The Unofficial (?) Cabin B-13 Comic Book Adaptation

Well, it's time for another in my recurring series on adaptations of the radio series Suspense that appeared in Marvel comics of the late 40s and early 50s but weren't credited to Suspense - even though Marvel had an arrangement with CBS to publish a Suspense comic book from 1949-1953.

Like most of the other stories I've found, this is an adaptation of a John Dickson Carr story originally written for Suspense - in fact, it's the most famous of all of Carr's Suspense plays - "Cabin B-13," first performed on Suspense March 16, 1943; in 1948, Carr had a series on CBS called Cabin B-13.

Our uncredited adaptation is from Girl Comics#7 (March, 1951) and it's called "If a Girl Be Mad." From the title, you might think Girl Comics was one of the many Marvel romance books of the era; actually, it was an unusual anthology book that featured stories from pretty much every genre, simply geared towards a female audience.

As in the original radio play the protagonist is a woman named Meg. She and her recently-wed husband are taking a voyage aboard a ship. He shows her to their cabin on B deck, number 13. Just a few minutes later, both he and the cabin disappear. The ship's doctor helps Meg and determines her husband was really the ship's first officer and had contrived a seriously, ridiculously complicated plan to murder her.

All of Carr's original story is intact - a few characters have different names (while the ship's doctor isn't named at all), but the fact that the cabin is still B-13 demonstrates Marvel wasn't working too hard to conceal the story's origins. So, maybe this story was supposed to be printed in Suspense but was somehow shifted to Girl Comics.

I've always had some fondness for the "Cabin B-13" radio play even though, like so much of Carr's fiction, I find it daft; the husband's entire plan of "disappearing" is to hide on a ship where everyone knows who he is! The only reason he seems to "disappear" is that Meg keeps insisting she came aboard with her husband and all the literal-minded crewmen say they never saw her husband; none of them knew the ship's first officer had been married, so if just one of them had said, "I didn't see your husband, you were with the ship's first officer" his brilliant plan would have fallen apart then and there.

Suspense: Secrets of the Comics Revealed?

Many years ago I wrote a blog post about the first two issues of Marvel's 1949 Suspense comic book series: found here. As I noted in that post, those first two issues were the only issues which featured direct adaptations from Suspense's CBS radio scripts as the series was otherwise comprised of original material.

As I noted in another blog post, there was an odd situation when Marvel - prior to forming that agreement with CBS - adapted the Suspense episode "Can't We Be Friends?" into Amazing Mysteries #32 as "With Intent to Kill." Here's my post on that unusual circumstance along with much speculation on my part.

I suppose this post, then, is my third post on this subject as I found two more stories that were adapted from Suspense -- or, at least partially adapted from Suspense. Let's turn to Private Eye, a detective series Marvel published 1951-1952 and featured detective Rocky Jorden; for the longest time, I thought he was supposed to be the same person as the CBS adventure hero Rocky Jordan (1945-1951) but no, despite very similar names and Marvel's licensing from CBS at the time, they're not related.

Private Eye lasted a mere 8 issues and in that final issue there are two different stories with plots very similar to stories heard on Suspense! Note that the 1952 publication date puts this well after the start of Marvel's 1949 deal with CBS. In the story "Nightmare for Two," (drawn by Vern Henkel, no writer credited) Rocky Jorden is riding in an elevator car when the car suddenly plunges to the bottom of the shaft. After workers use a torch to cut their way into the car, Rocky is surprised to discover one of the men who survived the plunge is now dead.

If you know your Suspense, you've already recognized the plot of "the After-Dinner Story" (October 26, 1943). It was adapted from a short story by Cornell Woolrich originally published in 1938. Of course, there's much more to "the After-Dinner Story" than the just the murder aboard the fallen elevator car, it's merely the inciting incident of the drama. Rocky's "Nightmare for Two" only used that particular situation for about 3 of its 7 pages but's it very interesting to see this minor rip-off.

