Suspense - Cabin B-13 (#64)
Channel: Old Time Radio Researchers
Date: 2023-03-12

Suspense - 11/09/43, episode 64
Brought to you by the Old Time Radio Researchers, courtesy of The Suspense Project

John Dickson Carr builds this story on an urban legend of “the vanishing lady” or “the vanishing hotel room” that began with a newspaper story in 1897. A mother was sick and she sent her daughter out for an errand, but when she returns there is no such hotel room and no trace of her mother. The story concludes with the authorities saying that her mother died of the plague and they needed to hush things up so there would not be a panicked mass exodus from Paris and the international exposition that was being held there. The concept was used in many stories, radio programs, television programs, and movies; this time the story takes place on a ship, but authors have used the plot on planes, trains, and land locales.

For Cabin B-13, the story begins with newlyweds taking a cruise to pre-war Europe for their honeymoon. They bring their gifts and savings amounting to $10,000 in cash ($170,000 in US$2023!) and will spend three months traveling about Europe. Today, no one would bring that much money with them, and they would use credit cards and electronic funds transfers. Such things were not available at the time in the format we are so used to them now. The money is to be locked in the ship’s safe, but the husband disappears and so does the money.

The bride has been ill. We’re told that she is recovered from “brain fever,” which is an unsophisticated name for meningitis. She is getting her strength back, but this is Carr’s story device to indicate that she is vulnerable and subject to some nefarious deed, building sympathy for the character, and laying the groundwork for others to say she is prone to memory loss and misunderstanding of reality. That nefarious deed is, like the “vanishing lady,” that no one believes that the husband has been with her on the cruise and that the room she thought she had doesn’t exist!

The cast: PHILIP DORN (Dr. Karl Heinrich), MARGO (Anne Brewster), Dennis Hoey (Captain Wainwright), Hans Conried (Marshall), Joe Kearns (Man in Black), Bill Johnstone (Ricky Brewster)

Three recordings of this episode have survived. The network recording is the best of the three.  

The story was adapted to the 1953 feature movie Dangerous Crossing which can be viewed at https://archive.org/details/dangerous-crossing-1953

For more information, visit https://suspenseproject.blogspot.com/2023/03/1943-11-09-cabin-b-13.html