Suspense: The first adaptation?

Some time ago I blogged about the Suspense comic book series which Marvel Comics began publishing in 1949. Only the first two issues adapted stories from the Suspense radio program the title was licensed from and, as I noted, all of the adaptations were taken from scripts written by John Dickson Carr from the early days of the series.

Recently I discovered there was an earlier attempt to adapt Suspense in the pages of Street & Smith's
Super-Magician Comics in 1944. Similar to the adaptations which that series made of Inner Sanctum Mysteries and Lights Out, this was evidently a once-only attempt by Street & Smith to adapt Suspense into a comic book format. The Grand Comics Database doesn't know who created this story.

As this was 1944 and Suspense had only begun in 1943, it should be no surprise that they adapted one of John Dickson Carr's stories, as he wrote the bulk of Suspense's early scripts. This time out it was an adaptation of "The Devil's Saint" from January 19, 1943; you can listen to that episode at archive.org by clicking on this mp3 link. The story concerns a young man who is courting the niece of a wealthy nobleman. The nobleman demands the young man spend a night in the notorious tapestry room of his manor, a room whose occupants tend to die during the night. Will the young man be the next victim?

As before when I blogged about the Marvel Comics adaptations of Suspense, I have to point to the quality of John Dickson Carr's writing and the way in which it's adapted into comics format. On the radio, the best thing the story had going for it was Peter Lorre's impressive performance as the nobleman. Lorre's reputation for portraying villains gives the nobleman an assumption of sinister intent - because he is, at the end, a great big red herring. The nobleman is set up as though he's the one killing people in the tapestry room; he talks about the supernatural and his family's belief in witchcraft; all of this is to distract from the real killer, which is the niece.

I don't think it's a very good story and the comic book adaptation only highlights the deficiences of the script. Whoever created the comic version didn't put much thought into how to best adapt the story for comics and instead translated the script as closely as possible. For instance, there's a lot of talk about the death of the previous occupant of the tapestry room but no depiction of the dead man; it would have been pretty simple to depict the discovery of the dead man's body while the other characters narrate the events. There are also stilted moments (even more stilted than on the radio) such as when the young man is brought to the tapestry room. In one panel he's talking to the count and niece as the count prepares to show him the room. The next panel depicts the count leading the young man into the room. The following panel shows the woman approaching the young man saying, "I had to see you for a moment." There's no sense that she was absent when the uncle showed him into the room! It's bad storytelling to replicate the dialogue verbatim without guiding the comic book readers through the action of the story.

There is, of course, not much 'action' to this story - it's John Dickson Carr. My great beef with his stories is how much time he spends on amateur sleuths making outlandish assumptions about the solution to the mystery as though it represented the conclusions of his audience. Carr wanted to play a battle of wits against his readers, which is fine, but all too often his stories would stop and all-but address the audience as if to say, "Oh, you think you have the story figured out? Watch as I suddenly reveal all these clues I withheld from you until now!"

Maybe the low point of this story is when the hero and the uncle are talking about the death of the tapestry room's last tenant; the uncle reveals the man was killed by chloroform, to which the young man reacts: "But it can't be true... chloroform blisters and burns the skin. There were no marks..." This is the first time it's been mentioned that "there were no marks." That's a bad adaptation - based on what's printed here, there's no way the hero should have that much information about the dead man.

Anyway, the Devil's Saint adaptation is an interesting little curio for Suspense fans out there.