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Today’s Mystery: Ellery Queen investigates the attempted poisoning of a cantankerous woman. The most obvious suspect is her eight-year-old nephew.
Original Air Date: January 4, 1948
Originating in New York
Starring: Hugh Marlowe as Ellery Queen; Santos Ortega; Ted de Corsia; Sarah Fussell; Anne Seymour; John Gibson
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Join us again tomorrow for another detective drama from the Golden Age of Radio.
“The Adventure of the [not “a”] Bad Boy” is nice to have available, the radio work of the prolific “Ellery Queen”(actually two cousins) not generally extant. Its motif of a possibly murderous child was carried to horrific extremes in “The Tragedy of Y” (1932; the second of four “Drury Lane” detective novels written by Queen using the “Barnaby Ross” byline), the prevailing old-house macabre atmosphere of this apparently inspired by S.S. Van Dine’s 1928 “The Greene Murder Case” (a tour-de-force that John Dickson Carr — a specialist in murder-mysteries with supernatural overtones — considered, rightly so in my opinion, one of the ten best mystery novels ever written). This vintage radio program commences rather sluggishly, to establish the principals, and its denouement — with typically overly dramatic and unrealistic ratiocinations, even featuring the well-worn (by this time) secret panel and passage — is as unbelievable as it is convoluted. But such could be, and remains thus, entertaining by lovers of such vintage fare (me included), demonstrating the impressive inventiveness that was so often seen in the E.Q. writings.
P.S. Further re: “The Adventure of the Bad Boy”, the plot device involving rabbits being immune to arsenical poisoning is indeed adroit; however, I’ve found nothing to verify it. While certain animals, such as the hedgehog, mongoose, honey badger and opossum are credited with immunity from snake venom; and the anthropoid known as millipedes said to be immune to cyanide; I find no mention of rabbits in such a context.
Here’s an odd bit of peripheral trivia.
In The Dark Tower series of fantasy novels,
Stephen King named one of the bad guys,
a henchman really, as Santos Ortega.
King is old enough to have heard
OTR when it was NTR.
It’s an odd coincidence,
but no stranger than finding
a character in an old radio show
was named Harry Potter.
I tried to look up which one,
but the search results are swamped
by a character named Harry Potter
in the 1986 movie Trolls.
That’s the problem with
Google as a research tool.
Recent pop culture references
will drown out the
actual information you seek.
Tim “sell-league-ah” Szeliga