Suspense - Forecast The Lodger (audition)

(July 21, 1940)
CBS Presented The Lodger as its audition program of the hugely successful radio series Suspense. Mr Alfred Hitchcock brilliant English director of such outstanding motion pictures as The Thirty-Nine Steps, Rebbeca and Foreign Correspondent was eager to create a very special type of radio drama, the suspense stories. As narrator and star of his production he thought at once of the distinguished actor with whom he had been associated in countless British film successes, Herbert Marshall. Mr Marshall suggested that they dramatized a certain favorite story of his and that story happened to be the very one Mr Hitchcok had in mind, Marie Belloc-Lowndes classic in chills, The Lodger. The Lodger is a work of fiction, which springs from recorded fact a story that begins in the year 1888 in London, a London terrorised by the fifth in a succession of recent murders. It is believed that these deeds were the works of one person, a tall gaunt figure in a black Inverness cape carrying a small narrow bag. The mysterious killer known as the Avenger preyed on young attractive blond haired women just like Daisy the daughter of the Buntings, the Buntings who had taken in a gentleman lodger…