Friday, June 07, 2013

Forgotten Magazines -- The Mysterious Traveler, Volume 1, Number 1, November 1951

I posted a while back about Suspense, a magazine connected to the radio show of the same name.  Here's a similar magazine, also connected to a radio show. This one was edited by Robert Arthur, who probably also wrote the brief editorial. 

As you can see from the scan, the idea was to present "Great stories of Mystery, Detection, and Suspense," on in other words, mostly reprints. There's even one story attributed to The Mysterious Traveler himself, but it's also a reprint of a story credited to Albert Fell. Is Fell Robert Arthur?  Maybe. He was also one of the writers and directors of the radio show, which was considerably more successful than the magazine.  The other author and director was David P. Kogan, listed as the publisher on the contents page of the magazine. The radio show had nearly 400 episodes, while the magazine ran for only five issues.  The radio show opened with the sound of a locomotive, and then the Mysterious Traveler intoned the opening.  Like many anthology shows, the stories were often dark and twisted noir tales that didn't end well.

Here's a listing of the contents of the magazine.

And here's a listing of some of the radio stations that carried the show.

7 comments:

Tom Johnson said...

Yeah, great magazine. I enjoyed the radio show too. The local radio station gave me a closet full of CDs with OTR shows, each one an hour (two shows each), but I haven't been able to catalog the things yet. Lots of Shadow, Johnny Dollar, Gunsmoke, etc., so I'm pretty sure The Mysterious Traveler is in there somewhere.

George said...

Wow! I've never seen MYSTERIOUS TRAVELER. Your collection is vast!

Jerry House said...

Yep. "Fell," Arthur, and "The Mysterious Traveler" were all the same person -- as was "John West."

Todd Mason said...

Arthur, among his other "rescues," dug Howard Rigsby's "Dead Man's Story" out of a 1938 back-issue of ARGOSY (where it was offered as "I'll Be Glad When You're Dead") and reprinted it here and in one of the ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS: volumes later on...

Richard Moore said...

Another radio program Robert Arthur created was "Murder by Experts" which featured on-air appearances by writers such as John Dickson Carr and Brett Halliday.

Arthur was also ghost editor of many of the Alfred Hitchcock anthologies.

His daughter Elizabeth Arthur is a fine writer of such novels as BINDING SPELL and BEYOND THE MOUNTAIN and the memoirs ISLAND SOLITUDE and LOOKING FOR THE KLONDIKE STONE.

Richard Moore said...

Here is a link to a nice article from Radio Spirits on Arthur and Kogan and the radio programs they created: http://www.radiospirits.com/email/murder_by_experts_060413.asp?pcode=P06NC001&source=rsnews060413&utm_campaign=060413&utm_source=rsnews&utm_medium=email

Unknown said...

Thanks, Richard.