Kill as directed: Other Media part 1... radio (1)

he radio plays were written by the cousins with great sense for new media. Many of which are lost. In a rare
development, the character of Ellery Queen was adapted to radio by its creators, as former advertising writers, knew the promotional power of radio. The authors brought to the new medium the "challenge to the reader" from their earlier books. This said, in essence, "You now have all the clues; can you solve the crime?" On radio, this took the form of the fictional Ellery stopping the action and delivering the challenge in person to the listener at home and, in some incarnations, to a celebrity sleuth there in the studio. The Queen radio show ran in one form or another on CBS, NBC, and ABC.

Scripts were by Dannay and Lee, and later by Lee assisted by others, most notably Anthony Boucher. During the 1940's EQ wrote a large number of radio plays. The Adventures of Ellery Queen started on radio in 1939 and lasted until 1948. EQ was apparently the pioneer author to move from prose fiction into the radio drama. Their value has to be seen in comparison with other radioplays. The storyformat simply isn't up to the depth a novel can reach. What makes them irresistable to a Queenfan is that almost each and everyone of the radioplays recycled Queenidea's or contained typical elements which were later re-used in the Queen-novels. The Adventure of the Murdered Moths is collection of the greatest radio plays by Ellery Queen. Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee won an unprecedented 5 Edgars,one for the Best Radio Drama, in 1946 they won in a tie between Ellery Queen (CBS) and Mr. and Mrs. North by Frances and Richard Lockridge (NBC).

n 1939 the cousins were experimenting with different media.
Both their efforts in theater and Hollywood had gone astray and fortunately for them an other medium was to come to full bloom... it came looking for them. George Zachary, a young executive at CBS was playing with the idea of an hour long detective where the listeners could match their wits with the leading character in solving the riddle before he could. He was searching for the writers who could come up with a weekly script for such a series... At that time radio had his heroes e.g. The Shadow but no 'real' detectives. Zachary was not really an expert on detective fiction and started working his way through several libraries. Only after 'some 200 stories' he stumbled upon his first Queen-story. There he found his idea of 'challenging' the listener in print. He made the cousins a modest offer of $25 a week in exchange for which they had to provide an hour long radiomystery on a weekly basis! It's probably wise to deduce that the possibility of millions of listeners did the trick. They were given the chance to learn the skills of this new profession by writing scripts for two existing series, sadly without credit nor pay. One of these was Alias, Jimmy Valentine (1937-1939), remotely based on an O.Henry short story about a reformed safecracker and featuring Bert Lytell in the leading role. Here the cousins supposedly wrote scripts on a weekly basis. Only one episode is written by them for sure: the episode aired on November 21,1938. Propably their last work for the serie. The other series was the illustrious' 'Shadow'. When asked by Francis M.Nevins Dannay didn't remember which scripts he and Manny helped creating, nor did he remember who played the Shadow at the time they were broadcast (Orson Welles or Bill Johnstone). It has become clear that their contributed to the first five seasons of the Bill Johnstone-era. Edith Meiser, script editor for the series, hired the cousins because "...she had read their stories, and was all too happy having them working for us. We handed them model scripts and they went to work..." (William Nadel) After a nice piece of deduction Nadel narrows the episodes down to the following 8 to 11 scripts:
        "Shyster Payoff" 11-06-38
        "Black Rock" 11-13-38

"Fountain of Death" 11-27-38 not available for examination*
        "Murder in E Flat" 12-04-38
        "Murder by Rescue" 12-11-38 not available for examination*
        "Give Us This Day" 12-25-38 not available for examination* )
        "Valley of the Living Dead" 01-22-39
        "The Ghost of Captain Bayloe" 02-05-39
        "Friend of Darkness" 02-19-39
        "Sabotage by Air" 03-05-39
        "Can the Dead Talk?" 03-19-39

* Syracuse University Library has script copies

Bill Johnstone and Orson Welles as 'The Shadow'

They did however appear as Mr.Ellery and Mr.Queen in a half game half panel show called Author! Author! which debuted on April 7, 1939. This show, they created and sold to the Mutual Network, would start with a dramatized version of some unexplicable event and the moderator (first Ogden Nash, later replaced by S.J.Perelman) would then challenge each of the four panellists to come up with a solution which would make sense... Next to the cousins several mediafigures served as guests Dorothy Parker, Fannie Hurst, Heywood Broun, Moss Hart and George S.Kaufman, Marc and Carl Van Doren, Erskine Caldwell, and Quentin Reynolds to name but a few. After having put their solutions to eachother it was attacked by the other members of the panel and listeners could participate to by sending in their solution to the problem. The sponsor B.F. Goodrich Rubber Co. offered $25 for every solution that was aired.
An example employed on the first program was this: " A young man arrives for the reading of his uncle's will. The only heir is in desperately in need for money to cover his gambling debts. The will gives him a choice: Accept $10,000 in cash or the contents of an envelope. He opens the envelope, which is empty, with no stamps or writing on it. 'I will take the envelope,' he says. The solution which Dannay proposed was that the young man had poisened his uncle by means of a poison applied to the envelope an that this uncle, before dying, gave him the choice of destroying the evidence of his crime or to claim the money, for which he committed the crime, only to risk exposure. Panelists were supposed to devise this kin of solution on the spot, while being attacked by other panelists. This kind of mechanical approach was especially appealing to Dannay and despite being a daring format for that period it wasn't what audiences waited for and it can still be considered a surprise it lasted for one year.
Over at CBS Zachary was gathering his team. In order to attract a more female audience, Dannay, Lee and Zachary added a new character to the stories: Ellery's secretary Nikki Porter. She was played by Marion Shockley whom Zachary married. The analogue to the 'Challenge of the Reader' was to stop the action and put the crucial question to a panel of well known guest stars or later listeners.

In 1939, over at CBS, the Columbia Workshop started it's second series. The Workshop was the first to experiment with radio drama...added sound Herrmann , one of the most innovative composers in radio, would also score the first Ellery Queen radio series... effects and music to good scripts thus attracting many big stars. In the early years Bernard Herrmann scored for the workshop. Herrmann , one of the most innovative composers in radio, would also score the first Ellery Queen radio series... The Columbia Workshop 2nd series had as it's 7th episode "The Great Microphone Mystery" a 30-minute episode broadcast on October 05, 1939. Aka Ellery Queen Mystery "The Case of the Mysterious Leap Year" and reran on February 29, 1940 it featured several CBS personalities, joined by several of their wives, play roles opposite to their usual ones. Burgess Meredith, Beatrice Kay, Howard Barlow, John Reed King, Mel Allen, Earle McGill, Norman Corwin, Nila Mack, Ted Husing, David Ross, Robert Trout, Kitty Trout, Mrs. Linton Wells, Ray Bloch (music director), Phil Cohen (director), John Fitzgerald (director), Paul Phillips (writer), Ted de Corsia, Mrs. George Fielding Eliot and Hugh Marlowe.

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