The War of the Worlds Murder - By Max Allan Collins Page 0,6

in 1975 a good deal of research into the other events of October 30, 1938—the ones that occurred outside the CBS studios. So the picture I will paint, in the theater of your mind, will flesh out somewhat the story the Shadow’s creator shared with me.

And I must admit that nothing in my research confirmed what Walter said, in our dark corner of the hotel bar at Bouchercon Six; but nothing contradicted it, either....

I leave it to you to decide, and remain obediently yours,

Max Allan Collins

October 31, 2004

Muscatine, Iowa

THURSDAY

OCTOBER 27, 1938

BY 1938, THAT EXPERIMENTAL NOVELTY known as radio had become mass communication, informing and entertaining listeners from (as announcers of the era so loved to point out) coast to coast.

In 1920 the first public broadcast told the United States that President Harding had been elected; now President Roosevelt was using the medium for “fireside chats”...and when November rolled around, FDR (and all American politicians) would listen with rapt attention to election returns, courtesy of this most immediate of mediums.

The first radio entertainment emanated from a garage in Pittsburgh—station KDKA—serving thousands; now ventriloquist Edgar Bergen with his dummy Charlie McCarthy brought laughter to over thirty million every Sunday night on their Chase and Sanborn Hour. The drawing power of the young medium could hardly be denied, even if the popularity of a ventriloquist act unseen by its audience did raise certain questions about the willingness of these listeners to buy just about anything, and not just what the sponsors were selling....

If the diversions radio provided were less sophisticated than those of a concert hall, the Broadway theater or even your neighborhood moviehouse, Amos ’n’ Andy, Major Bowes and Fibber McGee and Molly didn’t cost a dime, and were accessible at the flip of a switch and the turn of a dial. After all, just about everybody had a radio—ten million were sold per year, most homes having at least one, with car radios and portable sets making broadcasting a mobile member of the family. Radio was seriously undermining newspapers as the nation’s preferred news source (ironically, many stations were owned by those same papers), even while providing—in a country still reeling from the Depression—a cheap alternative to movies.

Popular music over the air also helped fight those Depression blues, with remote broadcasts from ballrooms and nightclubs in major cities bringing big bands and that new fad, swing, into living rooms. And of course if a news story broke, an announcer could always interrupt to keep Americans “coast to coast” instantaneously informed.

Which meant the average person felt more a part of things these days—even in the smallest American hamlet a listener could witness the marriage of the Duke of Windsor to Mrs. Simpson, and attend the Braddock-Louis heavyweight fight; or get firsthand reports on the great flood of the Mississippi Valley, and have the dirigible Hindenburg explode before their very ears.

It was a world where listeners were quite used to hearing from the president and comedian W.C. Fields within the same half hour—a world that happened to be on the brink of war, a populace waiting by the radio console for news of a first attack....

In the meantime, between this steady diet of comedy, music and news, a hardy handful of creators attempted to bring quality drama to the networks. Arch Oboler, with his pioneering, Twilight Zone–like Lights Out used innovative sound effects to project his movies of the mind, while radio’s “poet laureate” Norman Corwin trusted well-chosen words to grant his fantasies and satires literary qualities rare in a medium that already seemed crass.

At age twenty-two, Orson Welles—acclaimed and controversial as the boy genius of Broadway, a radio veteran thanks to a rich deep voice beyond his years—brought his skills and his talented associates to a project called First-Person Singular, soon to be renamed The Mercury Theatre on the Air. He was the star, narrator, writer, producer and director—at least according to the press releases—and a more ambitious slate of radio adaptations would be difficult to imagine: the first season (1937) began with an outstanding version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and was followed in short order by Treasure Island, A Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist, Around the World in 80 Days and Julius Caesar, among others.

But the 1938 season found the celebrated, acclaimed new series up against the most popular radio show in the nation—Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy’s aforementioned Chase & Sanborn Hour, which pulled in about 35 percent of the radio audience. After seven broadcasts in its new Sunday-night