However, that's just the first Suspense rip-off in that issue. The final story of that issue was dubbed "Panic!" (again by artist Vern Henkel with no credited writer) and concerns a woman facing execution who is accused of murdering her lover but she was suffering from a blackout and her memory of the incident was hazy. Rocky clears her and identifies the real killer because his testimony about having his arms raised when the woman shot at him is proven false due to the location of the bullethole on his coat.

Again, all you educated Suspense fans recall these are the details pertaining to John Dickson Carr's script for "the Hangman Won't Wait" (February 9, 1943), of which we only have the first half still in existence (but it was also adapted on Appointment with Fear as "the Clock Strikes Eight"). What's especially odd about this is Marvel had already published an authorized adaptation of this story in the first issue of Suspense (as "Here Comes the Hangman!").

So, what are we Suspense fans left with? A few more questions about why Marvel kept printing unauthorized plots from Suspense, for one thing. I continue to wonder if someone at Marvel had received access to CBS's script archive for Suspense and was surreptitiously filing off the serial numbers in order to make their deadlines.

Radio Recap: Cabin B-13

A few times now I've written on this blog about shows which had some relation to Suspense: Hollywood Star Playhouse; Appointment with Fear; the Philip Morris Playhouse; the Black Book. This time I'm looking at a series which is a direct spin-off from Suspense: Cabin B-13.

If you don't know, "Cabin B-13" is a story by John Dickson Carr which was dramatized on Suspense fairly early in its run (Carr wrote the bulk of episodes in the show's first year). It was first braodcast March 16, 1943, but we have no copies of that version. Fortunately it was repeated later that same year on November 9th (indicating it was a well-regarded script as they used few recycled scripts at the time) and that version still exists. It's a riff on "the Vanishing Lady" story popularized by Alexander Woolcott (many of Carr's Suspense stories are riffs on other people's works - "The Man without a Body" is Wells' "the Invisible Man," "The Body Snatchers" is obviously inspired by Stevenson's story of the same name, etc.).

In that drama, a woman on her honeymoon aboard a ship is alarmed when her husband disappears and no one aboard seems to remember seeing them together. The solution to the mystery is rather stupid but imagines itself to be very clever (which I find is a common problem in Carr's writing). The solution (spoilers for "Cabin B-13") is no one remembered seeing her husband because he was really a member of the crew. So basically it's only a mystery because no one asks the right questions or gives a complete answer - if just one crewman had said, "But I didn't see you with your husband -- just a member of the crew" the whole story would have ended right there.

The series Cabin B-13 features the character of Dr. Fabian as host (portrayed by Arnold Moss) - he was the one who solved the mystery in the original - and he frames the stories told on the program from Cabin B-13 itself (which was not his cabin in the original story, but whatever). It ran on CBS from July, 1948 to January, 1949. Unfortunately, although much of CBS radio has been preserved, very little of Cabin B-13 has survived - just three episodes. Even then, we know very little about the series of programs themselves and what stories were told. Heck, we don't even know for certain if the original story "Cabin B-13" was dramatized!

We do have the 1st episode, "A Razor in Fleet Street," which promises the series will feature brand-new stories by John Dickson Carr. But they didn't hold to that promise since the other two surviving episodes (both near the end of the run) were recycled from Suspense: "The Bride Vanishes" and "The Sleep of Death" (retitled from "The Devil's Saint"). The latter two episodes are interesting to compare with the Suspense versions and do have the type of quality expected of a post-war CBS dramatic program, albeit sans the big stars in the Suspense productions (Peter Lorre really carried "The Devil's Saint").

