MANNING LEE STOKES – The Dying Room. Mercury Mystery #124; digest-sized paperback; no date stated. Hardcover edition: Phoenix Press, 1947.

   This is strange — really strange, as a matter of fact. There are six copies of this book available for sale on ABE as I type this, and five of them are the paperback version. Guess which one’s the least expensive? The hardcover edition from Phoenix. Even without a dust jacket on the hardcover, explain that if you can.

   Manning Lee Stokes was born in 1911 and died in 1976, and at best, he had what you might call a mixed writing career. The Dying Room was one of his earliest books — his first four were published by Phoenix, beginning in 1945, and in chronological order, this one’s the third. From Phoenix he went to paperback originals (Graphic Books) and then wrote several others for another designed-for-libraries hardcover publisher, Arcadia House. One book was published Dell in 1958, but from 1960 on, he wrote nothing that appeared under his own name.

   He wrote some of the early Nick Carter spy thrillers from Award in the 1960s, for example, a few of the John Eagle “Expeditor” men’s adventure novels from Pyramid in the 1970s as by Paul Edwards, and as Ken Stanton, all eleven of the “Aquanauts” books (with leading character Tiger Shark) that came out from Macfadden and Manor, also in the 1970s. (I have all the Expeditor books, I believe, but I have no explanation as to why I have NONE of the Aquanauts books.)

   Stokes also wrote some of the sex-oriented SF-Fantasy “Blade” novels from Pinnacle, or so I’m told, but there’s certainly no reason to go into that, or at least not here. One other series character whom he created and who is worth mentioning is Christopher Fenn, who solved a couple of the cases from Arcadia House in the late 1950s, including The Case of the Presidents’ Heads, shown smoewhere below and to the left. Fenn was a private eye or criminologist of perhaps no great renown, but he is listed on Kevin Burton Smith’s PI website, so he has not been totally forgotten.

   But there is private eye that Kevin does not know about — a rare event — a gent called Barnabas Jones who appeared in both The Wolf Howls “Murder” (Phoenix Press, 1945) and Green for a Grave (Phoenix Press, 1946). And something that Al Hubin does not know about (yet) is that Barnabas Jones also shows up for a short appearance in The Dying Room. Even though Jones is not the leading character and his part is small, his role is a relatively important one, substantially more than a walk-on or cameo, and I’ll get there very shortly.

   Before I do, however, let me say this up front. The Dying Room is a much better book — and detective novel — than I expected it to be. Phoenix Press is not noted for its gems and works of art in the world of crime and mystery fiction, but you could do much worse than finding a copy of The Dying Room to read somewhere and somehow, hopefully not paying too much for it, no more than ten to fifteen dollars or so, and maybe less if you’re lucky. (My copy cost me five dollars if you were to split the money up as part of a group lot, and when I found it among the others, my first reaction was that I paid too much.)

   Telling the tale is Tom Fain, an ex-soldier with a splinter of a German shell embedded in his brain. About to be moved into the “dying room” at the Fort Tyner station hospital after his latest unsuccessful surgery, Fain decides to make a break for it. And with the help of a sympathetic nurse’s aide named Helen, escape he does.

   On his way to see his ailing stepmother, the only mother he has ever known, he stops to visit with an old friend — the aforementioned Barnabas Jones, who offers him a job, but with other things on his mind at the time, Fain turns him down. (Mr. Jones makes another appearance and more importantly, in his professional capacity, later on.) Failing to reach his stepmother before she died, and avoiding a pickup by a pair of MP’s on his trail, Fain heads back to New York (and Helen) on an airplane — which is where the story begins, or at least the mystery part.

   Fain sits next to a good-looking girl — no, change that, make it a beautiful girl — with whom he strikes up a lively conversation. Things are going well, but there’s nothing like a small disaster to get a story really going. Both Fain and the girl survive the crash. He’s more or less OK, but she is not. Her memory is gone, and a new one — one of her former life — has replaced it. Unfortunately there is a two-year gap in what she remembers. She doesn’t remember Fain, but being convinced that he helped save her life, she invites him to her new (old?) home to recover.

   There was a question mark there, as you will have noticed. Is the girl the missing heir to a considerable fortune? Or is she a fraud? Fifty million dollars is at stake. (I did say considerable.) Several persons try to hire him — it turns out that he, before the war, was a private eye himself. And as it turns out, and not too surprisingly, someone is playing a dangerous (and deadly) game, and Fain, as he quickly discovers, was never given the rules under which it’s being played.

