Radio Recap: The Black Book

The Black Book is an unusually brief but well-made radio program. According to all the research available on the internet, only three episodes were ever broadcast in 1952 - all of which still exist. However, there are two other recordings which were apparently never aired that suggest a lot was going on behind-the-scenes of the program.

The most important factoid about the Black Book is that it starred Paul Frees. Frees was simply one of the best voices on radio; he was sometimes an announcer on Suspense, sometimes the announcer and/or lead role on Escape. He was adept at drama and comedy, could speak with the neat mannerisms of Orson Welles, the rough voice of a butcher or the twang of a southerner.

The Black Book, then, was a vehicle for Frees to show off his abilities. The Old-Time Radio Researchers Library has a recording from 1951 called "Different Readings" which is apparently the Black Book's pilot. Frees is presented as "the Man in Black," who had been the host of Suspense in its earliest days (I'm pretty sure John Dickson Carr owned the character which is why he disappeared from Suspense with Carr). "Different Readings" is basically a five-minute "perfect crime" story told by Frees - and then re-told. You get to hear different takes on Frees trying out the story. This alone is pretty fascinating as we have all-too-few examples of multiple takes on the same works by the same creators. At first, Frees is simply narrating a story; in other takes, he adopts different voices; conversations are played out in full instead of being alluded to. You get the sense that someone thought it wasn't quite gelling and wanted a different approach. In one version Frees gets a bit tongue-tied and has to take a section over again. "Different Readings" was never meant for public consumption but it's a neat peek behind the curtain.

A year later it seems they tried another pilot for the Black Book. This time it was the story "The Price of the Head" by John Russell, which was also dramatized on Escape. The Escape version has some patchy audio so it's nice that the Black Book version is so crisp. This time instead of a five-minute narrated drama, the Black Book is a 15-minute program; instead of Frees running the show solo, he's joined by actor John Dehner. Between Frees, Dehner and the source material it sounds pretty much like a lost episode of Escape and small wonder - pretty much everyone working on it was an Escape alumni, from director Norman Macdonnell to composer Leith Stevens.

So I guess this 2nd pilot impressed CBS enough to grant the Black Book a spot in the schedule, but maybe they changed their minds because we only received 3 actual programs: "On Schedule," "My Favorite Corpse," and "Vagabond Murder." The casts in these shows are minimal but very strong, with Frees joined primarily with John Dehner (again). "On Schedule" is also interesting as it's a crime story by Nelson S. Bond, who was better-known as a science fiction author.

The Black Book would have been a crime show, based on the three episodes that actually aired. With all the talented people from Escape working on it, it could've become a classic of old-time radio. But, sadly, for whatever reason, it didn't pan out.

You can hear the three broadcast episodes on the Internet Archive, here. I've only seen the other two at the Old-Time Radio Researchers Library.