ODD.... CARLTON E. MORSE LOOKED INNOCENT ENOUGH....
I LOVE A MYSTERY!
Carlton E. Morse was getting bored in 1938.
NBC’s coast-to-coast run of his weekly half-hour, One Man’s Family, was five years old, (add an extra year for its West Coast trial run), and the author-producer-director of the Barbour Family’s highly rated but snail-paced narrative longed to create something faster paced and more adventuresome. (1)
Making his wishes known and getting a green light from Standard Brands, his satisfied One Man’s Family sponsor, Morse began to fashion I Love A Mystery, which would eventually rank in its sporadic, twelve-year, four network run with The Shadow and Lights Out for its gore and mayhem. Unlike the others, the Morse creation began as a 15-minute weekday strip show, then was converted to a weekly primetime half-hour of continuing stories, then once again shifted back to a weeknight strip. (2)
And unlike any other primetime program in Network Radio, I Love A Mystery was the only show to have its identical scripts performed by two different casts on two different networks in two different seasons of the Golden Age. But that’s getting ahead of our story…
Standard Brands told Morse to develop a quarter-hour adventure series of his liking and its agency, Kenyon & Eckhardt, (succeeded by J. Walter Thompson), would find a spot for it. The title was easy for Morse, I Love A Mystery was his motivation. To capture listeners' attention, he opened each episode with the sound of a passing locomotive, then segued into the moody organ theme of Jean Sibelius’ Valse Triste, (Sad Waltz). The solemn melody was often followed by a clock chiming to set the time of the episode.
Morse choice of the program’s three protagonists, (a gruff, no-nonsense leader, a Southern drawling sidekick and their veddy British third partner in the A-I Detective Agency), was the master scriptwriter’s shortcut to the listeners’ quick identification of Jack Packard, Doc Long and Reggie York. To play the three leads, Morse called upon three friends from UC/Berkeley who had proved their talents in the cast of his One Man’s Family, Michael Raffetto, Barton Yarborough and Walter Patterson. (3)
True to its word, Standard Brands’ Fleischmann Yeast introduced I Love A Mystery on the NBC West Coast network for a 26 week trial run at mid-afternoon on February 6, 1939. Even when surrounded by programming aimed a housewives, acceptance for the series was promising to the point that on October 2, 1939, I Love A Mystery was promoted by Standard Brands to the full coast-to-coast NBC network of 46 stations. The new series was slotted at 7:15 p.m. immediately following Fred Waring’s popular weeknight concerts.
Then the fun began. After calling I Love A Mystery, “The greatest radio program of all time!,” historian Jim Harmon explains in his 1966 text, The Great Radio Heroes: "The program seems to have been especially designed to outrage the PTA, the Mothers of America and whiten the hair of child psychologists. The monsters and murderers were not cleaned and prettied up. … Even the heroes were hardly symbols of purity and justice. 'I Love A Mystery' gave us the very wildest dream world possible, dwarfing the terrors of ‘The Hermit’s Cave,’ minimizing the exploits of ‘Captain Midnight,’ making simplicity itself of the mysteries of ‘The Shadow’ and it was peopled with characters that had reality of substance seldom found outside the printed pages of a novel.”
Leonard Maltin, in his 1997 text, The Great American Broadcast, quoted Morse describing his prolific workdays at the time, " I had to write 15 pages a day, five days a week for the 'I Love A Mystery' story and I had to write 'One Man's Family' once a week. I would just sit down at the typewriter with a blank page at 4:00 a.m., sit there for a few minutes and start to write. The minute I started writing, I was lost to the world for as much as two and a half hours." Maltin continued, "Later when Morse would rehearse his cast he sometimes marveled at what he had written, unable to explain where it came from other than his formidably fertile mind."
