It's No Mystery Why Radio Fans Love Grams
By Tony Fonseca
Grams, Martin Jr. The I Love a Mystery Companion. Churchville, MD: OTR Publishing, 2003. 391 p.
The back cover to Martin Grams, Jr.'s The I Love a Mystery Companion (which is unofficially subtitled The Official Guide) is a great introduction to what Grams, along with fans of 1940s and 1950s radio, calls one of the greatest radio shows of all time. For those of us who are too young to remember radio programs, OTR Publishing provides a brief introduction: "Longing only for action, adventure and excitement wherever it would lead them, three men fought through vampire-infested jungles, ghost towns of wind-swept Nevada, and solved mysteries including werewolves, mad scientists and even fought gruesome flying reptiles and modern-day pirates.... Jack Packard, Doc Long and Reggie York were those three musketeers." Grams' guide contains approximately four hundred pages of information which documents the entire history of the radio program. Grams even includes a brief biography of Carlton E. Morse, the writer/creator, producer, and director of the series.
The I Love a Mystery Companion, which boasts being authorized by the estate of Morse, is wonderful entertainment even for those readers who have no earthly idea what the radio program was about. Even people like me, whose only exposure to radio programming comes from watching reruns of A Christmas Story every year (the Little Orphan Annie scene is priceless), will find something to keep their interest. But for those who fondly remember I Love a Mystery, this book is pure gold. Grams features quotes and stories from cast and crew, which includes some recognizable names like Tony Randall; he also ends the book with as complete an episode guide as anyone has ever put together for any kind of program, in which he includes cast lists and plot descriptions, documentation of the I Love a Mystery novels, a reprint of an unused outline for a ten-chapter serial, USO material reprinted and Morse's correspondence. Not finished there, Grams adds episode guides for Morse's other radio serials, The Witch of Endor and Captain Post: Crime Specialist. He makes the information accessible by including an index of episode titles and people.
The book is not without its flaws, as is sometimes with texts that come from a small, independent presses. The editors did a poor job of proofreading for typographical and layout errors, so the reader's enjoyment of the book is constantly interrupted (especially since these errors are easy to spot). Although most of them are minor, this does not stop the book from becoming irritating to readers who are affected by poor editing, especially people like myself who write and edit for a living. In the case of the few major errors, they can be downright confusing. In one instance, the typesetters and editors have allowed a few paragraphs to be placed out of order. In addition, I couldn't help but find that the book is not well organized, and to a librarian, organization is everything. The general history is chronological, as a history should be; however, Grams intersperses sections like "Continuity Problems" and "Writing the Scripts" throughout. When these occur in the midst of a program synopsis, thereby creating an unintentional "continuity problem," it can throw the reader for a loop.
But I would not suggest to fans of radio and of the I Love a Mystery program to shun Grams companion simply because of the publishing issues. Books like these are too few and far between to begin with, so when they do come along, readers should flock to them to encourage publishers to put out more of them. And Grams' book is a very entertaining and informative text, for it shows both the love and the research abilities of its author. After all, how often do we get a behind-the-scenes look at the making of an iconographic radio, in a book-length text that pays homage to the popular "blood and thunder" type action adventure of the 1940's and 1950's? And to have such a book produced by a man who was the recipient of the 1999 Ray Stanich Award and is the author of works on Hitchcock, The Inner Sanctum series, the CBS Radio Mystery Theater, and various radio phenomenon....
That just makes the The I Love a Mystery Companion a must buy for fans and scholars of radio, horror, and popular culture.