Radio Recap: Adventure Ahead

Adventure Ahead was a short-lived juvenile program that aired on NBC during the summer of 1944. However, unlike other juvenile shows, the writing was rather strong because it drew from famous pieces of literature. The series had a very obvious appeal towards boys - that is, to the possible exclusion of girls - and so featured stories with young male leads such as "The Story of a Bad Boy" and "Toby Tyler." But many of the stories featured on the program were the same kind of content being prepared for adult audiences, such as "Robinson Crusoe" and "Two Years Before the Mast."

For me, as a John Buchan fan, I was extremely delighted that the series featured an adaptation of his 2nd Richard Hannay novel, "Greenmantle." Like many Hannay fans, I actually consider "Greenmantle" to be superior to "The Thirty-Nine Steps" but it seldom receives the attention afforded the more famous entry. "Greenmantle" is a great little spy drama but it's a bit too complex for a half-hour radio program - at least a 1-hour show would have been better. I'm happy it exists in any form, though!

Adventure Ahead is not flashy radio but by the standards of juvenile programming it has above average writing and production values. The Old Time Radio Researchers Group have collected the surviving episodes to a page on the Internet Archive, here.

Hitchcock vs. Radio Part 2: The 39 Steps

The 39 Steps

The 39 Steps was one of the greatest films from Alfred Hitchcock's pre-Hollywood career (the greatest, according to me). Unlike yesterday's look at the The Lodger, here we have a story which was adapted to old-time radio from both the original novel and the Hitchcock film. Interestingly, this time the first adaptation was of the movie!

• Lux Radio Theater (December 13, 1937): starring Robert Montgomery and Ida Lupino.
• Mercury Theater (August 1, 1938): starring Orson Welles.
• Studio One (March 23, 1948): starring Glenn Ford and Mercedes McCambridge.
• Suspense (March 3, 1952): starring Herbert Marshall.

Now, I love John Buchan's novel The Thirty-Nine Steps an awful lot as well, so I'm certainly not bothered by attempts to adapt the book instead of the movie. The Lux Radio Theatre adaptation is the one time Hitchcock's film was adapted to radio. Lux Radio Theater was an extremely well-produced program which would dig up good performers even when the originals weren't available (as is the case here). It's a good production but the dynamic between Robert Montgomery and Ida Lupino is lacking - they essentially argue in every scene they share, yet still declare they're in love with each other at the end. It's really not credible, unlike the Hitchcock film's efforts at convincing us that Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll's characters gradually fell in love.

The other three are adaptations of the novel and they're all pretty good, but I have to give the highest honours to Suspense simply because with only a 30-minute production they were able to condense the novel down to its most essential moments. It's a stellar piece of adaptation. The Mercury Theater version, on the other hand, tries to be a little too artsy and then has trouble fitting the story into an hour! Orson Welles made a comment about the Hitchcock film at the end of his adaptation:

"Ladies and gentlemen, if you missed Madeleine Carroll in our stag version of The Thirty-Nine Steps, the young lady in the movie, in common with almost everything else in that movie, is the child of its director's own unparalleled and unpredictable fancy. If you missed anything you must blame Mr. Alfred Hitchcock. If you were surprised by anything, you must blame us."

Old-Time Radio Theme Month, Day 20: "The Grove of Ashtaroth"

I became an Alfred Hitchcock fan while I was still in junior high, thanks to rebroadcasts of the original Alfred Hitchcock Presents and occasional viewings of his motion pictures. Having enjoyed his film the 39 Steps, I was interested to discover the original novel by John Buchan when my uncle gave me the Complete Richard Hannay. So began an equal fascination with Buchan's stories.

Outside of adaptations of "the 39 Steps," the only other old-time radio program adapted from Buchan is his short story "the Grove of Ashtaroth," as heard February 29, 1948 on Escape. This tells the tale of a man who builds an elaborate home in Africa by a grove of trees. A visiting friend soon discovers terrible things transpire in the grove by night. Buchan's biographers have pointed to this tale being inspired by Buchan's adulation and later disappointment in T.E. Lawrence.

You can download a copy of this radio show from archive.org here.

