Suspense — 1943
50 episodes broadcast in 1943.
A fortune in stolen money is hiding somewhere in plain sight, and a clever crook is confident no one will ever spot it. One woman takes it as a personal challenge to prove him wrong.
A prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition wakes in absolute darkness to find the walls, the dark, and a swinging blade above him are all part of a slow-built machine of torment. Escape means outthinking a system built to make it impossible. (after Edgar Allan Poe)
A traveling carnival illusionist known for reading palms and conjuring the departed falls hard for a sightless young woman and marries her. Their contentment doesn't sit well with a jealous competitor in the same trade, who schemes to break up the match -- or worse -- before the story's dark turn.
Somewhere between California and New York, George Javeny becomes convinced a one-armed stranger is trailing his car with murder on his mind. Whether the threat is real or a trick of a long, lonely highway, he can't afford to be wrong.
A doctor sets out to test a chilling theory — that a person already contemplating suicide can be talked into committing murder first. Once he's satisfied the idea works, he realizes it might work rather well for him personally.
This Suspense broadcast, "The Hangman Won't Wait" (1943-02-09), starred Sidney Greenstreet; no episode synopsis survives in the free sources consulted for this dossier, though the broadcast log notes: FIRST HALF ONLY.
Four contented years into her marriage, Lucia Durant watches everything unravel when her husband's half-sister moves into the house. Soon after, her health starts failing by degrees, and she becomes convinced the two of them are working together to kill her.
This Suspense broadcast, "Will You Walk into My Parlor?" (1943-02-23), starred Cedric Hardwicke, Geraldine Fitzgerald; no episode synopsis survives in the free sources consulted for this dossier.
An insurance investigator built his career catching arsonists — and now the evidence in a fresh string of fires keeps pointing toward someone far too close to home: his own wife. Proving it means destroying his marriage either way. (after Cornell Woolrich)
This Suspense broadcast, "The Phantom Archer" (1943-03-09), starred Ralph Bellamy; no episode synopsis survives in the free sources consulted for this dossier.
On the first night of an ocean crossing, a new bride wakes to find her husband gone from their cabin — and every crew member she asks insists he was never booked on the ship at all. She has to decide whether to trust her own memory or a conspiracy determined to erase him.
A mystery novelist who's spent his career inventing criminals suddenly finds himself surrounded by real ones, with his life riding on how well his research actually holds up. His sharp-tongued secretary isn't making the ordeal any calmer.
A wrong number connects a man to a voice he never expected to hear again — his wife's, who has been dead for some time. The line stays open just long enough to make him question which of them is wrong about that.
Mid-performance of Macbeth, an actor collapses with a very real knife wound — inflicted, as far as anyone can tell, by no one standing near him. The stage's own curses start to feel less theatrical once the impossibility sets in.
A young woman stands to inherit a fortune on one condition: her sanity must hold until her twenty-first birthday. As the date approaches, a portrait in the house begins changing in small, impossible ways that only she seems to notice.
Aboard a train bound for the French Riviera, a niece keeps close watch over her wealthy aunt and the medium she's convinced is running a con. Proving the fraud turns out to be far more dangerous than simply suspecting it.
Sophronia Winters gave the best years of her life to nursing an ailing father, and now that duty's finally behind her, she heads to Florida chasing sunshine and a second chance at happiness. Hiram seems to be exactly the answer to her prayers — or he seems to be.
A transatlantic flight crew finds a corpse aboard before they've even reached cruising altitude — and matters only worsen from there, as the plane veers off course, the cockpit turns up empty, and a Nazi agent is somewhere among the passengers.
A dealer in antiques has made a career out of quiet blackmail, and when he senses his mark is done paying, he issues a warning instead of a plea: kill him, and he'll return from beyond the grave within thirty minutes to settle the score. Whether that's bravado or a genuine promise is left for his target to gamble on.
Traveling salesman Alexander Bonaparte Cust suffers blackouts, a lingering souvenir of an old head injury — ordinary enough, until he notices that somebody turns up dead in every town where one of his lapses occurs. He can't prove his own innocence when even he isn't sure of it. (after Agatha Christie)
Confined to her bed with only a telephone connecting her to the world, Mrs. Stevenson picks up a crossed line and overhears two strangers calmly plotting a killing. The police brush her off as hysterical, leaving her to piece together, alone, whether the murder they're planning is her own.
One murderer slipped through a veteran prosecutor's fingers years ago, and the case has never stopped gnawing at him. To finally close it, he enlists an ally no courtroom would ever recognize — the restless spirit of the victim herself. (after Rupert Croft-Cooke)
A bachelor party takes a grim turn when a corpse turns up uninvited — and grows stranger still when the very apartment where it happened, canaries and all, seems to vanish afterward as if it never existed.
Drowning in debt, a dude ranch's husband-and-wife owners pin their hopes on a wealthy guest for a loan. Come morning the husband swears the money's secured — but his wife discovers the guest himself vanished sometime in the night, and the arithmetic stops adding up. (after Cornell Woolrich)
A quiet village falls under siege from a menace no one can see — footsteps, doors, violence, all attributed to a figure that supposedly isn't there at all. Whether the invisibility is real or a story someone wants believed is the question that matters.
