The Crime Club
The Concept Behind the Show
The Crime Club had one of the more unusual framing devices in old-time radio mystery anthologies. Rather than a hard-boiled detective narrating from his office or a disembodied voice intoning warnings from the dark, this show cast the listener as a patron of a private library. Each episode opened with the same ritual: a telephone ringing in the shadowed corner of the Crime Club library, an organist drifting into atmospheric music, the librarian answering and confirming he had the requested title, then the doorbell sounding as the reader was welcomed in and settled into the easy chair by the window. The book was opened, and the story began.
The sample opening gives a clear sense of the tone: "Yes, this is the Crime Club ... I'm the librarian. Silent Witness? Yes, we have that Crime Club story for you. Come right over." Quiet and unhurried, a little theatrical without being melodramatic. The framing made the anthology format feel like something more than a random collection of stories — you were a member, and the librarian was holding a specific book aside for you.
Two actors handled the librarian role across the run: Barry Thomson and Raymond Edward Johnson. Johnson was a notable get. He'd been the original "Raymond" on Inner Sanctum Mysteries from 1941 until he joined the Army in 1945, and the Crime Club came along roughly a year after he left that signature role. Inner Sanctum's host had been all sardonic creaks and graveyard puns; the Crime Club librarian was a different register entirely, courtly and bookish, and Johnson moved between them with no apparent strain. His other radio credits ran deep — the title role on Mandrake the Magician for Mutual, Don Winslow of the Navy on NBC Blue, a stint on Mr. District Attorney — and he'd starred as Thomas Jefferson in Sidney Kingsley's Broadway play The Patriots in 1943.
Where the Stories Came From
The show drew its material from the Doubleday Crime Club, a publishing imprint that had been producing mystery novels since 1928. That connection gave the series a ready library of source material and a built-in identity — the "Crime Club" of the title wasn't invented for radio, it was an established brand in crime fiction. The imprint had been conceived in the late 1920s by Daniel Longwell, Doubleday's advertising manager, who came back from a buying trip to England impressed by the popularity of Edgar Wallace's thrillers. By the time the radio series launched, the imprint was nearly two decades old and going strong; it would eventually publish 2,492 titles before closing in 1991, including the first U.S. editions of all fifty Saint novels by Leslie Charteris. An earlier program, The Eno Crime Club, had also tapped the same imprint.
About half of the Crime Club radio episodes were direct adaptations of specific Doubleday novels; the other half were original scripts written for the series. A new Crime Club book was promoted on-air each week as available at bookstores everywhere, which gives a sense of how the broadcast and the imprint were meant to support each other. The scripts came primarily from Stedman Coles and Wyllis Cooper — the latter a significant name in radio drama, having created the landmark horror anthology Lights Out in 1934 and going on to write the eerie, much-admired Quiet Please beginning in 1947. Cooper's documented contribution to The Crime Club includes "The Topaz Flower," broadcast April 24, 1947, with Raymond Edward Johnson, adapted from Charlotte Murray Russell's 1939 novel of the same name. Vincent Terrace, in Radio Programs, 1924–1984, characterized the show as one where crimes "require intellect, not brawn, to solve" and the series overall as "more talk than action."
When the show transitioned from adapting novels to running original scripts, the change was signaled inside the framing device itself: the librarian's line shifted from "The book is on the shelf" to "The MANUSCRIPT is on the shelf." A small touch, but a nice one — the show acknowledged the change in source material without ever stepping outside the conceit.
The Run on Mutual
The Crime Club premiered on Mutual on December 2, 1946, taking over the Monday eight o'clock slot previously held by the adventure series Bulldog Drummond. The premiere episode was "Death Blew Out the Match." On January 2, 1947, the show shifted to Thursdays at ten p.m. Eastern, and at various points it also aired on Wednesdays and Sundays. Episodes ran thirty minutes. Roger Bower produced and directed throughout. The acting ensemble heard in surviving episodes included Maurice Wells, Brad Barker, Staats Cotsworth, and Joe De Santis, among others.
The show ran as a sustaining program for much of its time on Mutual, with sponsors including Kellogg's, RCA Victor, and Ford Motor Company appearing at various points. The total run came to 47 episodes across just over ten months, ending with "Cupid Can be Deadly" on October 16, 1947. The relatively brief tenure and the schedule shuffling suggest the radio series never quite found a stable footing — and indeed, in sharp contrast to the Doubleday imprint that gave it a name, the broadcast version was not commercially successful. What it left behind is a compact anthology of mystery adaptations built around one of the more charming structural conceits the genre produced, hosted in its later months by one of radio's distinctive voices.