Maltin was obviously a fan of Morse's work: "These were full-blooded, pulp magazine-style yarns, offering the three jaunty proprietors of the A-1 Detective Agency a globe-trotting menu of adventures, from investigating reports of werewolves to trying to solve a series of grisly slasher murders in a a creepy old mansion. Morse knew how to pepper each script with vivid detail yet strike a balance between plot exposition and personality driven dialogue. The stories wouldn't have been the same without the rich and contrasting characterizations of Jack, Doc and Reggie."
Variety, however, had a tepid review of the first episode on NBC: “Although not devoid of hints of the radio writing skills that has made Carlton E. Morse a top of the pile figure through his 'One Man’s Family', there was not much in the initial installment of 'I Love A Mystery' to support large expectations. The characters were rather laboriously set and the plot a long time moving an inch-and-a-half which was the distance it had gotten when the first episode ended. .… Three adventurous young men are the pivots of this slowly unfolding melodrama. One of them has a Southern accent thick enough to pour over a bowl of grits. The others are less dialectic but probably better suited to longer wearing. There was rather too much description of themselves as swashbucklers and musketeers - Young Stonewall Jackson, in particular. … The lead-in sections of the continuity may be rapidly succeeded by something more rapidly easy to chew on. Serials are almost always impossible to evaluate fairly on a single hearing.” (4)
Listeners, however, quickly evaluated what they heard and they liked it. I Love A Mystery jumped to the front of its 7:15 p.m. time period, out-rating the alternating Lum & Abner and Jimmie Fidler on CBS, (who benefited from Amos & Andy’s lead-in), and Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons on Blue.
Nevertheless, Variety doubled down on its criticism on November 22nd with a critique hinting that I Love A Mystery came from Carlton E. Morse‘s trunk of old rejected scripts adding, "…The title is taking listeners under false pretenses as there is no mystery. Just gab. Nor are the characters sharply drawn, plausible or likeable. The program is an oddly lethargic framework for (Fleischmann Yeast) advertising that sells glowing energy and promises more vitality and more pep. It’s heard in the evening so it must be for adults.”
Indeed, adults were answering their telephones to C.E. Hooper pollsters and placed I Love A Mystery in the nightly Top Ten of Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday nights during the 1939-40 season. Standard Brands renewed the freshman adventure series for another 52 weeks in early December for a bargain basement production cost of less than $500 per performance.
In response, Variety moved its attack on the show from its review pages to its news pages on December 13th with a major story headlined over two columns, “Same Actors Double From Family To Mystery and Trade Dopesters See Destruction of Character Values.” The story cites unnamed sources creating, “…much comment being heard around the trade about Standard Brands’ practice of using the cast of its 'One Man’s Family' also for its 'I Love A Mystery'. The doubling, it is felt, puts the food combine in the position of possibly jeopardizing the highly valuable piece of property it has in 'One Man’s Family.” (5)
The double digit ratings of both shows didn't reflect this "problem." Of greater concern to Standard Brands were the complaints being registered to its retailers by their customers who objected to such “violent” fare being offered on their radios by Fleischmann Yeast at suppertime, interrupting family dinners and exposing their children to such mayhem. (6)
The number of petitions protesting I Love A Mystery grew to such numbers, (boosted by organized women’s clubs and PTA branches), that Standard Brands caved, but silenced the complaints, with a unique maneuver. It uprooted the 15 minute strip show on 32 NBC affiliates and converted it to a weekly half hour continuing format, (similar to One Man’s Family), on Thursdays at 8:30 on 48 NBC stations.
An episode from early in the NBC half-hour run, April 15, 1940, is mid-way through The Search of The Cobra God With Diamond Eyes adventure set in the jungles of French Indo-China and typical of the fun each show offered. The commercial displays Standard Brands’ liking for premiums, offering a “How To Swim” booklet by Olympians Johnny Weissmuller and Eleanor Holm for a dime and Fleischmann’s Yeast proof-of-purchase.
Ratings for the 15 and 30 minute versions of I Love A Mystery were almost identical, reflecting a steady, loyal audience. And although its 10.6 was terrific for a strip show, its 10.3 was disappointing for the Thursday series in the heart of prime time. In a rare, one-time occurrence, the half hour I Love A Mystery was edged out of Thursday’s Top Ten by itself in its former quarter hour Multiple Run form. As a result, Standard Brands exiled I Love A Mystery to Blue’s Monday schedule at 8:00 p.m. for the next two seasons.