So let's talk about "A Razor in Fleet Street," the one surviving episode which is original to Cabin B-13. The plot concerns a couple on holidays in England when the husband is sought out by Scotland Yard. They inform him he looks a lot like a killer they're trying to capture and they'd appreciate it if he stayed off the street. Determined to improve his career in the diplomatic corps, the man decides to ignore their warning and go seek the killer himself, hoping to capture him. It's already a pretty far-fetched premise but, indeed, he just so happens to encounter the criminal who looks like him. You might wonder what impact his resemblance to the killer has upon the plot; the answer is "absolutely nothing." It's merely an excuse to have Scotland Yard seek him out at the start of the story.

A common failing in Carr's radio writing is that his mysteries are too literary and don't make for good radio. He tends to bury his clues in the text and that's a problem in an audio medium. Such is the case in "A Razor in Fleet Street," which does not do a good job of presenting the clues. The murder happens about 20 minutes in and the rest of the runtime is devoted to characters making wild hysterical assumptions until the case is solved (which is typical for Carr's scripts). A better program - the sort of thing Suspense would attempt after Carr left - was to have the murder happen in the opening 5 minutes and devote the rest of the show to solving the problem. "A Razor in Fleet Street" would have been improved to my ears had it been structured in that manner - and better yet if the clue had been indicated through the audio, not just the dialogue. The clue to solve the mystery could have been conveyed using careful sound effects but instead it plays out like a magazine short story - which is, at heart, what Carr was best at writing.

I think Cabin B-13 is an important bit of Suspense's story and definitely one for the fan who's heard everything of that series and still wants more. You can hear the 3 surviving episodes on the Internet Archive.

Radio Recap: Appointment with Fear

Appointment with Fear was a radio drama series on the BBC which originally ran from 1943-1955. I don't normally look at BBC radio when I delve into old-time radio, but I made an exception for this series.

You see, Appointment with Fear is essentially the BBC's version of Suspense. Just as Suspense began largely as a series driven by scripts written by author John Dickson Carr, Carr was also the driving force behind the start of Appointment with Fear. The first several years were made up entirely of scripts by John Dickson Carr and the majority of them were originally written for Suspense.

I can't draw a fair picture of what Appointment with Fear was like because there's very little surviving from the series. I found only four episodes online - three by John Dickson Carr ("The Clock Strikes Eight," "The Pit and the Pendulum," and "The Speaking Clock") plus a non-Carr, "And the Deep Shuddered." All three Carr episodes were originally done on Suspense.

As a Suspense, Appointment with Fear is certainly of interest - the quality of the BBC versions are more-or-less equal to that of CBS. As well, Appointment with Fear was hosted by "the Man in Black," who likewise hosted the first few years of Suspense. Suspense seemed to evolve past the character, but now I wonder if Carr had some ownership of the character which required CBS to phase him out after Carr stopped working on their show.

If you've read this blog before, you might have read one of my gripes against Carr. To put it briefly, I don't think he was a very good radio writer (I can't judge him as a prose author); his stories were very talky, didn't make good use of audio effects and have (to me) an unpleasant odour of smugness.

But I'm a Suspense fan, so Carr is an important part of that show's history (and he did write some episodes I quite like). So, I'm happy to have heard what little there is of Appointment with Fear and if more episodes emerge I'll certainly check them out!

Radio Recap: Murder by Experts

Recently I listened to all of what remains of the radio program Murder by Experts. Considering that it ran on Mutual for more than 2 years and over a hundred episodes, it's astonishing that only Fifteen episodes are circulating today.

It's a bit of an odd duck - not quite what it claims to be. Initially the show was hosted by mystery author John Dickson Carr, later by author Bret Halliday. Each week they claimed that another famous author (such as Cornell Woolrich) had chosen the story which they were dramatising.

That claim is... practically unbelieveable. Many of the surviving episodes of Murder by Experts are recycled scripts from Molle Mystery Theater. Indeed, comparing the two series radio logs, I see 31 episode titles on Murder by Experts which originated on Molle Mystery Theater. I just can't believe that none of these famous authors chose stories written by their peers but instead asked Murder by Experts to redo a Molle Mystery Theater script or present a new story by the creators of The Mysterious Traveler. It feels as though the titular "Experts" lent nothing more than their names; maybe Mutual paid them with a basket of cheeses.

