The Island of Coffins and Other Mysteries from the

  Casebook of Cabin B-13 by John Dickson Carr

  Edited by Tony Medawar and Douglas Greene

  With an Introduction and Notes for the Curious by Tony Medawar

  Cincinnati

  Crippen & Landru Publishers, Inc.

  2020

  Copyright © 1948, 1949 by John Dickson Carr

  All other materials copyright © 2020 by the estate of John Dickson Carr.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  For information contact: Crippen & Landru Publishers PO Box 532057

  Cincinnati, OH 45253

  Web: www.crippenLandru.com E-mail: Info@crippenlandru.com

  ISBN (softcover): 978-1-936363-51-3

  ISBN (clothbound): 978-1-936363-50-6

  First Edition: December 2020 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  The editors and publisher would like to thank Mike Nevins, Geoff Bradley, James Keirans, author of The John Dickson Carr Companion (Ramble House, 2015) and Sam Brylawski of the Library of Congress.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction: Suspense at Sea 3

  Series 1

  A Razor in Fleet Street 9

  The Man Who Couldn’t Be Photographed 24

  Death Has Four Faces 38

  The Blind-Folded Knife Thrower 52

  No Useless Coffin 67

  The Nine Black Reasons 81

  The Count of Monte Carlo 95

  Below Suspicion 109

  The Power of Darkness 122

  The Footprint in the Sky 135

  The Man with the Iron Chest 148

  Series 2

  The Street of the Seven Daggers 163

  The Dancer from Stamboul 177

  Death in the Desert 191

  The Island of Coffins 205

  The Most Respectable Murder 219

  The Curse of the Bronze Lamp 233

  Lair of the Devil-Fish 248

  The Dead Man’s Knock 261

  The Man with Two Heads 275

  The Bride Vanishes 288

  Till Death Do Us Part 301

  The Sleep of Death 316

  Cabin B-13 Air Dates on CBS 331

  Suspense at Sea

  “CBS brings you John Dickson Carr’s famous Dr. Fabian, ship’s surgeon, world traveler and host in Cabin B-13 for strange and incredible tales of mystery and murder.”

  For many years, little was known about John Dickson Carr’s last major radio program, Cabin B-13, beyond the facts that it could have been heard on the Columbia Broadcasting System in the late 1940s and that it took its name from a radio play by Carr first broadcast in 1943 on CBS’s long-running radio program Suspense. Frustratingly, the titles of some of the plays in Cabin B-13 were known because they had been given in contemporary press reports and, as well as recordings of three of the plays11, the edited script of one of these had been published in an obscure British magazine. Professor Mike Nevins therefore spoke for many when, in 1978, he lamented, “that I have heard none of these plays and that no radio buff of my acquaintance has a tape recording of any in his collection are matters I deeply regret. From the titles alone they sound fascinating”.

  Full details of Cabin B-13 —and even the exact number of plays —remained unknown until the early 1990s when the scripts—23 in total— were discovered in the largest library in the world, the Library of Congress. The discovery was reported in a 1991 article in the much-missed magazine for crime and mystery connoisseurs, The Armchair Detective, and the authors concluded by expressing the hope that, one day, the scripts would be published, a hope that Crippen and Landru has fulfilled, a little over seventy years since the original, all too fleeting appearance of Cabin B-13.

  During the Second World War, John Dickson Carr produced countless radio scripts for the British Broadcasting Corporation, including “Speak of the Devil” (1941), a thrilling mystery serial, and “The Man in the Iron Mask” (1942), sub-titled a historical detective story. There were also many propaganda plays and five series of the immensely popular “horror” program Appointment with Fear, an anglicized version of CBS’s Suspense in which, like Carr’s contributions to the American original, each episode was introduced by the sinister voice of “The Man in Black”. It is therefore not surprising that, on leaving the BBC and returning to America, Carr expressed relief at being freed from having to grind out scripts. Nevertheless, he remained very keen on radio as a medium for mystery and, in the spring of 1948, he reached an agreement with CBS for a new program, which CBS announced in a press release dated 23 June 1948.

  “Cabin B-13 unfolds tales of mystery, romance and adventure as told by Dr. Fabian, ship’s doctor of a world-cruising luxury liner, the Maurevania. The liner sails form Southampton to Cherbourg then down the French coast into the Mediterranean and the Near East. Each Monday night, Dr. Fabian will relate a mysterious adventure experienced at some port of call or nearby inland areas.”

  Two series of Cabin B-13 were broadcast, between 5 July 1948 and 2 January 1949. All of the episodes were directed by Suspense veteran John Dietz with Charles S Monroe acting as editor. Incidental music was provided by Merle Kendrick for the first series and for the second by the prolific radio, film and television composer Alfredo Antonini.