The show’s move to Blue on September 30, 1940, was not welcomed by Variety: "The popularity rating of this Carlton Morse program was okay last year. It may be again. The formula is rife with the same values of excitement for the lower I.Q.’s and ages that pulp fiction represents. As the creator of one of radio’s best and most legitimate serials, 'One Man’s Family', Morse reverses the field to dish this exaggerated, unreal, dagger-thrust, gun-at-the-window sample of old fashioned adventure nonsense. There are again this year as last three incredible creatures out of San Francisco, (and the Hardy Boys), named Jack, Doc and Reggie. They are all he-men. Meaning long on action and missing on brains and caution.”
Think that’s bad? It gets worse. After two paragraphs condemning Morse’s The Tropics Don’t Call It Murder script as harmful to U.S. - Latin American relations, it continues: "This program is on 45 Blue Network stations at 8:00 p.m. and not offered as a kid program. Nevertheless, it will have thousands of kid listeners. They will find three crazy musketeers who deliberately go seeking trouble, who assiduously cultivate a chip-on-shoulder attitude and carry on conversations on a bogus realism basis that may pass for manly virility but it’s certainly not conducive to adult thought. Moreover, Jack, Doc and Reggie were constantly socking people, including women, in the jaw and saying, 'Excuse me, I’m sorry to do this, but I don’t have time to argue the point.'
"From the standpoint of the behavior of its characters and nature of its plot, 'I Love A Mystery' is very questionable radio. And that goes regardless of any popularity rating it may achieve." (7)
The reviewer was probably pleased that I Love A Mystery dropped from 60th to 70th in the season’s rankings in its move from NBC on Thursday at 8:30 to Blue on Monday at 8:00. The loss of 1.6 rating points was partly due to the lack of any 7:30 p.m. lead-in from the network for I Love A Mystery. Meanwhile, CBS opened its Monday nights with Blondie at 7:30, NBC offered Burns & Allen and Mutual led with The Lone Ranger.
Despite the same handicap in 1941-42, I Love A Mystery rebounded to a 9.8 season rating, 57th in the annual rankings and into Monday night’s Top Ten. Standard Brands expressed regret for cancelling the show on June 29, 1942, claiming wartime shortages that made advertising impractical.
Another episode of varying technical quality from the Blue Network run is posted from May 7, 1942. The Pirate Loot of The Island of Skulls takes Jack, Doc and Jerry into The Temple of The Jaguar. (8)
Procter & Gamble didn’t have shortage problems and it picked up I Love A Mystery on February 22, 1943, to replace its short lived quarter-hour variety show on CBS, Four To Go, starring Benny Fields and Joan Edwards. The 91-week run would last until December 29, 1944, returning ratings of 6.9 in 1942-43 and a solid 8.0 in 1943-44, (both against Fred Waring on NBC), and a 6.9 in 1944-45, (against Perry Como's 9.1 on NBC.) I Love A Mystery ranked among the Top Ten Multiple Run programs in each of its three seasons on CBS.
When P&G cancelled the series at the beginning of 1945, I Love A Mystery seemingly left the air for good - or not so good as its devoted fans believed. (9) Except for a 13-week revival on ABC under the name I Love Adventure in 1948, the radio show was all but forgotten by 1949. (10) Stars Michael Raffetto was working in movies, Barton Yarborough was achieving new fame as Ben Romero on Dragnet and Walter Patterson had taken his own life seven years earlier. Meanwhile, Carlton E. Morse had packed away the scripts to his adventure yarns in his famous leather-bound volumes, (not the trunk of old scripts as Variety had once hinted). Then Mutual came calling with an offer that the 48 year old Morse couldn’t refuse.
