Radio and The Threat
of Nostalgia
With
The Threat of Nostalgia and Other Stories (Ramble House), I wanted to accomplish
two things: gather some of my magazine stories that hadn’t been anthologized or
appeared in any of my three previous collections, and dedicate a book to radio
expert Dave Amaral, whose broadcast versions of Edward D. Hoch’s Dr. Sam
Hawthorne stories occasionally appear in the Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
podcast series (themysteryplace.com).
Thus I looked first for stories with a radio background.
Radio
has always loomed large in my life. I’m
old enough to remember a time when network radio still ruled, with a full slate
of comedies, mysteries, variety shows, soap operas, big band remotes, plus
flamboyant newscasters, mellow-voiced storytellers of the Housewives’
Protective League, and the Hartz Mountain singing canaries—not girl singers,
real canaries.
My father loved
and accumulated radios, with one in every room and every moving
conveyance. I only found out after he
died that he had done some broadcasts of sermons back in the 1930s while he was
a divinity student at the University of Chicago. Though he knew I was contemplating a radio
career during my college years, I guess it never came up. I broadcast basketball and baseball on the
student radio station. You’ll have to
take my word for it I was good, but I decided I didn’t have the voice or the
aggressiveness for that cutthroat business.
Oddly enough (or
maybe, when you read the stories, not so oddly), my radio-related tales, apart
from a couple that concerned play-by-play sportscasters, didn’t sell very
readily. Only the first four stories in The
Threat of Nostalgia are directly centered on radio. Two of them appeared in very obscure markets,
another in the long-lived but low-paying Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, and
the fourth never sold at all when written in the late 1960s and appears in the
book for the first time.
The title story
dates to 1980 and first appeared in the semi-pro magazine Skullduggery. The radio announcer protagonist, whose
teenage nephew collects old programs on tape, looks back thirty years to the
last broadcast of the Beldon and Mahaffey variety show. I’ve always found comedy teams with
dysfunctional relationships interesting, and B&M were as dysfunctional as
they come. I returned to another such
team twenty years later in my Ellery Queen pastiche, “The Gilbert and Sullivan
Clue,” also included in the book.
“The Old Radio
Puzzle,” from a 1982 issue of the short-lived Canadian periodical Black Cat,
also has a soured nostalgia theme, as the cast of the radio sitcom Career
Girl Sally is reunited and murder follows.
This story introduced my movie critic detective Stephen Fenbush, whose
second case, “The Missing Elevator Puzzle,” came along a mere quarter century
later. The latter case is much better, though
the first one (as Ed Hoch told me) is “not great but not bad.”
“The World’s
Champion Lovers” (MSMM, July 1983) doesn’t have an explicit radio
background but concerns the competition that might ensue to be mentioned on-air
by the National Commentator (based on Paul Harvey) as the day’s longest-married
couple. The two main characters were
written with the voices of Jim and Marian Jordan (Fibber McGee and Molly) in my
ear.
The last of the
radio stories, “Death of a Deejay,” draws to a small degree on my experience
working as a night switchboard operator at KMPC in Los Angeles in the mid-1960s. It was my effort to create a hardboiled
private eye, a figure that was somewhat unfashionable at the time but would come
back strong in the 1970s and ‘80s. It’s
a period piece, not to be taken too seriously but maybe worth a delayed debut.
The rest of the
stories in the book aren’t explicitly about radio, but at least a couple have a
radio inspiration: “A Quiet Death,” which I can imagine as a segment of Suspense
or another mystery anthology series; and “Spirit Recording,” involving a type
of occult phenomenon that often turned up on late-night radio talk shows. Conan Doyle would have loved it. (The phenomenon, not the story.)
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