Murder in the Air

THE BROADCAST MURDERS--Fred Smith --Day ($2).

When Danny McGlone, songwriter and radio program expert, got the job of putting on the Monarch Radio hour in Manhattan he was glad & proud. The first program went off as nicely as you please. Later that night his announcer and his star singer were murdered. In the crowded hours that followed, Danny was in at several more deaths, just missed his own more than once; but kept his head, his appointments and his job, plumbed the racket that was causing the trouble, rounded up the crooks and married the girl.

These alarums and excursions Author Smith relates in a style that owes something (but not too much) to hair-raising Dashiell Hammett (The Glass Key; TIME, April 27). Well above the average of detective story fiction, The Broadcast Murders reads as if its author was an old hand at the game, though it is his first attempt. But Fred Smith is an old hand at another game: radio. Having served his apprenticeship as a lumberjack in California, a schoolteacher in Indiana, a sailor on the north Atlantic, a government employe in Spain, an importer in Brussels, he became director of WLW, Cincinnati, in 1922; next year wrote and produced the first radio drama. With TIME since 1928 as manager of its radio department, he achieved national recognition among radio men as director of the March of Time program.

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