Al;fred itchcock's A Baker's Dozen of Suspense Stories, Part 1

 

This 1963 paperback is a repint of the 1949 edition. It's a tgood collexction of stories which could be called suspense (as in the title), mystery, The Weird, crime story, or a number of other things. In today's post, we'll touch on two of the authors included. 

Everyone knows Agatha Christie's work, but many have never read the gem of a story included in this Hitchcock anthology. The radio program "Selected Shorts" offers an audio version:

The author Ellis St. Joseph (below), so much less famous than Agatha Christie, was born in 1911 and died in 1993.  

 

St. Joseph wrote for a lot of television programs -- "The Outer Limits," "The Time Tunnel," and even "Batman," but he'd done scripts for a major Hollywood studio in the 1940s. (Here's his  IMDb listing.) And before that, he wrote stories for popular magazines. Two were notable to be, if not actually included, mentioned in the anthology The Best American Short Stories orf the Century:

The Hitchcock paperback includees St. Joseph's tale "Leviathan," but in this blog post we'll dip into St. Joseph's most-famous short story, "A Passage To Bali." This spooky one appeared in the critically-acclaimed Story magazine, and then was adapted into a play, two different radio programs, and a television episode. Today we have two radio versions: Orson Welles narrated "A Passage to Bali" for the Mercury Theater of the Air, and then the story became a script for the popular radio thriller series "Escape."  Enjoy!

"A Passage to Bali" on "Mercury Theater of the Air":

"A Passage to Bali" on old-time radio's "Escape":