What happens
Ted Stevens, a young publisher's employee, finds a photograph in a manuscript that shows a famous 17th-century poisoner, Marie Dobre, who looks exactly like his wife, Marie. Shaken, he confronts her, and their evening is interrupted by his friend Mark DePaul, who asks for help after his uncle Miles dies under suspicious circumstances. Ted agrees to help secretly open the family crypt, but the coffin is found empty. Captain Brennan and the writer Gordon Cross then gather the household and begin piecing together who could have been in the dead man's room that night. This is the Suspense series' 1942 broadcast of John Dixon Carr's novel The Burning Court, first aired on June 17, 1942.
A suburban town near Brisbane, in and around the DePaul family home, a country house with an ancestral crypt.
Characters: Ted Stevens, Marie Stevens, Mark DePaul, Lucy DePaul, Dr. Weldon, Captain Brennan, Gordon Cross, Mrs. Henderson
Listen for: The moment the photograph of the poisoner Marie Dobre is discovered in the manuscript, and the discovery that the coffin in the crypt is empty.
Written from the episode itself; it never gives away the ending. Every recording is remastered for the stream: cleaned of rumble, hiss and mains hum (and the old TV whine where we found it), then levelled in two passes to steady broadcast loudness, so one show is never quieter than the next.