As I alluded above, the series was produced by the same people as The Mysterious Traveler, so it feels very much the same - many familiar script beats and familiar actors. However, Murder by Experts lacked the supernatural and sci-fi tales which the Mysterious Traveler frequently indulged in.

I bring all of this up because in 1951, Murder by Experts won the Edgar Award for best radio program. I just can't believe a bunch of dusty Molle scripts by the Mysterious Traveler guys were the best mystery programs on radio, not when Suspense, the Whistler and Dragnet were on the air (in fact, the Whistler never won an Edgar, unlike Suspense and Dragnet). I wonder if that Edgar was merely a political award - handed out because the show plugged a famous mystery author every week and probably name-checked the majority of people who were voting on the ballot.

All this makes it sound like I dislike Murder by Experts; I don't. I think it's inferior to Suspense, but most shows were inferior to Suspense (compare the Murder by Epxerts production of "Return Trip" to the Suspense version - it's no contest, Suspense dramatized the same script much more ably). From those few remaining episodes there are some quite good programs; the first episode, "Summer Heat," was later adapted on the Alfred Hitchcock Hour. "Three's a Crowd" is also a great crime story. There's some good in there - but almost every other surviving episode is a new version of an earlier production which still exists.

Radio Recap: Murder Clinic

Murder Clinic is a show I had heard of but never actually sat down and listened to. When I finally became curious enough to look into the series I was surprised to learn there were only six episodes still known to exist from its one-year run.

Murder Clinic launched on Mutual in 1942 at the same time as Suspense. In fact, the series somewhat resembles that first year of Suspense, when the series would adapt famous detective stories by Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, John Dickson Carr and T. S. Stribling. Perhaps that has something to do with why Murder Clinic only managed to secure one year - Suspense was doing the same thing, but with a bigger budget.

Murder Clinic only suffers a little from its lower budget. For a Mutual series, it's actually pretty well put together with large rotating casts. The gimmick of featuring a different famous detective hero adaptation each week is an interesting one. If only the whole series were still available it would be an interesting tour of what detective fiction of the mid-20th century was like. As it is, here's what remains:

• August 11, 1942: Dr. Henry Poggioli in "The Governor of Cap Haitien" by T. S. Stribling
• August 18, 1942: Max Carrados in "The Holloway Flat Tragedy" by Ernest Bramah
• September 22, 1942: Rosika Storey in "The Scrap of Lace" by Hulbert Footner
• September 29, 1942: Sir Henry M. Merrivale in "Death in the Dressing Room" by John Dickson Carr
• October 6, 1942: Hercule Poirot in "The Tragedy at Marsdon Manor" by Agatha Christie
• October 13, 1942: Police Deputy Parr in "Gulf Stream Green" by Frederick Irving Anderson

I've complained a few times on this blog about John Dickson Carr's writing, especially what was presented on Suspense in 1942-1943. To my amazement, I don't hate the surviving Carr episode! Actually, it's a pretty good piece of detective fiction which plays fair with the audience and doesn't talk down to them (usually my problem with Carr). If only his Suspense writing had hit that note!

I also have to single out the Dr. Poggioli story. The Poggioli story "A Passage to Benares" on Suspense was the subject of my most popular blog post on old-time radio. The adaptation of "The Governor of Cap Hatien" is another great Poggioli yarn (also collected in Clues of the Caribees with "A Passage to Benares"). It involves a bit of voodoo and, as per usual, Poggioli makes some brilliant deductions but is a little slow at implementing them!

I should also say that the Poirot adaptation is good; living in a post-David Suchet world it is difficult to accept any other performer in that role, but it's done very well.

If you enjoy detective fiction (especially by any of those six authors), it's definitely of interest to you. More about Murder Clinic can be gleaned from the page at the Digital Deli.

