Suspese: The Kettler Method (and the Shadow)

One of the first purchases I ever made for my old-time radio collection was a four-cassette tape set of episodes of Suspense that I found in a Cole's bookstore. The set contains 8 episodes, mostly from the first year of the show's history. Among them was an episode titled "The Kettler Method" which had first aired on September 16, 1942.

The episode concerns a madman named Kettler, a former brain specialist who went insane after a patient died on the operating table. Kettler seizes control of the asylum where he'd been kept and imprisons the head doctor. When a married couple come to visit the doctor, Kettler poses as the head of the asylum. Hearing that the wife has a headache, Kettler decides this is his opportunity to prove the validity of the "Kettler method." To save his wife, the husband masquerades as Kettler's dead patient, wearing bandages to disguise himself.

From the first time I heard the program, it didn't seem quite like what I expected from Suspense. Certainly, the series was only a few months old at the time and hadn't really found its footing... but the plot felt like it belonged to an adventure program. It seemed most like an episode of the Shadow and the more I meditated on that, the more I wondered whether it were related to that program (perhaps a recycled script? or a script rejected by the Shadow?). I suspected that the scene where the husband donned bandages to impersonate the dead man had originally been a scene where Lamont Cranston assumed his ghostly guise as the Shadow. But at the time, I didn't even know who wrote "The Kettler Method" and none of the old-time radio fan sites of the 1990s knew anything about the episode's origins. As recently as 2020, I still couldn't pin this episode down.

I owe it to the terrific Suspense fan site the Suspense Collector's Companion for finally resolving my questions about "The Kettler Method." It turns out the author was Peter Barry, who was indeed a writer for the Shadow. In addition to the Suspense version, this script was used twice on the Shadow!

The first time was as "Nightmare at Gaelsbury" (February 2, 1941) a year before the Suspense broadcast. It's from the era where Lamont Cranston was portrayed by Bill Johnstone and Margo Lane was portrayed by Marjoie Anderson. The script is reasonably the same, with many passages reused in the Suspense version. This time the mad doctor believes he's a follower of Cagliostro and Lamont exploits that by claiming to be Cagliostro when he confronts the doctor as the Shadow. However, there are some interesting differences; in this version, there's a scene where Lamont buys a jacknife as souvenir; this later helps him escape the sanitarium. Further, when Lamont escapes the sanitarium, he climbs over the wall and is promptly arrested by some passing policemen who assume he's an escaped patient (if only Lamont had the power to cloud men's minds so they couldn't see him!).

Six years after the Suspense broadcast, the script was reworked considerably into the Shadow episode "Terror at Wolf's Head Knoll," broadcast February 15, 1948. This is from the era of Bret Morrison as Lamont Cranston and Grace Matthews as Margo Lane. In this version, the mad doctor (with pet bird) and an ally have already escaped imprisonment by the start of the drama; they take over a country house then set up a mirror to cause traffic accidents. Lamont and Margo's car crashes thanks to that stunt and the mad doctor threatens to use his procedures to "cure" Margo's injured foot. It's certainly a major departure from the two earlier versions and replaces one popular Shadow template (Lamont and Margo go to visit a friend) with another (Lamont and Margo's car breaks down, forcing them to visit a spooky mansion). Only a few lines of dialogue recur from the original script but if you follow closely, they are indeed kindred scripts.

Listen to them for yourself on YouTube! The Shadow: "Nightmare at Galesbury"; Suspense: "The Kettler Method"; The Shadow: Terror at Wolf's Head Knoll"