   But as a detective, Fain gives his clients their money’s worth, and in similar fashion does Stokes the author. A six-point summary on page 98 is as precise and to the point as any I’ve read in a work of detective fiction in quite a while. No power point presentation could have produced anything better.

   The ending gets a little too melodramatic, perhaps — well, no perhaps about it — and the prologue most certainly could have been ditched, which very nearly goes without saying, as most prologues could be (should be) ditched, but (and this is a big but) this book is as entertaining as anything I’ve watched on television this week.

   That someone never recognized that this book would make for an awfully good movie is something to be regretted. Filmed in black-and-white, with some professionally done noir-ish touches, perhaps, maybe even a great one.

[UPDATE] 07-11-08. Looks like I never told Kevin about Barnabas Jones, but I will today. (One of course wonders immediately if the gent is related to the later Barnaby Jones of TV fame. Probably not. There are a lot of Joneses in this country.)

   Barnabas Jones’s brief appearance in The Dying Room is now included in Part 5 of the online Addenda to the Revised Crime Fiction IV, along with a complete listing for each of the PI series he did, both early in his career.

LIGHTNING STRIKES TWICE. Warner Brothers, 1951. Ruth Roman, Richard Todd, Mercedes McCambridge, Zachary Scott, Daryl Hickman. Based on the novel A Man Without Friends, by Margaret Echard (Doubleday, 1940). Directed by King Vidor.

   Except for a short but crucial opening sequence, this little known black-and-white film begins (as many other noir-type movies have, as I’ve pointed out before) with someone getting off a bus in a small town in the West or South, only to find themselves in middle of a case of murder, or a situation where passions are so inflamed that a murder is about to happen.

   Except that the person getting off the bus is not Alan Ladd or Glenn Ford or Dana Andrews, it’s Ruth Roman. The town is apparently somewhere in the west Texas desert country, and but Shelley Carnes is definitely a loner of sorts, an actress who’s temporarily left her troupe and who’s planning to stay at a dude ranch in the area, needing a short respite from too much traveling on the road.

   The opening few scenes, which I mentioned as being crucial, are exactly that. A young man named Richard Trevelyan (Richard Todd) has been convicted of killing his tramp of a wife, only to be given a stay of execution at the last minute and granted a new trial. The new trial has ended in a hung jury, with one woman managing to persuade five others that he is not guilty.

   Enter Shelley Carnes. Trevelyan has returned but has gone into hiding. Shelley does not know it, but the dude ranch she is given directions to (with ulterior motives) has closed for the year. Liza McStringer (Mercedes McCambride) and her invalid brother own and operate the ranch, but they agree to let her stay.

   It turns out that Liza was the holdout witness, and the local folks are pretty divided about it, since Trevelyan certainly looks guilty, nor has he said anything to anyone about the killing. So, given all this, who do you suppose Shelley meets accidentally, and who do you suppose she …

   I hope you’re with me, because if I continue, I would be telling you the whole story, and that’s not what I intend to do. But as sure as Shelley is about Richard, it is obvious that some doubts still remain.

   As for the players, Todd, an English actor, is miscast as a man of the desert, no matter how much is made of where he was educated or brought up, but believe it or not, his part is not the most important.

   It might be Ruth Roman’s picture — and I’ll get back to that in a minute — and for the role she plays, she certainly makes the best of it. I think this is the earliest movie I’ve seen her in. I remember her most from her later days in television, where she gradually found herself playing much more mature roles. (She may be best known for her role as Sylvia Lean on Knots Landing, circa 1986.)

   Here she appears slim and vibrant and not quite so sure of herself, and for each of these reasons, but particularly the latter, she’s largely sympathetic as a woman who finds herself in a situation that moves continuously (and elusively) beyond her control.

   But the most fascinating character in the movie is Liza McStringer. Mercedes McCambridge was by far not the most glamorous movie star in the world, and in fact until the 1970s, she did not do many movies at all, concentrating first as a radio star, then in TV, but never in a continuing series. (She was the voice of the demon in The Exorcist, and she had to sue in order to get the screen credit she was to have been given.)

   But if nothing, Mercedes McCambridge is one of the most intense actresses (she’s the one on the right) I can think of now, and that is what she is in this movie, absolutely intense. I think if I were on a jury, and she were of the other opinion, I can only imagine how easily persuaded I might be.

