Murder By Experts:
“Summer Heat” (6/13/49)
CBS Radio workshop:
“Season of Disbelief and Hail and Farewell”
Weird Circle:
“The Passion In The Desert” (2/25/32)
The origins of superstition:
“Rabbit’s Foot” ( 1935)
Richard Wilson:
“Back To Julie”
(Galaxy Science Fiction May 1954)
Right Click here to download
Murder By Experts – Summer Heat
Murder By Experts was an anthology that ran in the United States between 1949 and 1951 on the Mutual Network. The program was at first hosted by mystery writer John Dickson Carr. Who would leave the show in 1950 to be replaced by Brett Halliday.
With a catalog of 130 episodes (unfortunately only a handful are known to have survived) the show revolved around the premise that each week a guest mystery writer would select a story from another writer (as in not themselves) to be presented as that week’s show. Sometimes at the end of the show (I guess as time permitted) there would be a critical postmortem of the episode, sometimes featuring well-known personalities.
Murder by Experts was created by David Kogan. A man who is well remembered in old-time radio circles as the writer/creator of The Mysterious Traveler, The Strange Doctor Weird and, if not countless then at least numerous, other radio programs dotting the landscape the radio’s “Golden Age“.
A newly graduated lawyer awakes with a dead body sharing his bedroom. He quickly finds that an old truism applies. “A friend will help you move. A really good friend will help you move a body. He could have used a friend like that as he has a very difficult time getting rid of that body!
Weird Circle – “The Passion In The Desert” (2/25/32)
The Weird Circle was a syndicated series produced in New York and licensed by Mutual, and later, NBC’s Red network (Digital Deli Too). For two seasons, it cranked out 39 shows (78 total) consisting mostly of radio adaptations of classic horror stories.
Contradiction Alert: Some sources date The Weird Circle as being produced from 1943 – 1945 (Digital Deli). Others state it was produced from 1946 – 1947.
This adaptation strays considerably from Honore de Balzac’s 1830 short story. It’s a tale about a man who encounters a leopard in the desert with which he develops an uneasy relationship.
Serious consequences entail.
I thought inasmuch as this story differs rather considerably from the original story. And since the original story is now safely in the public domain, I thought I would provide links to either read online, or download the story from the Internet.
I have had, in the past, some difficulty providing ancillary material in a manner that remains axillary. That is to say, I do not want the RSS feed to scrape this particular material and send it along. After a little bit of thought it seemed to me the best thing to do would be to create another blog at WordPress which I have called, “The NightTransmissions Annex”.
CBS Radio Workshop – “Season of Disbelief and Hail and Farewell” from February 17th of 1956.
The CBS Radio Workshop was an experimental dramatic radio anthology series that aired on CBS from January 27, 1956, until September 22, 1957. Subtitled “radio’s distinguished series to man’s imagination,” it was a revival of the earlier Columbia Workshop, broadcast by CBS from 1936 to 1943, and it used some of the same writers and directors employed on the earlier series. The CBS Radio Workshop was one of American network radio’s last attempts to hold onto, and perhaps recapture, some of the demographics they had lost to television in the post-World War Two era.
Music for the series was composed by Bernard Herrmann, Jerry Goldsmith, Amerigo Moreno, Ray Noble and Leith Stevens. Other writers
Adapted for the series were the likes of Robert A. Heinlein, Sinclair Lewis, H. L. Mencken, Edgar Allan Poe, Frederik Pohl, James Thurber, Mark Twain and Thomas Wolfe.
This episode features two Ray Bradbury’s character studies both introduced by Ray Bradbury himself, and narrated by John Dehner and Stacy Harris respectively. The musical accompaniment for both studies was scored and conducted by young Jerry Goldsmith.
The origins of superstition – “Rabbit’s Foot” from 1935.
The Origin of Superstition, witch was also known as Superstition On The Air, ran in 1935 for 39 episodes (At least that’s all that are known to have survived,) offers interesting and enlightening tales grounded in folklore and common Superstitions.
