From Those Were the Days:

1949 - Martin Kane, Private Eye was first heard on Mutual Radio. William Gargan starred on the Sunday afternoon program.
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“…stories of the strange and unusual…”

During the 1945 and 1947 summer hiatus of radio’s The Abbott & Costello Show, Bud and Lou’s sponsor—Camel cigarettes—paid the bills for a crime-mystery series entitled Mystery in the Air. However, this show appeared in two distinctively different formats; the first run (July 5-September 27, 1945) detailed the adventures of detective Stonewall Scott (played by one-time Shadow actor Steve Courtleigh), who specialized in solving baffling crimes assisted by pathologist Dr. Alison (whose first name had apparently been swiped; a crime even Scott couldn’t solve) and who was portrayed by Joan Vitez. No episodes of this series are known to exist—which is just as well, since this post is going to focus on the better-known second incarnation (July 3-September 25, 1947), a mystery anthology starring screen actor Peter Lorre.

Lorre was no stranger to radio, having been a featured guest on several episodes of “radio’s outstanding theater of thrills;" in fact, one of his Suspense broadcasts—“Nobody Loves Me”—was redone as an entry (July 31, 1947) on Mystery In the Air. He also hosted Mystery Playhouse, an AFRS series that consisted mostly of rebroadcasts from shows like The Whistler and Inner Sanctum Mysteries, with new intros provided by the celebrated actor. Mystery In the Air concentrated on “dark and compelling masterpieces culled from the four corners of world literature,” offering adaptations from authors like Edgar Allan Poe (“The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat”) and Marie Belloc Lowndes (“The Lodger”).

As OTR historian John Dunning relates, Lorre “delivered intense, supercharged performances of men tortured and driven by dark impulses.” The actor would often work alone at one microphone, “raving and wildly gesticulating,” while the supporting players faced opposite him at another. He would often find himself physically and emotionally drained and drenched with sweat by the end of each half-hour performance. Frequent Mystery player Peggy Webber once recalled an occasion where Lorre became so worked up that he threw his script up into the air, necessitating some quick ad-libbing and covering by the rest of the cast until the midway point of the program could be reached and the script pages reassembled.

Webber appears in both of the programs that I listened to while at work last night, the first (from August 28, 1947) being Ben Hecht’s “Beyond Good and Evil”—in which Lorre plays an escaped killer masquerading as a minister in a small town, his secret known only by an elderly clergyman (John Brown) who’s paralyzed from a stroke. This broadcast is quite good, with an interesting twist ending and fine support from Howard Culver, Russell Thorson and Jack Edwards, Jr. Next, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” (September 25, 1947 and the last show of the series), which tells the classic tale of a struggling writer named Raskolnikov who murders a pawnbroker and becomes embroiled in a game of cat-and-mouse with the law. Lorre fans might remember that the actor starred in a 1935 film treatment of this story, and in fact this production was adapted from that version. The cast includes Joseph Kearns, Ben Wright, Luis Van Rooten, Gloria Ann Simpson and Herb Butterfield.

Michael Roy was on hand to extol Camel cigarettes on Mystery In the Air, but handling the main announcing chores was a man billed as “The Voice of Mystery.” I won’t keep you in suspense, though—he was actually a young Harry Morgan, best remembered by TV fans for his roles as sardonic neighbor Pete Porter on December Bride (and its spin-off, Pete and Gladys) and Colonel Sherman Potter on M*A*S*H (and its spin-off, After M*A*S*H). Morgan was fairly well established in movies as a character actor at this point in his career (The Ox-Bow Incident, he's billed as Henry Morgan) but he also dabbled in radio, particularly on series like This is Your FBI and Dragnet. (His early association with Dragnet creator-star Jack Webb allowed him to be cast as Webb’s new partner, Officer Bill Gannon, when the cop show was revived in the late 1960s.)

(By the way—you’ve probably noticed that photograph of a woman on Colonel Potter’s desk in M*A*S*H, and yes, it’s supposed to be Potter’s long-suffering wife Mildred. But it’s also a picture of actress Spring Byington, Morgan’s co-star on December Bride.)

There are eight extant broadcasts of Mystery in the Air (the series was on for thirteen weeks in 1947) available to OTR collectors today, and I personally think they’re all fine examples of outstanding radio drama—buoyed by superb music orchestrated by Paul Baron and top-notch production-direction from Cal Kuhl. Series star Peter Lorre would take one more stab at a radio series in 1953 in Mutual Radio’s Nightmare, a horror anthology that billed the actor as “your exciting guide to terror.”
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