Radio Recap: The Sealed Book

The Sealed Book is a series I encountered very early on when I started listening to old-time radio but I never made a real effort to listen to every episode. For this series of posts I've been doing, I thought it would be interesting to finally give the entire series a fair shake.

The Sealed Book was a transcribed radio mystery program which aired on Mutual in 1945. It was written by Robert A. Arthur and David Kogan and seems to have been entirely recreations of scripts they wrote for the Mysterious Traveler. That's not necessarily a bad thing, since we have so few surviving episodes of the Mysterious Traveler.

Comparing the Mysterious Traveler version of the story "Out of the Past" to the later version on the Sealed Book helps highlight a problem with the series. "Out of the Past" concerns a woman being blackmailed; in the conclusion, we learn the blackmailer was her own husband, trying to drive her insane. But in the original he succeeds too well and is murdered by his wife. In the later version the husband gets away with his crime. It seems clear that the difference exists because The Sealed Book had a shorter runtime than the Mysterious Traveler and in more than one case you can tell they tried to save time by removing pages from the back of the script.

Still, the episodes I've heard all have very good audio - one of the rare times when transcribed radio dramas have an advantage over live broadcasts.

Another useful comparison is to Inner Sanctum Mysteries. The obvious difference would be that while Inner Sanctum would suggest the supernatural they never committed to genuine supernatural horror in their stories, while the Mysterious Traveler/Sealed Book had no problem using the supernatural. But it's more than that - Inner Sanctum constantly tried to maintain tension with sudden twists and surprises which often didn't make sense when the story was finally told. So I admire the Sealed Book for having strong narrative structure - when they have twist ending, the twist is always set up.

Of course, that means The Sealed Book can be a little predictable. "Murder Must Be Paid for," for instance, has a very obvious twist and beyond that, not much of interest going for it.

Still, their commitment to the supernatural - and science fiction - resulted in a few strong episodes. "Beware of Tomorrow" is a decent robot story; "the King of the World" is a great cursed-with-immortality story; and "My Beloved Must Die" wheeled out a figure who seldom appeared in radio horror programs.

I should also speak about the program's host(s). Initially the series had two hosts - the announcer, and "the Keeper of the Book," an elderly man who narrated the stories. It was a bit bizarre having two hosts talking to each other and begged the question why the stories had to be presented in that fashion; I guess someone really did ask, because after only a few episodes the Keeper became a silent figure as the announcer took over all the narration duties. It was for the best, frankly - the Keeper was just a rip-off of the Hermit from the Hermit's Cave.

You can listen or download the Sealed Book from the Internet Archive.