The network proposed to revive I Love A Mystery with a new cast performing 15 minute episodes of past scripts from the show’s NBC and CBS runs. Morse agreed to produce and direct the series as he had done with the original broadcasts and do so in New York City where he was also overseeing the adaptation of One Man’s Family for NBC-TV. The deal was struck and the three year encore of I Love A Mystery premiered on Mutual at 7:45 p.m. on Monday, October 3, 1949, with its new cast of Russell Thorson as Jack,Packard, Jim Boles as Doc Long and Tony Randall as Reggie York. (11)
The Mutual revival of I Love A Mystery wasn’t quite the same as the original, but the locomotive, Valse Triste and chiming clock were still there to set the mood and the new version was a close copy under Morse’s supervision. We’re fortunate today to have the entire 20 episode production of Temple of Vampires posted or to use Carlton E. Morse's terms: Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three, Chapter Four, Chapter Five, Chapter Six, Seven,Chapter Eight, Chapter NIne, Chapter Ten, Chapter 11, Chapter 12, Chapter 13, Chapter 14, Chapter 15, Chapter 16, Chapter 17, Chapter 18 , Chapter 19 and Chapter 20 .
Lack of sponsor interest in Network Radio prompted Mutual to relegate I Love A Mystery to its weeknight schedule at 10:15 p.m. on October 2, 1950. Then it dropped the show's revival on December 26, 1952. With the final cancellation, the A-1 Detective Agency, (..."just off Hollywood Boulevard and up one flight"...), shut its doors forever but left the memories of a dozen years that were never boring for Carlton E. Morse and his millions of listeners.
(1) As a staff writer at NBC’s KGO/San Francisco, Morse had created crime and adventure serials with tip-off titles, Chinatown Squad, City of The Dead, House of Myths and Phantoms At Sea.
(2) Carlton Morse also masterminded the successful conversion of One Man’s Family from a weekly half-hour continuing story, (1932-1950), to a weeknight 15-minute strip, (1950-1959).
(3) Michael Raffetto, Morse’s choice for Jack Packard, played the Barbour’s oldest son, Paul. Barton Yarborough, picked to play Doc Long, was Barbour son Cliff and Walter Patterson, Reggie York, was Barbour son-in-law Nick Lacey.
(4) It’s curious that the reviewer didn’t recognize the voices of the “three adventurous young men,” from their years on One Man’s Family or the guest appearances of J. Anthony Smythe (Henry Barbour) and Minetta Ellen (Fanny Barbour) in this first episode of I Love A Mystery.
(5) This concern is reported in the same publication that didn’t recognize the “doubling” in its review of I Love A Mystery two months earlier.
(6) Protesters seemed to ignore the latest murders being solved by Mr. Keen on Blue at the same time or the latest fates worse than death faced by Orphan Annie and Jack Armstrong an hour earlier.
(7) Both of Variety’s reviews of I Love A Mystery quoted here were written by its staff reporter using the pseudonym, Land.
(8) Walter Patterson’s Reggie York character was written out of the show in 1942, replaced by Gloria Blondell as Jerry Booker.
(9) Morse co-authored three Columbia Pictures film noir quickies based on his series during this period: 1945’s I Love A Mystery, then The Devil’s Mask and The Unknown in 1946. Barton Yarborough, as Doc Long, was the only principal from the radio show to appear in the films.
(10) See I Love A Sequel.
(11) Producer Morse was familiar with Russell Thorson’s work from One Man’s Family and Tony Randall had a leading role in the serial on NBC-TV.
Copyright © 2019, Jim Ramsburg, Estero FL Email: tojimramsburg@gmail.com
Carlton E. Morse was getting bored in 1938.
