Miraculous Mysteries by Martin Edwards

Author:Martin Edwards
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press, Inc.
Published: 2017-01-16T05:00:00+00:00

The Broadcast Murder

Grenville Robbins

Listening to the radio gained rapidly in popularity during the 1920s, and crime writers, as usual, soon identified the potential of a pleasingly topical new setting for their mysteries. Walter S. Masterman duly published 2LO in 1928—the title refers to a station which began broadcasting from Marconi House in 1922, and was transferred to the newly created British Broadcasting Company the following year. Six years after Masterman’s book appeared, two BBC insiders, Val Gielgud and Eric Maschwitz, collaborated on Death at Broadcasting House, in which a member of the cast of a radio play is strangled in a recording studio.

Grenville Robbins wrote ‘The Broadcast Murder’ in 1928, and it subsequently appeared in an anthology, Best Detective Stories of the Year: 1929, alongside tales from writers whose reputations would last, such as Agatha Christie, G.K. Chesterton, and Anthony Berkeley, as well as others whose fame was fleeting. Grenville Robbins was a journalist who worked for The Times, and wrote a handful of short stories, as well as song lyrics. He did not pursue a career as a crime writer, and appears to have published no novels, but at least he achieved the feat of publishing the first locked-room mystery set in the world of radio.

***

The Oxford voice from the wireless loud speaker, to which I had been listening, suddenly stopped in the middle of a word. There was silence for a second, and then a terrifying yell rang through the room. It came from the loud speaker. I jumped up and gaped at it in frozen astonishment.

‘Help!’ gasped the voice. ‘The lights have gone out. Someone’s trying to strangle me. I—’

There was another terrible shriek, an agonising gurgle, and then all was silence. There seemed no doubt whatever that the announcer, whoever he was, was either unconscious or dead. And the whole thing had not taken more than a second. He had been strangled, alone, and with no one to save him, while hundreds of thousands of people, who were unable to help him, had been listening to every sound.

While I was still gaping at the loud speaker, I heard the sound of a scuffle come from it. Then there was a crash, as though the microphone had been upset, and then there was the sound of someone coming into the room. Help had come at last and, from the ominous silence, it had come too late. Then the machine went ‘dead,’ and I knew that the apparatus had been cut off.

I turned off my set almost automatically.

And that was how I came to be in at the beginning of the great ‘Wireless Murder.’ ‘Great,’ not because the crime and its unravelling were so out of the ordinary, but because the circumstances were so exceptional.

It was certainly the first time that so many people had been present at the beginning of a crime of this kind. Thousands and thousands of people knew about it at the very moment of its being done. Thousands knew about it before even the newspapers could tell them.

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