Suspense and Horror – Retro Radio Podcast

Suspense and Horror – Retro Radio Podcast gathers vintage radio drama from more than one series and more than one network. Quiet Please and The Shadow come from Mutual; Suspense and CBS Radio Mystery Theater come from CBS. Ghosts share the feed with detectives, a poisoner and a playwright ruined by drink. The Quiet Please story 'Clarissa' is told in the first person from a drafty old house. Its narrator lies awake with a children's song drifting through their mind, thinking about a lonely child who lives there with an old man. The episode's opening is a protest: the fire started, and there is no way to prove it. The same series goes somewhere else entirely with 'Rain on New Years Eve', where a writer describes being kept on a film by a producer who cannot make up his mind and a director written off as a 'road company Hitchcock'. The monster in that picture, someone explains, only has power in the last hour of the year. The Shadow's 'Death House Rescue' opens on a long laugh and the question of what evil lurks in the hearts of men. In it, Margo Lane brings Mrs. Gordon, whose husband faces the chair, $1,000 in cash and a message not to lose hope. She also gets a line that plays on the series title: she cannot tell whether she really knows the man or only his shadow. In 'The Poison Death', Lamont and Margo test machine after machine until they find the typewriter behind warning notes sent to the papers, sitting in Gerber's office. Suspense, introduced by the man in black, presents 'The Singing Walls' with Preston Foster as a San Francisco homicide detective and Dane Clark as a young man who wakes up in a very serious jam. One scene hinges on a switched drink at a bar and a badge from headquarters. CBS Radio Mystery Theater's 'Letter of Love, Letter of Death' begins with a reflection on regret for things never done, then puts a lieutenant across from a suspect he says will one day beg to be arrested. The victim had agreed to produce the suspect's play even though drink had finished him as a writer, and the fingerprints on the murder weapon are not the suspect's. The commercials stay in. Blue Coal wraps The Shadow in anthracite pitches, down to a free booklet from its heating expert, John Barclay, on cutting the cost of heating a home. A CBS Radio Mystery Theater recording trails off into local ads for car sun screens and a transmission tune-up. Suspense closes by naming its producer, director, conductor, composer and radio author, and Quiet Please hands over to writer-director Willis Cooper to preview a story about a man who was haunted. For atmosphere, 'Clarissa' is a natural first pick; for a cat-and-mouse murder case, 'Letter of Love, Letter of Death'; for detective legwork, 'The Poison Death'.