They were really there, they were making real radio. And now, they are gone, faded into the sepia shades of another time.
As the title suggests this particular Episodes of, (well in this case, Superstition on the air) deals with Rabbit’s feet. Or why they are considered “lucky” by those who possess them.
Although perhaps they are only lucky for rabbits when they manage to use them to get away from humans intent on culling a bit of “good luck”.
Night Transmissions 
Mar 15, 2012 @ 10:06:36
Hi Gary.
After listening to Summer Heat, I realized how similar it was to an Alfred Hitchcock Hour episode “The Cadaver”, in which a medical student wakes to find a dead corpse in his room. He goes through the many same events. Funny how many adaptations there can be from a single story.
http://www.locatetv.com/tv/alfred-hitchcock-hour/season-2/1002201
Just thought you might be interested in hearing.
Regards,
Todd
Mar 17, 2012 @ 12:09:00
I Also noticed an air of familiarity about the story. Somewhere in the back of my head I know I have read or heard multiple instances of this general plot. Actually, even one from my brother, who told me about when he was in college how some pre-med students he knew, took a severed hand and went for a little ride across a local bridge, a toll bridge to be exact. They had glued a dollar to the hand for the toll (this was probably 50 years ago). One of the students was holding the severed hand which was covered by the sleeve of a longish coat he was wearing. When the toll-attendant reached out to take the dollar the guy holding the hand released it and the driver drove off.
My brother Bill has occasionally been guilty of embellishing facts in the pursuit of a good story. I should ask him about this again now that we are both getting old and will occasionally now hold that the truth has more virtue than even a good story.
But only occasionally.
Thanks for the link.
gary
Mar 18, 2012 @ 00:24:11
autistic (sic) license: another comment refers to your statement about the lack of input – sometimes it seems that splitting hairs ad infinitum is a fruitless task – I was actually shocked when looking at comments initially because I thought there would be far more than there were. I had presumed from the number of shows and their quality (have an apple teach ….) that your show had a wider audience – it indeed is a labor of love – keep up the great work!!!!
John Steinbeck was taken to task by another weekend guest at a mutual friend’s place because Steinbeck had taken a story told by the other guest previously and had replaced the particulars as if events had occurred in Steinbeck’s life and not in a third persons’. Steinbeck pointed out the differences between the intimacies involved with the listener in storytelling – that, in this case anyway, a more immediate impact was felt by what he had done.
I have been (slowly) working on a database which contains stories and their various iterations – I was sending some of my favorites to friends before the last holidaze and couldn’t remember which versions (Godwin’s “Cold Equation”) and “The Enormous Radio”) I had liked best so I sat down and began to assemble the components needed to ease the task.
Listening to Vanishing Point’s “Thrice Told Tales” I was absolutely blown away Nathaniel Hawthorne’s updated “Twice Told Tales”, and downloaded those in order to read them. My previous stereotype was a chilling night scene with Hester Pryne? (“Scarlet Letter”) and the reverend in unreal surroundings (in my mind’s eyes) – whenever I hear that shrill whistle indicative of cold wind forcing its way into a buildings cracks I am taken back to the (imagined?) isolation and sparseness of a New England winter two hundred or more years ago.
One of my buzz words is “form follows function” and I try to see myself writing with a quill pen on parchment by candle light in a freezing winter and the chilling impact it must have on what is being written. “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” and “Artist of the Beautiful” caught my eye and I anxiously wanted to see the sources in “Twice Told Tales” which generated the powerful new adaptations.
There is a thread somewhere here … eyes are dim with age ….. so somewhere around here … further digging on robot building robot and the fiascos generated in a robot’s interpretation of serving mankind – as number of robots became too big to hide the IRS entered the picture and another Preston Sturges comedy (Miracle of Morgan’s Creek”) is off and running. As per variations comment above, one ending is a “Mouse that Roared” where the robots declare the small piece of land to be a foreign country! Since I heard this radio program within the last year I’m digging into what memory cells I have left in order to find the title.
Enjoy! To further success however you might define it!
bern