Lawrence B. Marcus

Radio’s always harder to research than film. Short an Orson Welles here or a Casey Kasem there, you just don’t get a lot of people who are remembered for their radio appearances. Even there, all most people remember about the Mercury Theatre on the Air is “War of the Worlds,” admittedly quite the highlight but not all the program aired. At that, how many people remember that the actual script to that was written by blacklisted writer Howard Koch? And that’s one of the easiest of the radio shows to research—Lawrence B. Marcus is harder to research, no matter how great the scripts he wrote.

Oh, there’s always his screen credits. An Oscar nomination in 1980—he lost to Alvin Sergeant for Ordinary People, but that was a stacked year. David Lynch could’ve won for The Elephant Man, and that would’ve been okay with me. Better remembered than The Stunt Man today, however, is his adaptation of Witness for the Prosecution. 1957 was if anything a more stacked year, though, so it’s hardly surprising he wasn’t nominated that year. Still, if you want to talk about the movies, those are the movies people want to talk about.

But I want to talk about the radio plays. I’ve a great fondness for them, going back to the days when my mother had tapes of old episodes of The Shadow. (The one I remember most was from the Bret Morrison era.) Some of us read scripts together. And one night, we encountered a Suspense script called “Love, Honor, or Murder.” It’s a dark little story, the tale of a cab driver who finds a wallet in his cab and whose wife tries to persuade him to kill the man whose wallet it is. It was a great script. We weren’t expecting a great script.

Some years before then, he had been the writer for Dark Venture, a series full of mystery stories. The shows tended to hinge on some sort of twist, and that’s about what I could find out about it. With enough digging, I could probably find episodes online somewhere, at least one or two. I don’t know about the scripts, either. The scripts are always a challenge. And not all the ones we can find online have the writers’ credits in them, either.

“Love, Honor, or Murder” would make a hell of a film. I’m not sure if it even made it into one of the many anthology TV shows of the ‘50s, some of which Marcus wrote for. “The Wallet,” from Four Star Playhouse, has some similarity, I suppose. He did 87 episodes of something called One Step Beyond, and it might have made it there. But it looks like he was, for quite a stretch there, a go-to guy for dark stories for the radio and TV. Part of our lost pop culture legacy.