  While Cabin B-13 was no relation to the “original show”, they did have one thing in common, at least initially. The radio play “Cabin B-13” had been set almost entirely on an ocean liner, the steam ship Maurevania, and the ship’s Austrian surgeon, Dr Paul Heinrich plays an important role in unravelling the mystery. The cabin and the SS Maurevania also feature in the two series of Cabin B-13 but the surgeon is now “the sagacious and widely-travelled” Dr John Fabian, played by Arnold Moss in all but four plays. Moss had begun life as a stage actor, and in the film Reign of Terror (1949) he played the duplicitous Joseph Fouché, Napoleon’s Minister of Police—admirers of Carr’s “Carter Dickson” novels will not need reminding that a portrait of Fouché had hung over the white marble fireplace in the office of Sir Henry Merrivale. However, Moss’s immortality is guaranteed not by his many film appearances or his work for CBS radio but by his portrayal of a Shakespearean actor—who happens also to be a former genocidal dictator—in an episode of the evergreen television series Star Trek. The other actor to play Fabian was Alan Hewitt who took over while Moss was fulfilling a film commitment in Hollywood. Like Moss, Hewitt never became a major star but his long career encompassed roles in many of America’s most successful television programs of the 1950s and ‘60s including Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Dr Kildare, Ironside and Perry Mason, in three episodes of which he portrayed the murderer.

  Each broadcast of Cabin B-13 began with a ship’s horn sounding four times, followed by a burst of suitably atmospheric music. Over this, the announcer intoned the series’ title and introduced Fabian, usually speaking from his surgery on the Maurevania’s A deck.

  “From his notebooks of the strange and sinister, Dr. Fabian brings you tonight’s tale … another great tale of mystery and murder written by the world-famous bestseller mystery author John Dickson Carr.”

  This was followed by another musical flourish and then the play itself commenced. Although the substance of the stories in Cabin B-13 had much in common with those Carr had written for Suspense, the format of the program was to be quite different. Instead of Suspense’s “Man in Black”, recounting stories without his having any personal connection to them, Carr intended that Dr. Fabian should narrate stories of which he had direct knowledge. The character of Fabian is possibly named for Robert Fabian, an English police officer who rose to the rank of Detective Superintendent in the Metropolitan Police and was treated as a minor celebrity by the British media in the 1940s and 50s, not least for his heroism in dismantling a terrorist bomb in 1939. After retiring in 1949, Robert Fabian wrote crime fiction and curiously, he was once replaced by Carr for an appearance on the BBC television program Guilty Party in 1957, in which Carr was challenged to solve a mystery, “Murder in Train”, written by the radio scriptwriter Edward J Mason.

  It was also the original intention that the Maurevania should follow a logical course but this was only ever loosely the case. The structure of the first series, more or less, is a plausible route from England around Portugal into the Mediterranean and on to the Middle East but by the second series this device had largely been abandoned and Fabian is for the most part “The Man in Black” in all but name, simply a narrator of strange stories. And what strange stories they are. Murderers that can enter or leave a locked room without leaving a trace and others that can kill from a distance without leaving a mark on their victim. Places where time stands still and others where time does anything but stand still. Unusual weapons. Baffling clues. Pure Carr.

  The coda of the early Cabin B-13 shows was a
brief statement that “these Dr. Fabian stories are all newly written for you by Mr. Carr and have not appeared before on the air or in printed form”. Indeed, all but two of the eleven plays in the first series were original and their plots so effective that Carr would go on to build novels around three of them and use the device of another for a short story. When it came to the second series, CBS would also promote it as comprising “baffling originals”. However, only three of the dozen scripts Carr produced were genuinely new; the rest were re-worked from scripts he had written previously for Suspense or Appointment with Fear.

  Quite simply, the strain of being tied to a regular commitment had become too much, as Carr later explained to his friend Val Gielgud, the BBC’s Director of Features and Drama, who had produced several of Carr’s BBC radio plays and collaborated with him on two stage plays22:

  “What happened was what always happens. I overestimated my stamina in keeping going indefinitely … and I did pretty well, keeping up a new story a week for well over six months (sic), squarely down to the two week ahead deadline. But I was down for the count. This did not particularly please CBS who had a sponsor on the book. There were a number of “conferences”, which means that people tear their hair and bang the table. I pointed out that I was willing to go on, but the story quality would drop, the ratings follow it, and the sponsor follow that.”

  Reluctantly, CBS accepted Carr’s decision and on 2 January 1949, Cabin B-13 concluded with another repeat broadcast. At the end of the show, an announcer stated “Next week at this time, over many of these same CBS stations, you will hear the program, It Pays to Be Ignorant”.

  And, as it disappeared from the airwaves, Cabin B-13 passed into radio legend.

  However, Carr was not finished with the concept behind Cabin B-13. In 1949, he approached his old friend, the BBC’s Val Gielgud, with a proposal that would see him revising some of the scripts for a new series of Appointment with Fear with Dr. Fabian identified as “The Man in Black” from Suspense – in Carr’s words “he’s got to have some kind of background and that may be as good as any”.

