Radio Recap: Mr. & Mrs. North

Mr. and Mrs. North was a half-hour detective/comedy program based on a series of novels started in 1936 by the husband/wife team of Frances and Richard Lockridge. Mr. and Mrs. North became a popular stage play in 1941, a 1942 film that starred Gracie Allen, a television series and, for our purposes, a radio program.

We still have the pilot for the series, which was produced in 1941 for CBS and starred Peggy Conklin as Mrs. North (reprising the role she'd played on stage) and Carl Eastman as Mr. North. This pilot is very much a situation comedy and it didn't get picked up.

Mr. and Mrs. North finally landed at NBC with an emphasis on mystery (although still a light comedy), where it aired from December 30, 1942 to December 18, 1946. Then it moved back to CBS and ran from July 1, 1947 to April 18, 1955. Joseph Curtin and Alice Frost held the roles initially, with Richard Denning and Barbara Britton taking over the roles for the show's final 2 seasons; they were simultaneously portraying the Norths in a 1952-1954 television series. The Lockridges' books continued until 1963.

In the show's final years, Mr. and Mrs. North would open each episode with a dramatic scene - often including a woman's scream - then switch to the announcer for the show's standard opening. In the show's final year it became a daily 15-minute serial program (much as Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar did) but we only have one story from the serialized era. It looks as though it was only a serial program for two months from October-November 1954, then resumed being a half-hour weekly show.

Richard Denning's presence certainly gave the series a stronger comedic touch - he's probably best-known for playing opposite Lucille Ball in the radio series My Favorite Husband and his Mr. North seemed to treat the mysterious doings and goings-on with a detached bemusement.

Given Gracie Allen's involvement with the franchise, you might assume Mrs. North was a scatterbrained blonde - kind of like Jane Sherlock in Meet Miss Sherlock. However, Mrs. North was usually portrayed as simply an everyday woman who had no background in criminology but applied simple common sense (and good hunches) to solve crimes. Mr. North, as a publisher of mystery fiction, had a somewhat better background in detective work but most of the crime-solving was done by his better half.

Obviously, the entire franchise owes an enormous debt to Dashiell Hammett; the first time I heard Mr. and Mrs. North I assumed it was a rip-off of the Thin Man's Nick and Nora Charles. Whether or not Hammett influenced the Lockridges, the success of William Powell and Myrna Loy's 1934 Thin Man film popularized husband/wife teams who bantered, romanced and solved crimes together.

The supporting roles on Mr. and Mrs. North featured a number of familiar voices, including Frank Lovejoy, Maurice Tarplin (a bit distracting, given his role as the Mysterious Traveler), William Conrad and Jackson Beck.

The Old Time Radio Researchers have a collection of 75 episodes of Mr. and Mrs. North at the Internet Archive. Many surviving episodes are from the Armed Forces' Mystery Playhouse with Peter Lorre or Howard Duff hosting.