NBC’s coast-to-coast run of his weekly half-hour, One Man’s Family, was five years old, (add an extra year for its West Coast trial run), and the author-producer-director of the Barbour Family’s highly rated but snail-paced narrative longed to create something faster paced and more adventuresome. (1)
Making his wishes known and getting a green light from Standard Brands, his satisfied One Man’s Family sponsor, Morse began to fashion I Love A Mystery, which would eventually rank in its sporadic, twelve-year, four network run with The Shadow and Lights Out for its gore and mayhem. Unlike the others, the Morse creation began as a 15-minute weekday strip show, then was converted to a weekly primetime half-hour of continuing stories, then once again shifted back to a weeknight strip. (2)
And unlike any other primetime program in Network Radio, I Love A Mystery was the only show to have its identical scripts performed by two different casts on two different networks in two different seasons of the Golden Age. But that’s getting ahead of our story…
Standard Brands told Morse to develop a quarter-hour adventure series of his liking and its agency, Kenyon & Eckhardt, (succeeded by J. Walter Thompson), would find a spot for it. The title was easy for Morse, I Love A Mystery was his motivation. To capture listeners' attention, he opened each episode with the sound of a passing locomotive, then segued into the moody organ theme of Jean Sibelius’ Valse Triste, (Sad Waltz). The solemn melody was often followed by a clock chiming to set the time of the episode.
Morse choice of the program’s three protagonists, (a gruff, no-nonsense leader, a Southern drawling sidekick and their veddy British third partner in the A-I Detective Agency), was the master scriptwriter’s shortcut to the listeners’ quick identification of Jack Packard, Doc Long and Reggie York. To play the three leads, Morse called upon three friends from UC/Berkeley who had proved their talents in the cast of his One Man’s Family, Michael Raffetto, Barton Yarborough and Walter Patterson. (3)
True to its word, Standard Brands’ Fleischmann Yeast introduced I Love A Mystery on the NBC West Coast network for a 26 week trial run at mid-afternoon on February 6, 1939. Even when surrounded by programming aimed a housewives, acceptance for the series was promising to the point that on October 2, 1939, I Love A Mystery was promoted by Standard Brands to the full coast-to-coast NBC network of 46 stations. The new series was slotted at 7:15 p.m. immediately following Fred Waring’s popular weeknight concerts.
Then the fun began. After calling I Love A Mystery, “The greatest radio program of all time!,” historian Jim Harmon explains in his 1966 text, The Great Radio Heroes: "The program seems to have been especially designed to outrage the PTA, the Mothers of America and whiten the hair of child psychologists. The monsters and murderers were not cleaned and prettied up. … Even the heroes were hardly symbols of purity and justice. 'I Love A Mystery' gave us the very wildest dream world possible, dwarfing the terrors of ‘The Hermit’s Cave,’ minimizing the exploits of ‘Captain Midnight,’ making simplicity itself of the mysteries of ‘The Shadow’ and it was peopled with characters that had reality of substance seldom found outside the printed pages of a novel.”
Leonard Maltin, in his 1997 text, The Great American Broadcast, quoted Morse describing his prolific workdays at the time, " I had to write 15 pages a day, five days a week for the 'I Love A Mystery' story and I had to write 'One Man's Family' once a week. I would just sit down at the typewriter with a blank page at 4:00 a.m., sit there for a few minutes and start to write. The minute I started writing, I was lost to the world for as much as two and a half hours." Maltin continued, "Later when Morse would rehearse his cast he sometimes marveled at what he had written, unable to explain where it came from other than his formidably fertile mind."
Maltin was obviously a fan of Morse's work: "These were full-blooded, pulp magazine-style yarns, offering the three jaunty proprietors of the A-1 Detective Agency a globe-trotting menu of adventures, from investigating reports of werewolves to trying to solve a series of grisly slasher murders in a a creepy old mansion. Morse knew how to pepper each script with vivid detail yet strike a balance between plot exposition and personality driven dialogue. The stories wouldn't have been the same without the rich and contrasting characterizations of Jack, Doc and Reggie."