   The romance in this movie is there only to hang a pretty good murder plot on, which come to think of it, isn’t really all that strong, either. I think that there’s a mutual symbiosis between the two, each making the other half of the story stronger, helping disguise a weakness at the center of the tale in the best possible way it might have been done.

   Of the five authorial bylines in this installment of the onlineAddenda to the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, there may be only two actual authors involved. These entries come from Part 25. Besides the incidental alphabetical proximity between two of them, there’s no other connection.

ADCOCK, LARRY. It is possible that this author of one book in the Revised Crime Fiction IV is also Thomas L(arry) Adcock, q.v., author of several other crime fiction novels.
      CB Angel. Popular Library, pb, 1977. Add setting: cross-country US. Also add British edition: NEL, pb, 1981. Leading characters: “The Lone Ranger” = Steve Yancy and “Tonto” = Jay Banks. [A pair of truckers team up with a woman known to them only as “Foxy Lady” and a voice.]

ADCOCK, THOMAS L(ARRY). 1947- . Pseudonym: Buck Saunders; possible other byline: Larry Adcock, q.v.. Born in Detroit; a former journalist and newspaper editor before turning to writing full time. Under his own name, the author of seven police procedurals included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, six of them with NYPD detective Neil Hockaday. Hockaday earlier appeared in a series of short stories for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, the first of which, “Christmas Cop” (March 1986) received an MWA Edgar nomination. The second Hockaday novel, Dark Maze (Pocket, 1991), won an Edgar in 1992 for Best Original Paperback.

ADLON, ARTHUR. Pseudonym of (Harold) Keith (Oliver) Ayling, 1898-1976; other pseudonym: Kaye Ayling, qq.v. Under this pen name, among other adult fiction, the author of a marginally crime-related novel previously included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV. Add the one indicated with an asterisk (*).
      (*) -Bad Girl Abroad. Chariot, US, pb, 1960, Setting: France. [Criminous and passionate adventures of an American teenager in the French Riviera.]

      -The Prince of Poisoners. Chariot, US, pb, 1960.

AYLING, KAYE. Pseudonym of (Harold) Keith (Oliver) Ayling, 1898-1976; other pseudonym: Arthur Adlon, qq.v. Under this pen name, the author of one romantic spy thriller included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV.
      Who Was Ellen Smith? Lancer, pb, 1967. “Her husband’s past was a mystery.and her own future depended on the answer. Where could she seek help?”

AYLING, (HAROLD) KEITH (OLIVER). 1898-1976. Pseudonyms: Arthur Adlon & Kaye Ayling, qq.v. Born in Hampshire, England. Wartime service with the Royal Air Force; came to the US in 1940. Writer for Liberty Magazine and the aviation pulps in the 1940s; author of many non-fiction books about aviation and auto racing between 1941 and 1970. Also under his own name, the author of one espionage novel included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV. See below.
      The Last Enemy. Pyramid, pb, 1971. “International double-dealing in sex and revolution.”

   In clichesville, the equivalent of the gothic heroine is our old friend, the Private Eye — male variety. Frank Kane’s Johnny Liddell was a harmless example of the species — not vicious like Mickey Spillane but not possessing the social conscience of Mike Shayne of Lew Archer either. Recent reading of three of Kane’s books back-to-back showed that he “borrowed” liberally from himself. By the third book I had a feeling of déjà vu, and a fast rereading showed why, as the following quotes indicate. (NOTE: All page numbers are from Dell paperback editions.)

Poisons Unknown, page 63: “Gabby Benton was on her second cup of coffee, third cigarette, and fourth fingernail when Johnny Liddell stepped out of a cab. . . ”

Red Hot Ice, page 18: “Muggsy Kiely was on her third cup of coffee and her fourth fingernail when Johnny Liddlell walked into….”

Red Hot Ice, page 27: “Her legs were long, sensuously shaped. Full rounded thighs swelled into high-set hips, converged into a narrow waist. Her breasts were firm and full, their pink tips straining upward.”

Poisons Unknown, page 182: “The whiteness of her body gleamed in the reflected light from the windows. Her legs were long, sensuously shaped. Full rounded thighs swelled into high-set hips, converged into the narrow waist he had admired earlier in the evening. Her breasts were full and high, their pink tips straining upward.”

A Short Bier, page 60: “The whiteness of her body gleamed in the spotlight. Her legs were long, sensuously shaped. Full rounded thighs swelled into high-set hips, and converged into a narrow waist. A thin wisp of a brassiere made a halfhearted attempt to cover the full breasts, their pink tips straining upward.”