Uncle Henry has vanished, and his wife has gone strangely quiet about it. Between a syringe tucked away in a drawer, a patch of freshly turned earth in the garden, and footsteps in the house after dark, his niece and her husband start piecing together an explanation nobody wants to say out loud.
Debutante Ginny Trowbridge wants to help her detective boyfriend land the promotion he's chasing, so she takes it upon herself to bait the serial killer he's been hunting into the open. It's a plan built entirely on nerve, and precious little else. (after Cornell Woolrich)
A worried letter reaches investigator the Lone Wolf, warning that someone means to murder its author before a beauty pageant crowns its winner. He arrives too late: the woman is already dead, floating in the swimming pool, leaving him to work out who wanted her gone.
A doctor convinced that only five safeguards keep ordinary people from killing sets out to prove his theory by handpicking five strangers and pushing each toward murder, certain at least one safeguard will hold firm. His experiment doesn't end the way his research predicted.
A man's dreams pull him steadily backward in time, into an intimate friendship with Alexander Hamilton and toward the fateful duel that awaits him against Aaron Burr--history replaying itself, night after night, in his sleep.
A man drowns an insufferable colleague in his own ornamental fountain, staging the death to look like a drunken misstep. The arrangement holds--until a detective arrives at the estate and starts picking apart just how accidental that "accident" really was.
Confined to her bed with only a telephone connecting her to the world, Mrs. Stevenson picks up a crossed line and overhears two strangers calmly plotting a killing. The police brush her off as hysterical, leaving her to piece together, alone, whether the murder they're planning is her own.
A collaborator in Nazi-occupied Denmark starts getting mysterious mail forecasting his own death -- specifically, that he'll take his life on a date tied to the monarchy's calendar. At first dismissed as a crank's threat, the prediction starts to look uncomfortably well-informed as the day draws near.
Surfacing from a drug-induced blackout, a young man realizes he may have killed someone during the hours he can't remember--and he has only a handful of hours left to piece together what actually happened before the truth catches up with him.
An attorney grows convinced that his client is about to marry a man who has poisoned his way into fortunes before, and plans to do it again--this time for her estate. Can he prove it before the wedding seals her fate?
An innocuous newspaper ad pulls a young woman into a strange assignment: track down and lure in one of several heirs to a dead eccentric's fortune. What she isn't told is that the heirs are hunting each other, each willing to kill--and not one of them knows what the others look like.
A celebrated big-game hunter washes ashore on a remote island owned by a fellow enthusiast of the chase--except this host has grown bored with ordinary prey and hunts only the most cunning quarry of all: other people.
Somewhere along eight miles of open, unbroken track between two stations, an entire train simply vanishes--engine, cars, passengers, and all--leaving investigators to explain a disappearance that shouldn't be physically possible.
Alix barely knows Gerald Martin before she's married him — a courtship measured in days, not months. The honeymoon glow fades fast once her new husband's behavior turns odd, and she begins to wonder exactly who she's tied herself to. (after Agatha Christie)
A brush with death leaves one man with an uncanny gift--an inability to stay silent whenever he hears a falsehood--and a strange new certainty about things he shouldn't know. When he moves into the home of a doctor and his wife, that gift starts unsettling everyone around him.
When a plunging elevator traps five men in the wreckage, rescuers pull out four survivors and one victim--shot, not crushed. The four insist they saw nothing, and police are ready to call it suicide, but the dead man's father refuses to let the case close that easily.
An employee plots the perfect murder of his condescending boss, engineering an alibi so airtight that the killing not only goes undetected but earns him a promotion. The plan works flawlessly--it's his own conscience that starts to unravel him.
On the first night of an ocean crossing, a new bride wakes to find her husband gone from their cabin — and every crew member she asks insists he was never booked on the ship at all. She has to decide whether to trust her own memory or a conspiracy determined to erase him.
Desperate for cash, a black-market dealer decides murdering an associate and pinning the blame on someone else is the cleanest way to solve his money troubles. Naturally, the scheme doesn't unfold nearly as cleanly as he'd hoped.
A spy operating deep inside Nazi Germany grows increasingly certain that the Gestapo has picked up his trail, and every ordinary encounter starts to feel like the one that will expose him.
A fall on the sidewalk knocks one man cold--and when he comes to, three entire years of his life have vanished from memory. Piecing together what happened in that missing stretch, he discovers he built a whole second life he never knew about, one that may include a murder.
An insurance investigator built his career catching arsonists — and now the evidence in a fresh string of fires keeps pointing toward someone far too close to home: his own wife. Proving it means destroying his marriage either way. (after Cornell Woolrich)
When his daughter kills the local schoolmaster in a fit of passion, Mr. Princey doesn't call the police — he starts building a case against an innocent man instead. Family loyalty, pushed past its breaking point, becomes its own kind of crime. (after John Collier)
A mild-mannered botany professor quietly digs a pit in his cellar, ostensibly for a plant project, while his sharp-eyed wife busies herself planning their holiday travel. The hole, as it happens, is exactly the right size for a body.
A parlor seance at a school for young ladies goes horribly wrong when one student drops dead of fright on the spot. Was it a genuine brush with the beyond, or did a classmate engineer the fatal scare for reasons of her own? (after Ethel Lina White)
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