Variety, however, had a tepid review of the first episode on NBC: “Although not devoid of hints of the radio writing skills that has made Carlton E. Morse a top of the pile figure through his 'One Man’s Family', there was not much in the initial installment of 'I Love A Mystery' to support large expectations. The characters were rather laboriously set and the plot a long time moving an inch-and-a-half which was the distance it had gotten when the first episode ended. .… Three adventurous young men are the pivots of this slowly unfolding melodrama. One of them has a Southern accent thick enough to pour over a bowl of grits. The others are less dialectic but probably better suited to longer wearing. There was rather too much description of themselves as swashbucklers and musketeers - Young Stonewall Jackson, in particular. … The lead-in sections of the continuity may be rapidly succeeded by something more rapidly easy to chew on. Serials are almost always impossible to evaluate fairly on a single hearing.” (4)
Listeners, however, quickly evaluated what they heard and they liked it. I Love A Mystery jumped to the front of its 7:15 p.m. time period, out-rating the alternating Lum & Abner and Jimmie Fidler on CBS, (who benefited from Amos & Andy’s lead-in), and Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons on Blue.
Nevertheless, Variety doubled down on its criticism on November 22nd with a critique hinting that I Love A Mystery came from Carlton E. Morse‘s trunk of old rejected scripts adding, "…The title is taking listeners under false pretenses as there is no mystery. Just gab. Nor are the characters sharply drawn, plausible or likeable. The program is an oddly lethargic framework for (Fleischmann Yeast) advertising that sells glowing energy and promises more vitality and more pep. It’s heard in the evening so it must be for adults.”
Indeed, adults were answering their telephones to C.E. Hooper pollsters and placed I Love A Mystery in the nightly Top Ten of Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday nights during the 1939-40 season. Standard Brands renewed the freshman adventure series for another 52 weeks in early December for a bargain basement production cost of less than $500 per performance.
In response, Variety moved its attack on the show from its review pages to its news pages on December 13th with a major story headlined over two columns, “Same Actors Double From Family To Mystery and Trade Dopesters See Destruction of Character Values.” The story cites unnamed sources creating, “…much comment being heard around the trade about Standard Brands’ practice of using the cast of its 'One Man’s Family' also for its 'I Love A Mystery'. The doubling, it is felt, puts the food combine in the position of possibly jeopardizing the highly valuable piece of property it has in 'One Man’s Family.” (5)
The double digit ratings of both shows didn't reflect this "problem." Of greater concern to Standard Brands were the complaints being registered to its retailers by their customers who objected to such “violent” fare being offered on their radios by Fleischmann Yeast at suppertime, interrupting family dinners and exposing their children to such mayhem. (6)
The number of petitions protesting I Love A Mystery grew to such numbers, (boosted by organized women’s clubs and PTA branches), that Standard Brands caved, but silenced the complaints, with a unique maneuver. It uprooted the 15 minute strip show on 32 NBC affiliates and converted it to a weekly half hour continuing format, (similar to One Man’s Family), on Thursdays at 8:30 on 48 NBC stations.
An episode from early in the NBC half-hour run, April 15, 1940, is mid-way through The Search of The Cobra God With Diamond Eyes adventure set in the jungles of French Indo-China and typical of the fun each show offered. The commercial displays Standard Brands’ liking for premiums, offering a “How To Swim” booklet by Olympians Johnny Weissmuller and Eleanor Holm for a dime and Fleischmann’s Yeast proof-of-purchase.
Ratings for the 15 and 30 minute versions of I Love A Mystery were almost identical, reflecting a steady, loyal audience. And although its 10.6 was terrific for a strip show, its 10.3 was disappointing for the Thursday series in the heart of prime time. In a rare, one-time occurrence, the half hour I Love A Mystery was edged out of Thursday’s Top Ten by itself in its former quarter hour Multiple Run form. As a result, Standard Brands exiled I Love A Mystery to Blue’s Monday schedule at 8:00 p.m. for the next two seasons.
