Suspense — 1944
51 episodes broadcast in 1944.
A man boards a roller coaster very much alive and disembarks strangled to death--an impossible murder, given that he rode the entire course alone in the back seat, hurtling along at speeds that should have made killing him unthinkable.
A taxi dancer at a Manhattan dance hall learns that a fellow dancer and close friend has become the latest victim of a killer preying on women in her line of work. When police ask her to serve as bait, she has to decide how far she's willing to go to catch him.
A woman is found dead in a theatrical rooming house, and the detective gathers every resident under one roof to sort out what happened. It's a blind lodger who breaks the case open--unable to see a thing, he heard every sound of that night and can recount it exactly.
A man turns up murdered over what looks like a stolen diamond, but the real puzzle isn't who did it--it's how. He died alone in a room locked from the inside, windows sealed, with two witnesses stationed outside the only door who swear nobody passed through it.
Convinced she's about to die, a woman walks into a funeral parlor and calmly orders her own coffin. The alarmed mortician calls the police, fearing a suicide in the making, and the detective who investigates finds her sharing a house with a sister whose grip on reality seems none too steady.
Mr. Mummery hasn't been feeling himself lately, and when his business partner mentions a poisoner going door to door taking cook's positions, an uncomfortable thought takes root. Could the woman preparing his meals every day be exactly the killer everyone's been warned about? (after Dorothy L. Sayers)
Desperate for fifteen hundred dollars before the clock strikes midnight -- the price of staying alive -- a young man turns to his mother, only to learn her savings are already gone. Cornered, he starts weighing increasingly dangerous options to raise the sum in time.
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 painter who happened to witness a killing finds the culprit's face has slipped entirely from memory, even though he's sure it was a woman standing over the body. He sets brush to canvas anyway, sketching everything but her features, gambling that finishing the portrait will shake the missing detail loose.
An ex-convict takes a job with the very law firm run by the partner who once put him behind bars. When that partner turns up murdered, suspicion lands squarely on him, and he has to clear his name before he's sent back to prison for a crime he didn't commit.
A family's quiet life is upended when the wife's long-absent brother returns, claiming he's mastered occult powers during years studying in India. He has ambitions to open an asylum where he can put those unsettling abilities to use on the patients in his care.
A film director's crime pictures draw skepticism from a detective who doesn't think they ring true--so the detective takes him to the morgue to view the body of a notorious hired killer. Fascinated, the director starts digging into the dead assassin's life, determined to build his next picture around it.
Late one night, an engineer radios a colleague isolated at a secretive research station tucked in the Vermont mountains -- and instead of conversation, hears a stranger's cough and then gunfire before the connection goes dead. He heads north himself rather than wait for answers that clearly aren't coming over the air.
With no family to miss her and no one to ask questions, a young woman answers a want ad that pulls her straight into the middle of a scheme run by a pair of Nazi agents.
A carnival mind-reader and medium wins the heart of a blind woman and marries her, only to draw the jealousy of a rival showman in the same racket -- a tale of obsession under the big top that builds toward tragedy.
A skilled forger enlists in the army as a way of staying one step ahead of the law, only to realize he's now bound for the front lines. When he spots the chance to swap identities with a dead soldier, it looks like the perfect second escape.
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 vain, theatrical actor sets his sights on a leading lady still grieving the presumed death of her husband a year past. Just as she's finally ready to return to the stage opposite him, the husband she mourned turns up very much alive, as if walking back from the grave.
Presumed murdered by a close friend, a young man vanishes from his own life story--until he reappears three years later, very much alive. The question that follows him home is whether he's really who he claims to be, or an impostor angling for an inheritance.
After a fatal car crash, an ambitious scientist keeps a ruthless tycoon's brain alive in his laboratory, convinced the breakthrough will one day save countless lives. The brain, unfortunately, has ambitions of its own--and saving lives isn't among them.
After a fatal car crash, an ambitious scientist keeps a ruthless tycoon's brain alive in his laboratory, convinced the breakthrough will one day save countless lives. The brain, unfortunately, has ambitions of its own--and saving lives isn't among them.
A young woman sets her sights on marrying a recently widowed socialite whose Philadelphia mansion was built around an enormous pipe organ, its music felt through every room. When his two children come home from boarding school hinting at what might be concealed inside those towering pipes, the house starts to feel far less welcoming.
Plagued by headaches and nightmares that refuse to let up, a millionaire tycoon finally turns to a psychiatrist for answers--and opens the door on whatever has really been troubling his mind.
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.
When her purse is snatched in a crowded subway station, a woman's cries bring a stranger running to retrieve it for her. She thanks him and boards her train--only to discover, once she's settled in, that ten thousand dollars belonging to someone else has somehow found its way into her bag.