  Gielgud was very optimistic and prompted Carr to send some of the Cabin B-13 scripts to his BBC colleague Martyn C. Webster who had produced the war-time Appointment with Fear series. Encouraged, Carr submitted 12 of the first 13 plays, omitting only “The Footprint in the Sky” because a version of this story had already appeared in Appointment with Fear. Disappointingly, Webster was far from impressed. He scathingly dismissed the scripts as “crude and … well below standard” although, on reading them and in light of the producer’s next encounter with Carr, these remarks are hard to understand.

  Five years passed and in December 1954, Carr contacted the BBC and

  again suggested a revival of Appointment with Fear. He had a meeting with Gielgud and they discussed several plot outlines, which—unknown to the BBC man—were those of several Cabin B-13 plays. Two were discounted almost immediately: “Death in the Desert”, which Carr accepted “didn’t fit the pattern”; and a revised version of “No Useless Coffin”, which puzzingly Gielgud felt would be “just a little too much on the gruesome side even for Appointment with Fear”.

  Carr duly produced some draft scripts and called in at the BBC with the intention of leaving them with Gielgud. Unexpectedly, he encountered Martyn

  C. Webster again. The Appointment with Fear producer was, in Carr’s words, “as doubtful as at times I myself have been [and] agreed that it couldn’t be done unless the new shows were knockouts”. Carr accepted Webster’s challenge and finalized new versions of several of the Cabin B-13 plays, which he then submitted along with a few entirely new scripts. The BBC were delighted and, in the summer of 1955, they were broadcast as what would prove to be the final series of Appointment with Fear.

  Nonetheless, Cabin B-13 remained at the back of Carr’s mind and ten years later, in November 1964, his agents submitted to the BBC a proposal for a new program, MV Suspense, along with a brief outline:

  “The actual name of the liner is MV (Motor Vessel) Illyria, probably a Cunarder, very much like the actual Sylvania in which I so often travel. She is on a cruise (round the world?) whose details I must work out with the Cunard line so as not to set her on course which would be illogical or plain crazy … The principal character, who can also act as narrator, shall be the ship’s purser … Let’s call him Adam Benson – a man in his late forties or early fifties: suave, highly educated, with much good nature and a sense of humour … As the liner enters a given port, Benson tells a story which has occurred either in that port or a large city associated with the country

  … Each will be a suspense story, usually a mystery, always with a surprise twist-ending but with every clue given so that the alert listener can solve the mystery for himself … Such a show should be good fun for the listener; assuredly so, it will be so for the writer.”

  On this occasion, the proposal was reviewed by Richard Imison, the Sound Script Editor at the BBC. Disappointingly, he was not taken with the idea and, as Carr had returned to America shortly after providing his agents

  with the outline, the MV Suspense sank before it had even sailed.

  More than 70 years after the series was first broadcast, it is possible to see Cabin B-13 as the final flowering of the truly great days of radio. As well as ingenious and satisfying plots, the plays integrate music in a way that is more filmic than sonic and the atmospheric settings and tightly defined characters are conjured with interesting and unusual sound effects. Monsieur Bo’s fly swatter in “The Nine Black Reasons”. The roulette wheel of the Grand Casino in “The Count of Monte Carlo”. The zitherist of “The Street of the Seven Daggers” and the mournful howling of a jackal in “Death in the Desert”. The shuffleboard game in “Below Suspicion” and the gentle spinning of a globe in “The Most Respectable Murder”. All carefully incorporated to build atmosphere and, of course, suspense. And in some of the plays—it would be unwise to say which—the sound provides a crucial clue—sometimes the clue—to the mystery.

  Now it is almost the time you have been waiting for. Find a comfortable chair; preferably by an open log fire. Pour a modest libation; preferably a Scotch.

  Tune in your radio; preferably to Cabin B-13.

  … and open your eyes.

  Tony Medawar

  Wimbledon, London

  A Razor in Fleet Street

  (Sound: a ship’s whistle) ANNOUNCER: Cabin B-13.

  (Music: in and behind)

  FABIAN: My name is Fabian...ship’s surgeon of the luxury-liner, Maurevania. Tonight, as we lie alongside the docks at the great port of Southampton, the ship is ghostly, deserted. Our passengers on this world cruise have gone to London. And as I sit here in my Cabin, B-Thirteen, I am reminded how the tides and storms of a thousand voyages have wrought nothing more strange, more sinister than man’s desire for adventure in the strange ports and lands we touch. I remember Bill and Brenda Leslie—it was years ago, before the war—and the effect on their characters of the mortal terror that overtook them in London. (Music: fades out)

  FABIAN: London—and Hampden’s Hotel, in Norfolk Street, off the Strand. A quiet little street sloping down to the river, a quiet little hotel: so dingy, with its stuffiness of old carpets and yesterday’s tea-trays, that you’d never suspect how fashionable it is; or how expensive. Can’t you hear the lift whining...

  (Sound: the elevator can be heard from the word “tea-trays”)

  FABIAN: as its two latest arrivals—the husband American, the wife English—go swaying up to a bumpy stop.