Suspense Sundays (138) The Mystery of Marie Roget

Suspense was a radio series from 1942 to 1962.  I have a fondness for "Old Time Radio" as we call it now, and Suspense is my favorite show.  It sets up weird, dark, scary, or intriguing stories with a plot twist in the end, and all in half an hour.  For Suspense Sundays I'll give a short review of an episode.

"The Mystery of Marie Roget"

Air date: February 7, 1960
Starring Jackson Beck

>>Episodes here<<

Edgar Allan Poe's detective C. Auguste Dupin investigates the death of Marie Roget - a young girl found dead in the Seine River.  Dupin unravels the mystery using a clear set of clever deductions, which is revealed to the listener in a brilliant sum-up in the end.

This episode mentions the real life mystery of the death of Mary Roger which occurred in New York City and inspired Poe to write the original story.  This Suspense episode, rather grandly, gives Poe a ton of credit by saying Poe figured out the mystery perfectly which was proved by a confession given for the real life case later.  Which I found very interesting, so I looked it up and have found that to not be the case.  The real life murder mystery has never been conclusively solved.  How terrible that in this time there was no internet to fact check these people!  I hope the Suspense writers were not just blatantly lying so they can make the episode sound better.  They did sort of link up the real life mystery with Poe's version in this episode, by having an epilogue scene where we "hear" the murderer being brought to justice.  That approach to adapting this story really was a terrible idea, but Poe's story itself is really clever and intriguing - I was very much impressed by how Dupin solved the mystery.