Old-Time Radio Retrieved, Part 3: Suspense

I won't be able to talk about the January 10, 1946 Suspense episode "This Was a Hero" without discussing the episode's twist, so be warned - spoilers follow.

"This Was a Hero" is told from the perspective of a police officer portrayed by Phillip Terry. As it opens, the officer is informing a woman that her husband has been killed - and he was the officer who killed him. The dead man was a veteran and his death raises questions the wife can't put away, so the officer agrees to delve further to learn why her husband wound up dead.

So now, the twist - it's our old friend the unreliable narrator! I'm not one to fall for this technique, buddy - I've listened to so many Inner Sanctum Mysteries where the big twist is the protagonist was the killer all along and didn't know it. There are always telltale signs and an obvious one is when the investigator talks to a witness, then the witness turns up dead.

Why I want to discuss this twist is because the villain of the story turns out to be the central character - the police officer. Given the worship of the police in the USA, it's rare to find a story like this. Usually if there's a bad cop such fiction, the story is told from the perspective of the good cop who stops him, but that doesn't happen here. The show doesn't dance around the fact that this man whom the media dub a "hero cop" is actually a murderer abusing the power granted to him. And that is, unfortunately, bound to be an eternal truth about policing in the USA - because so much latitude is granted to authorities to enable them to do their jobs but so little is done to dissuade them from abusing the trust placed in them. Heck, just this weekend the USA saw major protests after yet another horrific crime perpetuated by the police was revealed to the public.

For those reasons this episode hits a nerve that other unreliable narrator tales don't. It leaves unsettling questions about why the policeman's account is recounted by the media as fact, despite the dead man being an unlikely criminal. It's possible that this story hits harder today than it did in '46.

You can find "This Was a Hero" here!