Poisons Unknown, pages 49-50: “The pealing of the phone at his ear was shrill, strident, insistent. Johnny Liddell groaned, cursed softly, and dug his head under the pillow. The noise refused to go away. He opened one eye experimentally, squinted at the window shade and noted that it still wasn’t light. He tried to wipe the sleep from his eyes, but it wouldn’t wipe away.”

Red Hot Ice, page 40: “The telephone on the-night table started to shrill discordantly. Johnny Liddell groaned, cursed sleepily, and dug his head further into the pillow. The noise refused to go away. He opened one eye experimentally; he could see by the half-drawn shade that it was still night…. He tried to wipe the sleep from his eyes, but it wouldn’t wipe.”

Red Hot Ice, page 90: “Muggsy Kiely … opened the door herself in response to his knock. She was wearing a robe that clung to a figure that was decidedly worth clinging to.”

A Short Bier, page 39: “Muggsy Kiely opened the door in response to his knock. She was wearing a hostess gown that clung to curves that were obviously worth clinging to.”

Poisons Unknown, page 20: “… seemingly unaware that the front of her housecoat had sagged open with breathtaking effect.”

A Short Bier, page 41: “…seemed unaware that the front of her hostess gown had sagged open with breathtaking effect.”

   With that technique, coupled with no great originality of plotting, it’s surprising Kane only wrote thirty-one books about his hero.

    Books reviewed or discussed in this installment:

FRANK KANE – Poisons Unknown. Ives Washburn, hardcover, 1953. Dell 822, paperback, 1955. Dell D334, pb, January 1960.

  —, Red Hot Ice. Ives Washburn, hardcover, 1955. Dell 991, pb, 1956. Dell 7292, pb, November 1967.

  —, A Short Bier. Dell First Edn B150, paperback original, July 1960.

AUSTIN J. SMALL – The Crimson Death.

Lead novel in the pulp magazine Detective Classics, March 1930.

   Austin J. Small is not a name well-known in mystery circles today, and all I knew about this story before I started reading it was the typically pulpish lead-in blurb: “Terror stalks at Gairlie” — with all that conjures up about ghosts, haunted castles and the like, but not — as a first impression — as being a “classic.”

   But then the Gairlie Rubies are stolen, from a sealed room under observation at all times, and could it be? A locked room mystery that no one else knows about? Is Small going to play it straight? Can he be trusted to play fair with the reader?

   The investigation goes on, and doubts begin to creep back in. The Crimson Death strikes, and the first victim is a maid, slain in the library by an invisible killer that streaks her dress with red. Detectives from Scotland Yard are called in — but obviously they’re not at all familiar with anything close to resembling standard police procedural techniques. It’s not enough that the wrong questions are asked, but the answers they do get are often not revealed. Hopes fade fast.

   Am I revealing too much, considering the general non-availability of this particular work, to say that Small is more interested in writing science-fiction than an utterly fair detective story? Still, in spite of the frustrating nature of the incompetent investigation, and in spite of the dumb obstacles placed in the way of true love, there is a modicum of quaint naivete to go with the many pulp styled thrills and chills, thus making this sinister mystery not a complete failure.

   It comes close, though.

[UPDATE] 07-08-08. I’ve always assumed that this was the magazine version of one of Austin J. Small’s several crime and mystery novels published in hardcover, sometimes under the pen name of “Seamark,” but now that I have the means of checking into it more thoroughly, this is apparently not so.

   Which also means that in terms of an appropriate cover image, I’m stumped, for the first time in a long time. In its place, I have an inappropriate one, but it is one in my collection by the same author, and it appears to be the same kind of science-fictional overlap with the world of detective fiction. I’ve never read it, so I could be wrong, and don’t hold me to it.

   I no longer even have a copy of the magazine I read this story in. I must have traded it off for something I thought I’d rather have at the time. Little did I know then that I would need it now.

HENRY KANE – Until You Are Dead.

Signet S1835; paperback reprint, August 1960 (Barye Phillips cover). Hardcover edition: Simon & Schuster, 1951. UK editions: T. V. Boardman, hc, 1952; ppbk, 1953. Earlier US paperback edition: Dell 580, 1952, mapback (Victor Kalin cover).