The show’s move to Blue on September 30, 1940, was not welcomed by Variety: "The popularity rating of this Carlton Morse program was okay last year. It may be again. The formula is rife with the same values of excitement for the lower I.Q.’s and ages that pulp fiction represents. As the creator of one of radio’s best and most legitimate serials, 'One Man’s Family', Morse reverses the field to dish this exaggerated, unreal, dagger-thrust, gun-at-the-window sample of old fashioned adventure nonsense. There are again this year as last three incredible creatures out of San Francisco, (and the Hardy Boys), named Jack, Doc and Reggie. They are all he-men. Meaning long on action and missing on brains and caution.”
Think that’s bad? It gets worse. After two paragraphs condemning Morse’s The Tropics Don’t Call It Murder script as harmful to U.S. - Latin American relations, it continues: "This program is on 45 Blue Network stations at 8:00 p.m. and not offered as a kid program. Nevertheless, it will have thousands of kid listeners. They will find three crazy musketeers who deliberately go seeking trouble, who assiduously cultivate a chip-on-shoulder attitude and carry on conversations on a bogus realism basis that may pass for manly virility but it’s certainly not conducive to adult thought. Moreover, Jack, Doc and Reggie were constantly socking people, including women, in the jaw and saying, 'Excuse me, I’m sorry to do this, but I don’t have time to argue the point.'
"From the standpoint of the behavior of its characters and nature of its plot, 'I Love A Mystery' is very questionable radio. And that goes regardless of any popularity rating it may achieve." (7)
The reviewer was probably pleased that I Love A Mystery dropped from 60th to 70th in the season’s rankings in its move from NBC on Thursday at 8:30 to Blue on Monday at 8:00. The loss of 1.6 rating points was partly due to the lack of any 7:30 p.m. lead-in from the network for I Love A Mystery. Meanwhile, CBS opened its Monday nights with Blondie at 7:30, NBC offered Burns & Allen and Mutual led with The Lone Ranger.
Despite the same handicap in 1941-42, I Love A Mystery rebounded to a 9.8 season rating, 57th in the annual rankings and into Monday night’s Top Ten. Standard Brands expressed regret for cancelling the show on June 29, 1942, claiming wartime shortages that made advertising impractical.
Another episode of varying technical quality from the Blue Network run is posted from May 7, 1942. The Pirate Loot of The Island of Skulls takes Jack, Doc and Jerry into The Temple of The Jaguar. (8)
Procter & Gamble didn’t have shortage problems and it picked up I Love A Mystery on February 22, 1943, to replace its short lived quarter-hour variety show on CBS, Four To Go, starring Benny Fields and Joan Edwards. The 91-week run would last until December 29, 1944, returning ratings of 6.9 in 1942-43 and a solid 8.0 in 1943-44, (both against Fred Waring on NBC), and a 6.9 in 1944-45, (against Perry Como's 9.1 on NBC.) I Love A Mystery ranked among the Top Ten Multiple Run programs in each of its three seasons on CBS.
When P&G cancelled the series at the beginning of 1945, I Love A Mystery seemingly left the air for good - or not so good as its devoted fans believed. (9) Except for a 13-week revival on ABC under the name I Love Adventure in 1948, the radio show was all but forgotten by 1949. (10) Stars Michael Raffetto was working in movies, Barton Yarborough was achieving new fame as Ben Romero on Dragnet and Walter Patterson had taken his own life seven years earlier. Meanwhile, Carlton E. Morse had packed away the scripts to his adventure yarns in his famous leather-bound volumes, (not the trunk of old scripts as Variety had once hinted). Then Mutual came calling with an offer that the 48 year old Morse couldn’t refuse.
The network proposed to revive I Love A Mystery with a new cast performing 15 minute episodes of past scripts from the show’s NBC and CBS runs. Morse agreed to produce and direct the series as he had done with the original broadcasts and do so in New York City where he was also overseeing the adaptation of One Man’s Family for NBC-TV. The deal was struck and the three year encore of I Love A Mystery premiered on Mutual at 7:45 p.m. on Monday, October 3, 1949, with its new cast of Russell Thorson as Jack,Packard, Jim Boles as Doc Long and Tony Randall as Reggie York. (11)
The Mutual revival of I Love A Mystery wasn’t quite the same as the original, but the locomotive, Valse Triste and chiming clock were still there to set the mood and the new version was a close copy under Morse’s supervision. We’re fortunate today to have the entire 20 episode production of Temple of Vampires posted or to use Carlton E. Morse's terms: Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three, Chapter Four, Chapter Five, Chapter Six, Seven,Chapter Eight, Chapter NIne, Chapter Ten, Chapter 11, Chapter 12, Chapter 13, Chapter 14, Chapter 15, Chapter 16, Chapter 17, Chapter 18 , Chapter 19 and Chapter 20 .
