The Whistler 1946-08-19 "Delivery Guaranteed" (listen here)
The basic setup: A man kills his wife, hides her body in a trunk, and calls the express company to ship the trunk to where he can dispose of the body. Things keep going wrong. Elliott Lewis gives an entertaining performance as a character who spends much of the episode on the brink of hysterics!
Produced by George W. Allen, written by Robert Libbott and Frank C. Burt
Whistler: Bill Forman
Announcer: Marvin Miller
Cast (credited): Elliott Lewis, Lurene Tuttle
Cast (ear): Charles Calvert as the first express man
The story: Phillip Linden is looking forward to two weeks in the high Sierras with his wife Cathy, hoping the trip will repair their failing romance. He arrives home to find Cathy packing a large old wardroom trunk: she's not going with him, she's going to Reno for a divorce. He tries to stop her from leaving, and in the quarrel he impulsively strangles her to death.
Philip hides Cathy's body in her own trunk and calls the express company to have it shipped to the mountain cabin, figuring he can drop the body off a cliff and tell everyone she disappeared while hiking. After the express men leave with the trunk, a policeman shows up! It's their next-door neighbor Charlie, who's excited about his new job as a policeman and wanted to say goodbye to Philip and Cathy before their trip. Phillip lies and fends him off, and as Charlie leaves, the express men come back with the trunk, saying it's not packed right and he'll have to repack it.
Phillip realizes the key is inside the trunk. As he prepares to force the lock, Charlie comes back for something he forgot. Charlie insists on helping Phillip repack the trunk. He gets it open, and it's the wrong trunk. Phillip phones the express company about the mixup, and the clerk says they do have his trunk, but the label has come off and he'll have to verify the contents. They'll just open it up.... Phillip hangs up the phone and tells Charlie all.
The twist: Back at the express company, the man has found the shipping label on the bottom of the trunk and they don't need to open it after all. What to do now? Ship it to the address on the label. That's their motto: delivery guaranteed!
Miscellaneous notes: Elliott Lewis plays a man who murders his wife Cathy. Maybe it's for the best that Cathy Lewis didn't play the female lead this week!
Another version: Libbott and Burt reused this story for the fifteen-minute program The Unexpected, 1948-11-07 "Handle With Care." That episode is much weaker than the Whistler episode, and listening to both is an interesting study in pacing.
For "Handle With Care," the story is compressed so that there are fewer distinct events between the murder and the confession, which means we don't get the mounting tension that comes from things going wrong over and over again. We also lose a lot of dialogue that wasn't strictly essential to the plot, but that helped build a sense of impatience--such as Phillip looking up and dialing the number for the express company, and a lot of his forced casual conversation with Charlie.
There's also less time to hear how Philip reacts emotionally to the murder and subsequent events, and less time to develop the relationship between him and Cathy in the first scene--for instance, she just says she never loved him, rather than explaining that "a woman will say a lot of things when she's twenty-five and starting to wonder if she's ever going to get a husband." And while it's true Barry Sullivan had less to work with, his performance sounds downright sedate compared to Elliott Lewis's--which in itself makes the episode less interesting, since some of the best suspense in "Delivery Guaranteed" comes from the way Phillip sounds like he's about to fall apart and give himself away any second.
"Delivery Guaranteed" was the title of the Chicago Whistler broadcasts of 1946-08-18 and 1946-10-27; neither program is known to survive.
Additional listening: See also 1946-08-21 "The Broken Chain" for another Whistler episode by Robert Libbott and Frank C. Burt in which Elliott Lewis kills his wife and then loses his grip... and which was also reused for an episode of The Unexpected with Barry Sullivan (1947-07-11 "Mercy Killing").
Other Whistler episodes involving a body in a trunk:
- 1946-02-04 "Panic" by Harold Swanton (also featuring Elliott Lewis and Lurene Tuttle)
- 1949-04-03 "The Rawhide Coffin" by Robert Stephen Brode
- 1951-03-18 "The Jackson Street Affair" by Adrian Gendot
- 1954-07-18 "Mr. Pettibone's Last Journey" (no author credit on surviving recording)
And, for an unrelated story of a series of mishaps involving a wife in a trunk, see Suspense 1956-02-07 "Variations on a Theme" by Antony Ellis, which plays the subject for laughs!