   In order of publication, Until You Are Dead was either the sixth or seventh of Henry Kane’s series of detective tales featuring a suave Manhattan private eye named Peter Chambers. (The reason I’m not more definitive on this is that there were two of Chambers’ adventures in 1951. With nothing else to go on, I’m going to suggest that this one is #6, since it was came out from Simon & Schuster, who published the first five, and A Corpse for Christmas appeared from Lippincott, suggesting a change in publisher. The Christmas aspect of the latter also suggests that it was published later in the year, once again making Until You Are Dead the earlier one.)

   Such is life in the fast armchair-detective lane.

   Also of note is that Kane’s first three short stores, one of which, “Kudos for the Kid” (May 1947) may have been the overall first appearance of Peter Chambers, were published in Esquire, which was a prestigious magazine to be in at the time.

   After 1951, though, all of Kane’s novel length fiction in the US, most but not all adventures of Peter Chambers, came out as paperback originals, first from Avon, then Dell and many of the others including Signet, before both Kane and Chambers ended up in a series of X-rated books from Lancer in 1970.

   Oops. I see I erred in one thing I just said. There was a series of novels about Inspector MacGregor that appeared in hardcover from Macmillan between 1965 and 1968. These all took place in New York City, but I don’t know if I’ve ever seen any of them. (I no longer remember all of the books I’ve seen.)

   It’s not clear how sharp an operator Chambers is, and how close to the legal edges he usually runs, but he seems to know his way around and to know a lot of people who come close to running the town. Really running the town, that is. But either way, he draws the line at aiding and abetting a jazz musician turned blackmailer — the guy had seen a killing in a night spot men’s room, a guy high in the rackets who tossed Kermit Teshle (that’s his name) a hundred dollar bill and left.

   Teshle wants more. Chambers says no. Enter Ivy Teshle, his sister, a girl who dances for a living while trying to make it to Broadway. (See either of the two covers shown.) She meets him in his office, worried about her brother, on page 15, and on page 17 she is kissing him. Chambers says yes.

   It is that kind of book, and Chambers is that kind of private eye, and Henry Kane is that kind of writer.

   Kermit ends up dead, and Chambers is in it up to his neck.

   As a writing stylist, Henry Kane is pretty good. Not in Raymond Chandler’s league, but he can rattle off the dialogue when he wants to, which is often, and he can go into philosophical matters with equal ease. Once in a while these discussions become what in the vernacular might be called full-fledged rants, or here in New England, “wig-outs.” Example, pages 85 and 86:

   Whew. He caught me there, but only twice, thank goodness. (How about you?)

   With a passage like that to recommend this book, I wish the mystery had an ending to match. It’s OK, don’t get me wrong. It just isn’t up to the one I’d been waiting for. (I don’t think it could have.)

THE LIQUIDATOR. MGM, 1965. Rod Taylor, Jill St. John, Trevor Howard, Wilfred Hyde-White. Song over opening credits: sung by Shirley Bassey. Based on the novel of the same name by John Gardner. Director: Jack Cardiff.

   Anti-hero secret agent Boysie Oakes has come up before on this blog, back when I read and reviewed Understrike, a later book in the series. That’s when I also listed all of the books in the series, so I needn’t do it here.

   But I will repeat myself a bit by describing how I saw Mr. Oakes back then:

   I also wondered about how Mr. Oakes got into the spy business in the first place, if he’s that inept and that much of a coward. Well, wonder no more, Mr. Lewis. The opening scene of the movie version of The Liquidator, filmed in black-and-white (with the rest of the movie in color), tells us exactly that. In the closing days of World War II, during the liberation of Paris, Boysie Oakes (Rod Taylor) accidentally saved the life of a British agent named Mostyn. See below and to the right:

   Mostyn (Trevor Howard), never one to forget favors like that, but also not knowing how accidental his rescue was, calls on Boysie much later on to fill a new position in his Department, that of assassin, to eliminate those embarrassing people (double agents and the like) who would provide the press with more scandals, either by defecting or being arrested before they could defect.

   Tempted by the promises of a mid-60s Hugh Hefner life of luxury when not working, even before he knows what “working” actually means, Boysie accepts. Bad move. How does he get out of actually doing the work? In the most delightfully engaging way – assuming of course you agree that the victims actually need to be, um, liquidated.

   There is some satire involved here, as well as a slight touch of spoofery, and by this time half the movie is over. Of course there is another hour to fill, and with beautious Jill St. John (as Iris, Mostyn’s right-hand assistant) on hand to accompany Boysie on a strictly unauthorized trip for two to the Riviera, you’d think it would be filled most handsomely.