A priest calls on a former pupil, now a journalist, who says a stranger cornered him days earlier with a bizarre demand: hand over two specific Bibles and help him find something called "the walls of Jericho." The priest knows nothing of either--leaving the journalist to work out just what his visitor was really after.
A composer completes an original piece straight from his own imagination, only to learn that someone else has already written the identical composition, note for note. He sets out to understand how two minds could possibly land on exactly the same music.
Through the pages of a cryptic diary, a grieving father lays out his single obsession: hunting down and killing the hit-and-run driver who took his only child's life. (after Nicholas Blake)
Buried in gambling debts, a boxing manager is forced to sign his prize fighter over to the man he owes. But when the boxer announces plans to marry and leave the country, the deal threatens to collapse--and with it, the manager's own life.
An elderly woman approaches a young fairgoer with an easy offer: come live in her house as a companion, for pay far better than the light duties deserve. She takes the job and moves in without hesitation--only to grow convinced that someone else is hidden in the house with her, and that leaving may not be so simple after all.
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)
On a train, a chance companion tells Mr. Pender he has no patience for mystery novels, since real murderers get caught--he's interested only in the ones who don't, and describes in careful detail how a killing can be made to look like natural causes. Soon after, a string of deaths matching those exact methods begins turning up, with the same stranger somehow present each time.
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.
Convinced his daughter's death was no suicide but a carefully staged murder, an aging stage actor sets an elaborate trap: a lavish dinner party gathering every friend and colleague from her theatrical circle. Somewhere at that table sits the killer he intends to unmask before the night is through.
Fleeing a violent gangster husband, a woman slips away to Havana with the man she loves, hoping for a fresh start on the island. Their first night together barely ends before she's found stabbed in the back — and the evidence points straight at him. (after Cornell Woolrich)
A hired companion expects her ocean crossing home to be a quiet, mournful one — she's escorting her late employer's coffin for burial and hoping to recover from the loss. Then word spreads that a notorious 'blackout killer' may be aboard, and a shadowy figure keeps turning up near the lifeboats whenever she's alone.
A newlywed's first real quarrel ends with his wife storming out and flinging back a bitter threat — that he'll never lay eyes on her again. He shrugs it off, certain she's simply cooling down at her mother's house, until a phone call reveals she never arrived there at all. (after Cornell Woolrich)
Occupied France is gripped by a string of unsolved killings, and a doctor's wife finds herself circling an unthinkable question. Could the man she married — the one healing patients by day — be the murderer the whole region fears after dark?
Buried in gambling debts, an insurance man kills his wife rather than accept her refusal to hand over the money she's hidden away. Getting rid of a body is one problem; getting away with it for good is another — yet fate seems to hand him one lucky break after another. How long can that luck possibly hold?
A jaded foreign correspondent snaps what should be a routine photograph of a stranger drinking alone in a Lisbon bar — and gets an explosively violent reaction in return. Chasing down why that one candid shot provoked such fury pulls him into something far more dangerous than he expected.
After a quarrel at home, a man escapes to an operetta and loses himself in its lead role, convinced he's actually the dashing prince on stage — and that only one particular woman in the audience truly sees it in him. His fantasy hardens into obsession, and freeing himself for her means getting rid of his wife.
With her husband locked away for a crime he swears he didn't commit, a devoted wife launches her own investigation to clear his name. Her hunt leads her to a man who may well be the real killer — and, inconveniently, someone she can't help falling for. (after Cornell Woolrich)
A decade after her testimony helped convict a vengeful criminal, a woman still flinches at his long-ago vow to make her pay. When a new elevator operator moves into her building, she becomes certain he's the same man, somehow free — though whether he's real or a fear grown too large to see past is another question entirely.
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.
A nightclub singer working the Brazilian circuit starts noticing things that don't quite add up about the men who sign her paychecks. Slowly, an uneasy suspicion takes hold: she may be performing every night for a Nazi operation.
When his sister flees her brutal husband, a protective brother hides her away — but the man tracks them down anyway. Jimmy returns one day to find him dead on the floor and his sister too shaken to explain what happened, leaving him to somehow make the body disappear before either of them takes the blame.
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.
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.
A killer is stalking women through the fog-bound streets, and no one has caught him. When a landlady rents a room to a quiet, secretive boarder, she can't shake the feeling that danger has just moved in under her own roof. (after Marie Belloc Lowndes)
An actor who's grown sick of playing a fictional stage strangler finally gives his last performance in the role — only to be struck down by falling debris during an air raid on his way out of the theater. The blow to his head leaves him convinced he isn't acting anymore: he really is the killer he used to play.
A once-celebrated stage actress living in seclusion receives a rare visitor — a retiring vicar bringing along the young curate meant to succeed him — and recounts her theatrical rise, including the rival she loved to upstage and the slap that rivalry once earned her. That same rival was later found stabbed to death, and the old woman's calm telling of the story leaves the question of guilt hanging in the air.
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