behind the gang, and a brawl in the darkness dispatches all five attackers, after which the trio commandeers a faster freight train. 7. Part 2 begins on the new freight car where the trio encounters Nasha, who announces herself as 'a dangerous female — so watch out,' and her companion the Maestro, described as an extremely fat, silver-haired philosopher-magician in shabby clothes. 8. In total darkness, Nasha describes herself aloud at the Maestro's command: 'black hair and eyes, a mouth red as blood, flexible enough to touch her forehead to her knees or lay her head on the floor.' 9. The Maestro claims to be 'a student of philosophy, mysticism, and higher ethics' who performs stage magic only when 'finances are bad,' dismissing Doc's challenge by calling it 'a very dangerous thing to ask.' 10. The Maestro places a rawhide leash around Nasha's neck, strokes her hair, and hypnotically commands her to become a tigress; Doc reports her eyes are 'blazing green and yellow in the dark' and she begins snarling. 11. Jack demands the demonstration stop, Nasha wakes confused, and the Maestro claps twice, announcing a murder has taken place in the boxcar; Jack reaches forward and touches a dead man with a knife in his chest. 12. Host Eric notes that the opening exposition references events from a 'lost episode' — Doc's crooked poker game — that was never actually written, part of Morse's technique of implying a continuous adventure universe. 13. Eric observes that after 10 years of the podcast he now hears I Love a Mystery differently against shows like Quiet, Please and Suspense, rating it closer to 'The Shadow' in ambition — built for fun rather than literary depth. 14. Eric advises new listeners to 'listen loosely,' warning that the serial is 'full of weird holes, jumps in logic, and so much deus ex machina' compared to more carefully crafted golden-age radio. 15. Eric identifies Morse's dual-audience design: adolescent boys and 'semi-literate horny men,' explaining that the pitch-dark self-description scene gives Morse a narrative excuse to have Mercedes McCambridge enumerate Nasha's physical charms aloud. 16. The hosts debate why the script goes out of its way to insist Nasha is 'not Russian, but from a country near the Russian frontier,' with theories ranging from Cold War caution to giving Mercedes McCambridge cover from criticism of her accent. 17. Tim and Joshua argue that the Maestro functions as a Shadow-style villain in Part 2, and the glowing-eyes moment is a stronger cliffhanger than the dead body because it poses an unanswerable question for the audience. 18. Eric counters that Morse needed a concrete, material threat — the dead body — to give Jack a genuine reason for alarm, since Jack dismisses all supernatural suggestion outright. 19. The episode is conversational and fast-moving, with the hosts frequently interrupting to quote lines from the serial; Tim jokes that Morse 'never wrote a second draft' while 'cranking out 5,000 scripts a week for 40 years.' 20. Best for listeners who enjoy golden-age radio drama with commentary; less rewarding for those seeking deep critical analysis or complete narrative resolution.

As heard by us

A clear opening that pairs I Love a Mystery history with a theatrical freight-car scene.

The episode starts a seven-episode run through the 15-part Bury Your Dead, Arizona serial from I Love a Mystery, and it makes good use of the opening stretch. The hosts briefly trace the show back to Carlton E.

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Why you'd press play

A freight-train mystery where the suspects introduce themselves like obvious phonies.

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