Box 13

Box 13 is an old-time radio mystery built on a simple hook: a box number at the Star Times, and a man willing to answer whatever lands in it. Alan Ladd, announced as the star of Paramount Pictures, plays Dan Holiday, and Holiday narrates his own cases in a wry first person. He writes fiction for a living, though not happily. One episode catches him reading back his own purple line about blonde hair under a new moon, then asking himself why he never became a truck driver with the open road ahead and a motorcycle cop behind. The mail offers better material. In 'Hot Box', an unsigned letter with money enclosed tells him to bid on an old Chinese teakwood box at the Mason auction rooms and wait for further instructions. In 'The Better Man', Charles Winthrop writes that he wonders whether Holiday is serious or insane, then invites him to dinner with a hundred thousand dollars at stake. In 'The Professor And The Puzzle', a friend named Bob Lanham, teaching at Riddell College, asks for help with a personal problem that Holiday admits soon had him tangled up to his neck. 'The Sad Night' starts on the other side of the story, with Carl and Therese standing over a dead man and hunting for a copybook, just as a child's copybook turns up at Box 13. Its cover carries the name Marina Layton and the year 1930, and Susie is convinced it hides a code to buried treasure. Susie is the comic counterweight. She confuses Monte Cristo with Monte Woolly on the grounds that both had beards, calls an auction a gin rummage sale, and loses her way halfway through a proverb. Holiday humors her, and she returns the favor by egging on his most far-fetched theories, like the one about crown jewels and international jewel thieves. Beneath the banter, the stakes are grim. 'Three To Die' takes him down into the building of a river tunnel, where two men have been killed, only half the crew has turned up, and Angus shows him the many ways the work could be sabotaged. 'Extra Extra' puts a boy named Johnny in danger: he phones Holiday about a stranger searching his home, then disappears. 'The Better Man' becomes a star-chart riddle about Orion the hunter, and Holiday consults the Star Times science editor while, as he puts it, keeping one step ahead of a killer. The newspaper runs through these stories as both mail drop and resource. The credits name Rudy Schrager for original music, Sylvia Picker as Susie and Russell Hughes among the writers, all under the Mayfair banner. What a listener gets is a sturdy formula: a strange request, a sharp turn toward danger, and a hero who narrates it all with a raised eyebrow.