Suspense: The first adaptation?

Some time ago I blogged about the Suspense comic book series which Marvel Comics began publishing in 1949. Only the first two issues adapted stories from the Suspense radio program the title was licensed from and, as I noted, all of the adaptations were taken from scripts written by John Dickson Carr from the early days of the series.

Recently I discovered there was an earlier attempt to adapt Suspense in the pages of Street & Smith's
Super-Magician Comics in 1944. Similar to the adaptations which that series made of Inner Sanctum Mysteries and Lights Out, this was evidently a once-only attempt by Street & Smith to adapt Suspense into a comic book format. The Grand Comics Database doesn't know who created this story.

As this was 1944 and Suspense had only begun in 1943, it should be no surprise that they adapted one of John Dickson Carr's stories, as he wrote the bulk of Suspense's early scripts. This time out it was an adaptation of "The Devil's Saint" from January 19, 1943; you can listen to that episode at archive.org by clicking on this mp3 link. The story concerns a young man who is courting the niece of a wealthy nobleman. The nobleman demands the young man spend a night in the notorious tapestry room of his manor, a room whose occupants tend to die during the night. Will the young man be the next victim?

As before when I blogged about the Marvel Comics adaptations of Suspense, I have to point to the quality of John Dickson Carr's writing and the way in which it's adapted into comics format. On the radio, the best thing the story had going for it was Peter Lorre's impressive performance as the nobleman. Lorre's reputation for portraying villains gives the nobleman an assumption of sinister intent - because he is, at the end, a great big red herring. The nobleman is set up as though he's the one killing people in the tapestry room; he talks about the supernatural and his family's belief in witchcraft; all of this is to distract from the real killer, which is the niece.

I don't think it's a very good story and the comic book adaptation only highlights the deficiences of the script. Whoever created the comic version didn't put much thought into how to best adapt the story for comics and instead translated the script as closely as possible. For instance, there's a lot of talk about the death of the previous occupant of the tapestry room but no depiction of the dead man; it would have been pretty simple to depict the discovery of the dead man's body while the other characters narrate the events. There are also stilted moments (even more stilted than on the radio) such as when the young man is brought to the tapestry room. In one panel he's talking to the count and niece as the count prepares to show him the room. The next panel depicts the count leading the young man into the room. The following panel shows the woman approaching the young man saying, "I had to see you for a moment." There's no sense that she was absent when the uncle showed him into the room! It's bad storytelling to replicate the dialogue verbatim without guiding the comic book readers through the action of the story.

There is, of course, not much 'action' to this story - it's John Dickson Carr. My great beef with his stories is how much time he spends on amateur sleuths making outlandish assumptions about the solution to the mystery as though it represented the conclusions of his audience. Carr wanted to play a battle of wits against his readers, which is fine, but all too often his stories would stop and all-but address the audience as if to say, "Oh, you think you have the story figured out? Watch as I suddenly reveal all these clues I withheld from you until now!"

Maybe the low point of this story is when the hero and the uncle are talking about the death of the tapestry room's last tenant; the uncle reveals the man was killed by chloroform, to which the young man reacts: "But it can't be true... chloroform blisters and burns the skin. There were no marks..." This is the first time it's been mentioned that "there were no marks." That's a bad adaptation - based on what's printed here, there's no way the hero should have that much information about the dead man.

Anyway, the Devil's Saint adaptation is an interesting little curio for Suspense fans out there.

A Series Well-Calculated to Keep You In...

In an earlier post (found here), I briefly discussed how CBS' great radio program Suspense was transformed into a 1949 comic book series published by the entity we would now call Marvel Comics (back then, a shell company known by many names). As I indicated in the earlier post, early issues of the series adapted episodes of Suspense from early in the series' run, back when the program was primarily written by John Dickson Carr. As a fan of comic books and a fan of old-time radio, I thought I'd try to bridge the gap between these two genres and discuss how the two came together. There's just one problem: I'm not a fan of John Dickson Carr.

