The Clew of the Busted Hose

In Chicago, nine minutes before the close of WBBM's Ellery Queen program, a water hose burst in the transmitter cooling system, and WBBM had to go off the air. Almost immediately WBBM's switchboard was swamped with calls, all asking, "Who was the murderer?" The phone girl had to call CBS in Manhattan, whence the program had been coming, to find out. The next hour she spent replying: "The murderer was Mr. Wiggins. . . . The murderer was Mr. Wiggins. . . ." Next day WBBM called back another thousand who had left their numbers, reporting Mr. Wiggins' crime with trimmings.

Mr Wiggins, a hotel clerk, was the culprit in The Adventure of the Mother Goose Murders, that week's twist in the Adventures of Ellery Queen, a four-month-old radio hour in which armchair experts assemble evidence from a dramatization of a mystery, spend the last twenty minutes of the show trying to put the finger on the murderer. What happened when the WBBM hose burst was a better clew to the interest of radio fans than any radio survey.

Ellery Queen, as the vast U. S. crime club well knows, is the pen name of two quirky fictioneers named Manfred Lee and Frederic Dannay, cousins who look as much alike as oboe players. Ten years ago Manny was a movie publicist, Fred an ad agency man. Now their Ellery Queen's published adventures stack 16 volumes high, he has been in the movies, on the stage, on the lecture platform, and this year in radio he has been both actor (on MBS's Author, Author) and writer.

For the CBS Adventures hour Lee and Dannay write a $350 mystery a week. Ellery, represented as a William Powell-style detective by a radiogenic actor named Hugh Marlowe, with a photogenic actress named Marion Shockley as his secretary, Nikki, leads the way through such adventures as those of the Gum-Chewing Millionaire, Napoleon's Razor, George Spelvin's Murderer, The Three R's.

For its first few months, the show's armchair guests (at $25-$50 a case) were dilettanti like Princess Kropotkin, Gelett Burgess, Deems Taylor, Lillian Hellman, Margaret Bourke-White. They were given to sniffing up recondite alleys: Lillian Hellman was the only one to show on-the-scent results, solving the mystery of Napoleon's razor in a nick. This month the show tried picking its detectives from fans who write in. More like flatfeet than fancy-dans, the unpaid fans not only proved uniformly baffled, but dull. So last Sunday a group of experts from Hollywood appeared. One, Mystery Writer Harry Kurnitz, solved the mystery of the March of Death right off the bat.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.