I Love a Mystery
The Joe Hehn Memorial Collection
I Love a Mystery was an adventure serial that was broadcast from 1939 to 1944. It was revived twice, first as a 13-week series I Love Adventure in the summer of 1948, and then again as I Love a Mystery from 1949 to 1952. The program was highly sought by early of the radio program collectors in the 1960s who remembered the series fondly from their childhood. It was highlighted in one of the books that helped establish the hobby of collecting programs, The Great Radio Heroes by fan and collector Jim Harmon (published in 1967, it is in the collection of The Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/greatradioheroes00harm The show was created and written by producer Carlton E. Morse, who was also the force behind the esteemed soap opera One Man’s Family. The basic storyline follows three friends who run the “A-1 Detective Agency” in San Francisco and travel wherever mysteries and adventures take them. The main characters are “Jack, Doc, and Reggie” who met as mercenaries fighting the Japanese in China. Later, they met again in San Francisco, where they decided to form the A-1 Detective Agency. The radio series was popular and made the jump to the big screen. There was a 1945 movie, I Love a Mystery , was produced and was followed in May 1946 by The Devil’s Mask and in July 1946 by The Unknown . In 1973, a television movie starring Ida Lupino and David Hartman was broadcast on NBC. The movie was filmed in 1966 but was held for six years before broadcast. It can be viewed at The Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/ILoveAMystery1973 Early collectors were disappointed by how few of the I Love a Mystery series had survived, and, therefore, it did not gain a big following except for those who remembered it when it was originally broadcast. Only two of the storylines are fully intact, but not as individual episodes. Early collectors transferred the transcription discs to recording tape and then edited the openings, commercials, and closings out to create one long drama that is about 3 hours long. Thing That Cries in the Night is one of those series from 1949 that is in the Hehn collection. The other is Bury Your Dead, Arizona . It is unlikely that the individual intact episodes will ever be available. There are many individual episodes that have survived, but they are all pieces of different storylines. * * * These recordings are part of the Joe Hehn Memorial Collection. Mr. Hehn (1931-2020) was a pioneering collector of radio recordings when the hobby emerged in the 1960s. Digitizing his collection of reel tapes and discs is the effort of a wide range of North American volunteers, and includes assistance of some international collectors. The groups supporting this effort with their funds, time, technology and skills are the Old Time Radio Researchers and a small group of transcription disc preservationists who refer to themselves as the "The Knights of the Turning Table."
This recording is part of the Old Time Radio collection.