After a pilot broadcast in 1940, Suspense finally became a series in 1942. Through the end of 1943, many of the series' scripts were either written or adapted by British author John Dickson Carr; some of the material was adapted from Carr's fiction, including radio scripts he'd written for BBC dramas. Although Carr's last episode of Suspense came in January, 1944, some of his scripts would be recycled over the years - as late as 1959 (Suspense ceased broadcasting in 1962).

By the time the Suspense comic book arrived in 1949, a Suspense mystery magazine had already come and gone (lasting four issues). Strangely, while that earlier publication drew from certain popular Suspense scripts of recent years, Suspense's comic book drew almost no content from the radio show - and what content they did, came from John Dickson Carr's scripts. Only the first two issues of Suspense featured photo covers - and likewise, only these issues contained actual Suspense scripts.

Let's list the adapted stories in order:

Suspense#1: "The Graveyard Ghouls" by Matt Baker.

Adapted from John Dickson Carr's Suspense episode "the Body Snatchers" (November 24, 1942).

Suspense#1: "The Bride Vanishes"

Adapted from John Dickson Carr's Suspense episode "the Bride Vanishes" (December 1, 1942).

Suspense#1: "Here Comes the Hangman!"

Adapted from John Dickson Carr's Suspense episode "The Hangman Won't Wait" (February 9, 1943), but the episode itself is lost to time. Carr later adapted it again for the BBC series Appointment With Fear as "the Clock Strikes Eight."

Suspense#2: "I Bet With Death!" by Gene Colan.

Adapted from John Dickson Carr's Suspense episode "Will You Make a Bet With Death?" (November 10, 1942).

Suspense#2: "The Man Who Lived Again!"

Adapted from John Dickson Carr's Suspense episode "Mr. Markham, Antique Dealer" (May 11, 1943).

As I outlined in my earlier blog post, it's odd that the comic book only drew material from the early years of the program - and only from Carr's scripts at that! Perhaps it was part of a package deal when the contract was made between CBS & Marvel - they got the Suspense name and Carr's scripts, but nothing else. Did Carr even receive payment for his stories being adapted in the comic (unlikely as they appeared without credit and publisher Martin Goodman was a notorious skinflint). Perhaps the original intent was to adapt episodes from the early years of the show and gradually work up to more recent stories, but the plan was abandoned to save money on soliciting material from CBS.

Again, as I stated before, I think John Dickson Carr has to be one of the worst authors you could hope to adapt to the comic book medium, especially in the 8-page format (although "I Bet With Death" ran 11 pages). Carr's stories are extremely convoluted - he seemed to place a lot of emphasis on subverting the expectations of mystery fans, matching wits with them. He really belonged in prose (his true career) rather than radio or comics, because his stories are full of red herrings and characters jumping to far-fetched conclusions just to distract his audience from the real solution. Inevitably, his stories would end with a drawn-out explanation of what we'd just witnessed - for instance in "the Body Snatchers," it's that the supposed dead woman isn't dead (which is even more abrupt and head-scratching in the comic book version than on radio); in the radio version of "the Bride Vanishes," the solution to the women vanishing from a balcony is a cowboy who's been roping victims with his lariat - for some reason, the comic changes this to an insane countess who can wield a whip, causing the finale to play out with even more belaboured explanations (as the cowboy is still present and thus is a red herring requiring more explanation). "Will You Make a Bet With Death?" is the one Carr story amongst this batch which I think actually works well on radio and in comics - it definitely helps that it runs to 11 pages, granting it the space to let the story unfold.

Given the years I've spent on my hobby of Marvel Comics and Suspense combining the two should have been just about the greatest thing ever printed; instead, the comic book version of Suspense didn't come into its own until it dropped its connection to CBS, instead becoming a horror comic no different than any of its companion mags on the rack. Ah, for what might have been...