Suspense is compounded of mystery and suspicion and dangerous adventure. In this series are tales calculated to intrigue you, to stir your nerves, to offer you a precarious situation and then withhold the solution… until the last possible moment when we again hope to keep you in…Suspense!
Suspense (1942-1962) aired “The One Man Crime Wave” on January 11, 1954 as the 534th of its 945 episodes.
As recounted in the introduction to the more than 50 episodes of Suspense we’ve shared over the past fourteen years, it was such a rich goldmine of superior stories that we found that each one has had something unique to offer. Suspense was one of the most well produced, written, acted, and critically acclaimed of all radio shows during the Golden Age of Radio, many a film star jumping at the chance to perform in an episode, among them Cary Grant, Orson Welles, Jimmy Stewart, Susan Hayward, Vincent Price, Charles Laughton, Loretta Young, Peter Lorre, and Rita Hayworth. After many another radio show had gasped its last breath during the 1950s, Suspense (along with Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar) finally closed shop in September of 1962 whereupon radio historians proclaimed the Golden Age of Radio dead, television having become the medium of choice in America.
“The One Man Crime Wave” puts the spotlight center stage on a tale of senseless murder, something all too common and more timely than ever these days. Film star Dana Andrews (1909-1992, photo top right) here assumes the role of a police sergeant whose job it now is to track down and one way or another bring to justice a serial murderer, one whose crime seems to escalate with each murder; at first a single stabbing of a woman on the street at night, but whose third and latest involves more than a single victim and which now includes butchery. I found it interesting to compare how such crimes are solved today, with our advanced technology in the area of criminology and such television programs as Criminal Minds, the police procedural featuring the special FBI section known as the Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU), an entire team of experts devoted to profiling the psychology of the criminal mind. As an expensively produced hour-long program with an ensemble starring cast as opposed to this half-hour radio play featuring one lone police sergeant with only the resources available to him at the time, it speaks well to the dedication, resolve, and ingenuity of crime fighters of any era, this example but one of many that all too often fail to get the headlines.
Dana Andrews would star in a number of notable Hollywood films, probably the most memorable being Laura (1944) where he co-starred with Gene Tierney as a police detective in search of her presumed murderer. Also featuring Clifton Webb, Vincent Price, and Judith Anderson, and directed by Otto Preminger, the film has become a film noir classic. For science fiction fans, Andrews would star in The Twilight Zone episode “No Time Like the Past” which aired on March 7, 1963. For a number of years prior to his death Andrews suffered from Alzheimers, spending his final years in a medical center devoted to Alzheimers patients. According to his wikipedia page he died on December 17, 1992 from “congestive heart failure and pneumonia.”
Play Time: 30:07
{This episode airing on a Monday ensured that the neighborhood gang would hit the nearby newsstand on their way home from school the next day, in search of more excitement. They were in luck. Astounding SF (1930-present, now Analog) had been a mainstay for years, so this issue was picked up sight unseen. They were in luck as along with others this issue contained stories by Algis Budrys, Frank M. Robinson, John J. McGuire & H. Beam Piper, and Charles L. Harness & Theodore L. Thomas. ASF was a monthly in 1954. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (1949-present) was still mixing stories between the “best of the old” and new material, a practice it would soon end with its first issue packed with all new material being the April 1954 issue, a few issues down the road from this current January issue. F&SF was a monthly in 1954 and has been for some time the second oldest SF magazine in existence, behind Astounding/Analog. Galaxy (1950-1980) began a year after F&SF‘s debut in the Fall of 1949 and made a huge splash of its own, editors H. L. Gold and then Fred Pohl pointing the SF field in new, and much welcomed, directions. Along with the incomparable Damon Knight (founder of SFWA and named its 13th Grand Master in 1994) featured on the cover, this issue held fiction by Gordon R. Dickson, Jerome Bixby, and none other than Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. ‘Nuff said. Galaxy was a monthly in 1954.}
[Left: Astounding SF, Jan. 1954 – Center: F&SF, Jan. 1954 – Right: Galaxy, Jan. 1954]
To view the entire list of weekly Old Time Radio episodes at Tangent Online, click here.