Lack of sponsor interest in Network Radio prompted Mutual to relegate I Love A Mystery to its weeknight schedule at 10:15 p.m. on October 2, 1950. Then it dropped the show's revival on December 26, 1952. With the final cancellation, the A-1 Detective Agency, (..."just off Hollywood Boulevard and up one flight"...), shut its doors forever but left the memories of a dozen years that were never boring for Carlton E. Morse and his millions of listeners.
(1) As a staff writer at NBC’s KGO/San Francisco, Morse had created crime and adventure serials with tip-off titles, Chinatown Squad, City of The Dead, House of Myths and Phantoms At Sea.
(2) Carlton Morse also masterminded the successful conversion of One Man’s Family from a weekly half-hour continuing story, (1932-1950), to a weeknight 15-minute strip, (1950-1959).
(3) Michael Raffetto, Morse’s choice for Jack Packard, played the Barbour’s oldest son, Paul. Barton Yarborough, picked to play Doc Long, was Barbour son Cliff and Walter Patterson, Reggie York, was Barbour son-in-law Nick Lacey.
(4) It’s curious that the reviewer didn’t recognize the voices of the “three adventurous young men,” from their years on One Man’s Family or the guest appearances of J. Anthony Smythe (Henry Barbour) and Minetta Ellen (Fanny Barbour) in this first episode of I Love A Mystery.
(5) This concern is reported in the same publication that didn’t recognize the “doubling” in its review of I Love A Mystery two months earlier.
(6) Protesters seemed to ignore the latest murders being solved by Mr. Keen on Blue at the same time or the latest fates worse than death faced by Orphan Annie and Jack Armstrong an hour earlier.
(7) Both of Variety’s reviews of I Love A Mystery quoted here were written by its staff reporter using the pseudonym, Land.
(8) Walter Patterson’s Reggie York character was written out of the show in 1942, replaced by Gloria Blondell as Jerry Booker.
(9) Morse co-authored three Columbia Pictures film noir quickies based on his series during this period: 1945’s I Love A Mystery, then The Devil’s Mask and The Unknown in 1946. Barton Yarborough, as Doc Long, was the only principal from the radio show to appear in the films.
(10) See I Love A Sequel.
(11) Producer Morse was familiar with Russell Thorson’s work from One Man’s Family and Tony Randall had a leading role in the serial on NBC-TV.
Copyright © 2019, Jim Ramsburg, Estero FL Email: tojimramsburg@gmail.com
| ilam__12-01-41.mp3 |
| ilam__5-07-42.mp3 |
| ilam__1-02-50.mp3 |
| ilam__1-03-50.mp3 |
| ilam__1-04-50.mp3 |
| ilam__1-05-50.mp3 |
| ilam__1-06-50.mp3 |
| ilam__1-09-50.mp3 |
| ilam__1-10-50.mp3 |
| ilam__1-11-50.mp3 |
| ilam__1-12-50.mp3 |
| ilam__1-13-50.mp3 |
| ilam__1-16-50.mp3 |
| ilam__1-17-50.mp3 |
| ilam__1-18-50.mp3 |
| ilam__1-19-50.mp3 |
| ilam__1-20-50.mp3 |
| ilam__1-23-50.mp3 |
| ilam__1-24-50.mp3 |
| ilam__1-25-50.mp3 |
| ilam__1-26-50.mp3 |
| ilam__1-27-50.mp3 |
| ilam__4-15-40.mp3 |