   Not so. The people who put out the film thought they needed a plot, but the plot they give us is pure pap. Things do not go nearly as well as Boysie had planned. First he’s kidnapped (amusingly before anything serious happens in the bedroom), then released and/or allowed to escape, then sent off on a fool’s mission to do some serious damage back in the UK.

   I’ve not read The Liquidator, the book, but at least one source says the movie people actually followed the book fairly closely. Perhaps they did, but they missed something, that something perhaps being that in spite of the movie being largely a spoof – which it definitely is until the shooting starts …

   That’s it. That’s exactly when things started going wrong. Right then, when the movie people began to make a straight (but still more than a little goofy) action picture out of what until then was a mild and gentle satirical poke at Mr. Bond.

   One other note. In the book I read, as you may recall from the review excerpt above, Boysie was described as being a coward.

   That’s hard to play on the screen, so that part was downplayed, or so it seems to me. Rod Taylor simply plays Boysie as a good-natured chap, a fellow who’s rather inept (as also previously described) and gets sick in airplanes (and you know where that will lead) but this is about as far into that direction the movie goes.

   This was the only film version of the character that was ever made.

      MARY ANNA EVANS —

   Relics. Poisoned Pen Press; trade paperback, Feb 2007 trade paperback; hardcover edition, August 2005.

   Effigies. Poisoned Pen Press, hardcover, January 2007.

   These two novels, the second and third in a series, feature Faye Longchamp, an archaeological graduate student. In Relics, she’s directing a project on an ethnically isolated Alabama group, the Sujosa, who have shown an unusual resistance to diseases that include AIDs, while in Effigies, she’s part of a team excavating a site in Neshoba County, Mississippi, where the Choctaw nation is thought to have been born. When mysterious deaths occur in each case, it’s left to Faye to investigate.

   Evans’ style is a bit heavy at times, with the scientific data weighing somewhat heavily on the narrative, but Faye is talented and possessed of a strongly independent mind that, coupled with a natural empathy for the native cultures she is investigating, make her a most sympathetic protagonist. The interaction with other members of the team and with the local population are thorny in both novels, and I found these both emotionally and intellectually satisfying.

[COMMENT] There is one earlier book in the series, as Walter mentions: Artifacts (2003); and one more recent one: Findings (2008).    — Steve

   In her review of Round the Fire Stories, by Arthur Conan Doyle, posted here in May a year ago, Mary Reed began by saying:

   And then in a footnote, she later added the following:

[WARNING: SOME PLOT ELEMENTS MAY BE REVEALED.]

   In a comment left last April, and inexplicably never acknowledged by me until now, Brian Gould replied by saying:

>>>>>>>

   My apologies to Mr. Gould for not pointing out this very useful reply until now. My only excuse is that I was out of town attending the Bordentown pulp and paperback show around the time his comment was posted, and I suspect that in the rush to catch up when I was back here at home, I simply failed to.

   But here’s what I discovered that prompted my attention back to “The Lost Special” again, a rare find: one the “missing” episodes of Suspense, one of Old Time Radio’s best-known, and longest-lasting mystery programs.

   I won’t post a link directly to the MP3, but I strongly recommend you go to Randy Riddle’s podcast blog and listen to it there, along with more information about both the disk and the program Of special note, until he found the disk, the program may not have been listened to in over 60 years, a “lost special” in and of itself. Excepted from Randy’s comments, here’s the basic info:

   Unheard publicly since September 30, 1943, we bring you Orson Welles starring in “The Lost Special” a “tale well calculated to keep in you Suspense!.” Originally broadcast on the CBS radio network, but now lost, the version heard here was distributed by the Armed Forces Radio Service as program 24 in the Suspense series.

    “The Lost Special” is based on a Sir Arthur Conan Doyle story and concerns a train that mysteriously disappears. The story was also used on the series Escape on February 12, 1949, so it may seem familiar. (You can give it a listen here.) However, in the “Suspense” version, the story is told by the main character and framed as a broadcast by a condemned man that will reveal the identity of persons responsible for certain crimes.

       […]

   Orson Welles appeared in the series Suspense eight times between 1942 and 1944 in such classics as “The Hitchhiker” and “Donovan’s Brain.” One of Welles’ performances, “The Lost Special,” was thought to be one of about thirty-five Suspense programs missing out of over 900 broadcast during the run of the series.