Texts of 2011: reconsidered champions and new landscapes

So much of my spare time in 2011 was spent on films and comic books that I don't believe I read as many books as I do in a typical year. However, a few things stand out:

I continued my fascination with author Sax Rohmer, reading his books the Sins of Sumuru, Return of Sumuru, Slaves of Sumuru, Dope, Fire-Tongue, the Orchard of Tears, Bimbashi Baruk of Egypt, the Sins of Severec Bablon (more about it here), Tales of Chinatown, the Haunting of Low Fennel and Wulfheim. I'm just about done with Rohmer - in two senses; first, I've read very nearly all of his books, which is no mean feat since when I first began hunting for him in second-hand bookstores circa 1999, his books were nowhere to be found; second, the more I read of his lesser-known works, the less respect I have for his fiction. I used to be quite the Rohmer apologist, but when I hit Fire-Tongue and found it racist even by his own culture's reckoning, it was a turning point for me in terms of how far I'm willing to defend him. Also, while working my way through the Fu Manchu books way back in 1998, I noted how by the 1940s, Fu Manchu had lost a lot of his exotic flavour, becoming what I felt was a more generic criminal mastermind. The more I read of Rohmer's 40s fiction, the more I see how generic his villains had become - his 40s Fu Manchu could've been swapped with any of them and the villains are usually the best part of his early novels. Indeed, the early novel Dope was one of the few highlights of last year's readings. Who knows, perhaps 2012 will be the year where I finish reading all of his novels and short stories?

The only other piece of fiction worth noting was John Buchan's Witch Wood, primarily because it was the last remaining work of Buchan's fiction I hadn't read. It didn't strike me as being quite as good as it was made out to be in Buchan fan circles, but it was an interesting book, very similar to the Blanket of the Dark.

The real winners for me in 2011 were two pieces of non-fiction I pulled from my uncle's home in Angola: King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild and the State of Africa by Martin Meredith. It may seem silly to you that I spent a portion of my time in Africa reading about Africa when I might've done it from home before I departed. It wasn't lost on me, to be sure, but feeling "better late than never" and being instantly fascinated with both books, I delved straight in; several of my nights in Angola were spent sitting up reading in the living room with family and guests, so why not spend the time learning a little more about the continent?

King Leopold's Ghost told the story of the Belgian Congo and the shrewd, underhanded means King Leopold used to seize a second kingdom for himself. I think like many, I was unaware of the early 1900s human rights campaign to end the sufferings of the Congo, which is exactly what drew Hochschild into unearthing the story for his book. What it really impressed upon me is that while slavery was supposedly abolished in the western world, colonial powers in Africa could run their territories as slave states, which was even worse than buying and trading human lives.

The State of Africa attempts to recount the stories of every African nation in chronological order as they obtained independence in the 20th century. Although it's a massive tome, the chronological order makes the "story" of Africa difficult to follow because so many major leaders are introduced, then disappear while others are added to the cast, sometimes leaving behind earlier characters at a "dramatic" episode (I was quite convinced Kwame Nkrumah died in Vietnam in 1966 when his story was abruptly cut short at the end of a chapter; perhaps a chapter later his story continued, much to my surprise). It's sprawling, but immensely rewarding. After reading this book, I had a much better picture in my mind of the continent, the major turning points in recent history. It also helped me to see many of the (sadly) recurring patterns in independent countries, which would seem to either descend straight into civil conflict or, if they were politically stable, drive their economy down so that civil conflict erupted about a decade later. Points of history which I knew of on a superficial level such as the Ethiopian famine were explained succinctly and memorably. Before leaving to Angola, my African geography was simply terrible - I could identify perhaps six nations without reading their names off a map. I'm much, much better now and that's partly due to this book for granting me a "big picture" view of the land.

Tomorrow: The bad side of comics books; when they hurt, I hurt.

Great Short Stories: #51-60

51. "The Voice in the Night" (1907) by William Hope Hodgson. Two men at sea hear a voice in the night, coming from a rowboat. The voice asks for food, but does not want to be seen. The men comply and some time later the rowboat returns and the voice tells them its tragic story. What is it? Well, I can tell you this: this is the story which inspired Matango ("Attack of the Mushroom People")!

"The Voice in the Night" can be found in The Collected Fiction of William Hope Hodgson Volume 3. You can read the text online here.

52. "The Willows" (1907) by Algernon Blackwood. A disturbing tale in the style Lovecraft would later popularize. Two men on a canoeing trip spent a night on a tiny island. With them is an unearthly presence so terrible that their only hope is to not think about it, because the moment they perceive what is with them will be the moment of their destruction!

"The Willows" can be found in The Willows. You can read the text online here.

53. "Ancient Sorceries" (1908) by Algernon Blackwood. Chilling story about a man who gets off at a small village to make a point to another travler. Although he chose the village at random, the lcoale seems strangely familiar. And the people seem to recognize him, watching him, waiting for something to happen.

"Ancient Sorceries" can be found in Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories. You can read the text online here.

54. "To Build a Fire" (1908) by Jack London. A taut tale about a man in the frozen north whose cruelty gets the best of him when he faces the danger of freezing to death; his only prayer is to build a fire in time.

"To Build a Fire" can be found in To Build a Fire and Other Stories. You can read the text online here.

