The Crime Club 03/20/47  Dead Man Control
Escape 07/21/49, “Action”.
SF68 (1968), “The Will”.
The Black Museum 1951, ” The Brass Button”


Segment One:

Produced and directed by Willis Cooper (Lights Out, Quiet Please) the Crime Club was a  series that ran in 1946 and 1947, featuring murder and mystery stories:


Although there exists no evidence of a contractual arrangement between the Mutual Network and Doubleday publishing even  a casual exploration of  titles in  this radio series makes it clear that the inspiration for the series has to be  the literary imprint  the Crime Club.  Most of the stories were adaptations from this Doubleday series.


This imprint of books began in 1928 with the publication of The Desert Moon Mystery by Kay Cleaver Strahan (creator of one of the first female fictional detectives).


The imprint continued to publish until 1991.


The radio series opens as a phone rings and a voice answers, “Hello, I hope I haven’t kept you waiting. Yes, this is the Crime Club. I’m the Librarian…” (Actually it’s Raymond Johnson best known as the host of Inner Sanctum)


The show today is from 03/20/47, “Dead Man Control“.

Segment Two:

A spin off from Suspense, Escape ran on CBS from 1947 to 1954, and dealt in a wide variety of stories: science fiction, horror, murder.

Good fun for the whole family.

The program displayed a fondness for adventure tales set in the tropics or on the high seas. As far as I have been able to find out, there were a total of 194 stories.

Many of the episodes were taken from the classics, but not all. Often the writers and producers of Escape  culled material from stories that were not then considered classics but have gained that status since. Not that the radio show had anything to do with that. This distinction was brought about by the excellence of the material itself and the garnishment of time.

Today’s segment, “Action” originally aired on July 21 of 1949.

Segment Three:

SF68 was a South African  broadcast featuring high caliber adaptions of mostly previously published short stories from established science fiction writers,  like Bradbury, Ellison, and Leinster. The shows were well made and the stories interesting. Produced and directed by the dean of South African radio drama, Michael McCabe. It was an unfortunately short-lived series that had it’s run in, appropriately enough, 1968. The series was dropped in favor of a mystery/horror series called Beyond Midnight, whose run was far more successful and in itself was a good show. Today’s story on SF 68 is an adaptation of a short story by Walter M Miller, “The Will”.

Miller, was a well-established and quite Famous Science Fiction Writer best known for His 1960 post-apocalyptic Novel, “A Canticle for Leibowitz”. If you haven’t read this it would be hard to overestimate its influence on science fiction of the era.
Get it.
Read it.
You won’t be sorry.

Segment Four:

Segment Four is “The Brass Button” an episode of The Black Museum from  sometime in 1951

The Black Museum was a 1951 radio crime drama produced by Harry Alan Towers for the BBC. It would later air in the United States, on the Mutual Network, between January 1st, 1952 and December 30th, 1952.


The show dramatized true cases from the files of Scotland Yard’s Black Museum ,wherein the narrator, Orson Welles ,tells us the story of one or another grisly murders. Always, well nearly always, accomplished by the means of some ordinary object now preserved and on exhibit in Scotland Yard’s “Black Museum” as in this case..  “The brass button”  an innocuous, ordinary brass button  a brass button that was found near the dead body of a woman…



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