Adventures by Morse

Adventures by Morse is a 1940s radio adventure serial presented by Carlton E. Morse, and its stories unfold in chapters rather than single episodes. The titles show it plainly: It's Dismal to Die carries episode numbers, while Dead Men Prowl is marked part by part out of ten. Every opening heard here bills Captain Friday as the featured character. The openings also share a refrain, a spoken invitation to anyone who likes high adventure, the stealth of intrigue, or blood and thunder. In the continuing chapters, a narrator then recaps where things stand. In It's Dismal to Die, a telegram reaches Captain Friday and Skip Turner in New Orleans as they return from the Chilean jungles. It is signed by a young woman named Julie, who asks them to meet her at the edge of the Dismal Swamp; her husband, she tells them, has been lost there for more than a month. Skip makes up their minds in two shakes of a lamb's tail, and he is candid that Julie's looks had something to do with it. He is reminded that she is married. By the third episode the trail has led to a lonely swamp hideout, quicksand, and a gigantic man called the Dummy. There Dr. Eckhart shoots his assistant, Morales, in a quarrel over Julie, then turns his gun on her kidnapped husband, Johnny, in a cold fury. Dead Men Prowl shifts to Holman, a small resort village on the Marin County coast, across the bay from San Francisco, where Captain Friday keeps a summer cottage. He and his weekend guest, Dr. Jamie Croft, arrive expecting quiet and instead find three men dead, among them old Doc Sims. Then the dead start prowling. Friday handcuffs them, ties them down and locks them in the morgue's refrigeration room, and none of it does any good. Four young relatives of the dead, the cousins Carmel and Andres Ruiz and the siblings Gail and Martin Stanley, come under the captain's wing, and at one point they are found half-frozen in that same refrigeration room, with the three corpses standing guard outside the door. In the tenth part, Carmel has disappeared, and the captain admits the case has just about got him stumped. The two stories pull in different directions, and that range is much of the draw. The swamp chapters run on rescue, gunfire and Skip's folksy talk, with phrases like 'doggone right' breaking up the menace. The Holman chapters are a village mystery steeped in morgue detail, from slabs and ice niches to a morgue handwagon, with stretches told in the captain's own voice. Period language comes along with it, including outdated terms for disability and dated remarks about women.