Radio Recap: Murder at Midnight

Murder at Midnight was a syndicated mystery anthology program heard from September 16, 1946 until September 8, 1947. It was directed by Anton M. Leader, shortly before he became the director of Suspense and just after working on Words at War.

The program's announcer was Raymond Morgan, who had the unusual background of being a minister who went into show business. He rumbled out the program's title at various points through each episode: "Murderrr! Aaat... Miiidniiight!" In fact, the scripts would often take pains to set events around midnight so that when the announcer interrupted the drama he could remind listeners how near they were to midnight (and whether a murder had happened or was about to happen).

Amazingly, much of the series was recycled from existing scripts. A lot of episodes were reused from Inner Sanctum Mysteries, particularly scripts by Robert Newman and Sigmund Miller. Some of these episodes no longer exist in their Inner Sanctum version, so the Murder at Midnight copies at least give us a performance of the work. Others exist in both forms, such as "Death Across the Board" and "the Dark Chamber."

There's also an episode of Suspense that was recycled on Murder at Midnight - "A Week Ago Wednesday - but the Murder at Midnight version appears to be lost. Most surprising is that many episodes were recycled from the Shadow, meaning they had to edit the character of the Shadow out of the script! You can observe this for yourself if you listen to the Murder at Midnight episode "Trigger Man" and compare it to the Shadow episode "Death Keeps a Deadline."

I've blogged about one episode of Murder at Midnight before -- that would be "the Creeper", the drama of a murderer targeting women. It was first produced on Molle Mystery Theater. Interestingly, some Murder at Midnight episodes were later adapted on Molle Mystery Theater - the episode "Nightmare" became "I Dreamt I Died" (it was also adapted for Murder by Experts).

But amidst all these adaptations there were a number of original scripts. A good chilling episode is "Terror Out of Space" about an extraterrestrial consciousness that possesses a scientist. Or there's "the Heavy Death" about a man who's made himself extremely dense. And there's an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's "Suicide Club" called "The Ace of Death" that makes a few changes to the story but works pretty well.

I feel Murder at Midnight is of interest primarily to people who like the other shows I've mentioned. If Inner Sanctum Mysteries, the Shadow, Suspense and Molle Mystery Theater are your cup of tea, then you ought to give this series a chance. The program's one great shortcoming is that every episode opens with a brief preview of the upcoming drama, sometimes giving away part of the story's climax! It's a very bad idea and ruins some of the suspense.

You can hear Murder at Midnight using this YouTube playlist created by the Old-Time Radio Researchers' Group.