I Love a Mystery
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I Love A Mystery was an old-time radio program that ran from January, 1939 to December, 1944 on NBC. Following its cancellation, the show was revived, and ran on the Mutual Broadcasting System from 1949 to 1952. I Love a Mystery was a serial drama with one 15-minute episode airing each weekday. For a time the show switched to the more conventional schedule of one half-hour broadcast each week but eventually returned to the five programs a week model. Valse Triste by Jean Sibelius was the program's theme music.
The premise of the show was three adventurous friends who ran a detective agency. Jack Packard, Doc Long and Reggie York met as mercenary soldiers fighting the Japanese in China. Later, they met again in San Francisco, where they decided to form the A-1 Detective Agency. Their motto was "No job too tough, no adventure too baffling."
The agency served as a plot device to involve the three friends in a wide variety of stories. These straddled the genres of mystery, adventure and supernatural horror, and their adventures often took the trio to exotic locales.
Jack, the group leader, is a tough charismatic man, usually the first to figure solutions to the mysteries. Jack has more of an edge than the typical radio hero of the period. He distrusts the attractive women who always seem to show up, and he professes to dislike women in general. The series' writer claimed that Jack's problems with women had to do with his youth. He had gotten a girl pregnant and had to leave his home town in shame. This was only a back story detail and was never made explicit on the show. Doc and Reggie are slightly less edgy characters. The Texas-born Doc is a hard-fighting, boastful, high-spirited character who provides comic relief. Reggie, an Englishman noted for his great strength, competes with Doc in trying to romance the women.
The series was distinguished by the writing of Carlton E. Morse, considered one of the best writers in radio. Morse took delight in creating vividly imagined settings for the show and elaborate, often bizarre plots. In a medium whose heroes tended to be serious and strait-laced, he created three who were wonderfully reckless and exuberant. Jack, Doc and Reggie were more interested in the thrill of adventure than in righting wrongs. When they collected a fee, their only goal was to spend it as quickly as possible.
There were several film adaptations of I Love a Mystery by Morse, but none had the success of the radio series. Surviving recordings of the show are rare. Over the years, Jack was played by Michael Raffetto, Russell Thorson, Jay Novello and John McIntire. Doc was played by Barton Yarborough and Jim Boles. Reggie was portrayed by Walter Paterson and Tony Randall.
