What happens
Duke and his partner break into a house to rob it, tying up a man they find in the cellar. The man, Paul, has been left wired to a bomb set to explode at three o'clock. He is the husband of Francie, who has been seeing another man, and he has been waiting in the cellar while the minutes count down. He tries to attract a passerby, a boy, and then his wife, with the clock ticking closer to three. This is an episode of the CBS radio series Suspense, first broadcast on March 10, 1949, starring Van Heflin.
A suburban house with a cellar, on an afternoon in the late 1940s.
Characters: Paul, Francie, Duke, Bobby
Listen for: The steady ticking of the alarm clock as the minutes count down to three o'clock.
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.