55. "Tobermory" (1909) by Saki. An amusing story in which a cat obtains the ability to speak; after an initial burst of enthusiasm, the people who the cat knows become terrified of the feline because it knows all of their secrets and has no compunction about sharing them!

"Tobermory" can be found in Great English Short Stories. You can read the text online here.

56. "August Heat" (1910) by William Harvey. Haunting story about an artist who makes a picture of a murderer. Then he meets the man, who turns out to be a tombstone carver; the carver has just inscribed the artist's name on a display stone. The two men gradually realize that they are war with destiny and must somehow prevent the inevitable.

"August Heat" can be found in Masters Choice. You can read the text online here.

57. "The Blue Cross" (1910) by G.K. Chesterton. This might be the best of Chesterton's Father Brown stories. In this one, a man sets about perform seemingly random acts, not unlike the character from Doyle's "Adventure of the Six Napoleons." As in that story, there's more going on than appears on the surface and it takes Father Brown to discern the "madman's" intentions by behaving "mad" just like the criminal!

"The Blue Cross" can be found in Favorite Father Brown Stories. You can read the text online here.

58. "The Grove of Ashtaroth" (1910) by John Buchan. Buchan wrote very few tales of the supernatural and when he did delve into such matters, he often evoked strange compulsions which cling to environments, rather than conventional ghosts and spirits. In this tale set in South Africa, the narrator recounts the tale of his friend who became suddenly invested in a piece of South African land containing a certain grove circled by doves. On evenings he heads into the grove and performs certain acts - acts of worship to the goddess Ashtorah!

"The Grove of Ashtaroth" can be found in The Moon Endureth: Tales and Fancies. You can read the text online here.

59. "Casting the Runes" (1911) by M.R. James. An unforgettable tale of a man who derides the forces of darkness, then finds himself beset by them. Everywhere he goes, something follows upon his footsteps. The haunting is fated to end eventually, but that brings little relief: it can only end in death.

"Casting the Runes" can be found in Complete Ghost Stories. You can read the text online here.

60. "The Adventure of the Dying Detective" (1913) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. This was the story which first interested me in Sherlock Holmes. Holmes lies dying in his bed and refuses to let Watson treat him. Watson speeds off to find a specialist, but it seems the specialist is all too aware of Holmes' precarious condition.

"The Adventure of the Dying Detective" can be found in The Complete Sherlock Holmes. You can read the text online here.

Remembering John Buchan

Today, February 11th, marks the 69th anniversary of the death of John Buchan. I know Buchan best for his novels, first brushing near them when I saw Alfred Hitchcock's film version of the 39 Steps. My Uncle Ted later gave me a collection of Buchan's five Richard Hannay novels (all stories featuring the hero of the 39 Steps) and I've been an immense fan ever since. Last year I went through the university's collection of Buchan novels and read everything of theirs which I didn't own myself.

Today gives me an opportunity to speak about a book I recently finished, John Buchan: the Presbyterian Cavalier, a biography by Andrew Lownie. My parents gave it to me years ago, but it was only weeks ago that I finally read it.

It really is a fine biography, especially for someone who has read as much of Buchan as I have. Buchan's stories are all brought up in the course of the chronology along with some opinions from the author (I agree with him, A Prince of the Captivity isn't that great). Much is made of the various recurring characters who link the novels together, as well as the recurring themes - prominently, the hero who does good work but finds no reward. I was also surprised to learn that the novel Huntingtower was made into a film and that the film apparently did much to help Buchan's election as an MP.

But the real revelation of this biography was to discover what a great Governor General he was for Canada. Much as I like his writing, I knew I couldn't expect him to be much of a politician. And yet, he did so many great things! One interesting facet was his emphasis on national and international pride. He wanted Canada to be unified from coast-to-coast and made several trips to the west and the north to shed light on the areas oft-overlooked in the east. He also wanted Canada to be proud of its king & queen and helped organize their first-ever royal visit in 1939. He also wished Canada to have strong ties to the USA because he wanted the USA to ally itself with England and saw that Canada was the connection needed. He was friends to Franklin D. Roosevelt although after entering WWII he had to overcome the USA's "neutrality" by communicating to FDR through clandestine means.

Also, given some of the anti-Jewish rhetoric which appeared in some of his novels, it was heartening to discover that Buchan was not only pro-Jews, but a Zionist. When he became Governor General it was disheartening to the Jewish organizatoins he had supported as an MP because they were losing one of their best voices in parliament. And yet, God had his hand in that appointment; Buchan helped bring Jews over from Europe to Canada after Hitler came to power, simultaneously helping to populate parts of Canada and saving Jewish lives.

All in all, he seems to have been a fine man, the rare author who you come to admire more as you increase in your knowledge of him.

"We can pay our debts to the past by putting the future in debt to ourselves." - J.B.