Many thanks to Lori, Bob, Alan K, Christopher, Walter C and Jim D for their contribution to this page.

The Three Muskateers, By Alexandre Dumas. The story begins in 1625. The main character, d'Artagnan, born into a noble family of Gascony, leaves home for Paris to fulfill his greatest dream: becoming a Musketeer of the Guard. He suffers misadventure and is challenged to a duel by each of three musketeers (Athos, Aramis and Porthos). Attacked by the Cardinal's guards, the four unite and escape.

The Count of Monte Cristo. By Alexandre Dumas. Dashing young sailor Edmond Dantes is a guileless and honest man, whose peaceful life and plans to marry the beautiful Mercedes are abruptly shattered... Dashing young sailor Edmond Dantes is a guileless and honest man, whose peaceful life and plans to marry the beautiful Mercedes are abruptly shattered when his best friend Fernand, who wants Mercedes for himself, deceives him. Set up to be unlawfully sentenced to the infamous island prison of Chateau D'If, Edmond is trapped in a nightmare that lasts for thirteen years.

Radio Stories by Cornell Woolrich. Cornell Woolrich was a pulp writer and novelist whose work is noted for its suspense, emotionalism, and vivid writing. He started out as a mainstream writer in the 1920's, whose work was in the tradition of F. Scott Fitzgerald. When the Depression caused him to lose his markets, he turned to the pulp magazines to survive. He also changed his style to one of dark, brooding suspense. From 1934-1946 Woolrich was an immensely prolific pulp writer, turning out scores of pieces, both long and short, for the pulps. Starting in 1940, he also wrote over a dozen suspense novels in the 1940's. Woolrich's work was adapted into numerous motion pictures, the best being Robert Siodmak's Phantom Lady (1944) and Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954).

Woolrich's fiction is at the center of what has come to be known as the noir style. Noir, pronounced 'nwahr', is the French word for black. In noir works, the protagonist is menaced by sinister, powerful forces from the world around him. He has to struggle to survive in a sinister labyrinth of a universe that he can barely understand or control. Noir was an important style in the 1940's and 1950's, both in prose works such as Woolrich's, and in Hollywood films. The movie version of the style, known as Film Noir, runs through hundreds of film thrillers of the era, including many of the best films directed by Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Robert Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer, Orson Welles, Joseph H. Lewis, Gerd Oswald, and Robert Aldrich. Noir also influenced comic books, including the science fiction comics scripted by Joe Samachson and the King Faraday stories of Robert Kanigher and Carmine Infantino.
Woolrich had a remarkable prose style. He especially excelled at description. For a good example, see the small story, almost a fragment, known as "Funeral". This is one of Woolrich's best pieces of writing, exemplifying his descriptive gifts. It describes that cliché of gangster movies, the shoot out with police, with unforgettable literary brilliance.

Thanks to Bob for this extract. Full details of plays are available.

After Dinner Story 
Angel Face
Black Path Of Fear
Deadline At Dawn
Dime-a-Dance
Finger of Doom
I Wont Take A Minute
Last Night
Library Book
Momentum Suspense
Night Has A Thousand Eyes
Papa Benjamin Escape
Post Mortem
The Lie
The Night Reveals Suspense
Three O'Clock
White Rose Murders

The Pitch. By Jeremy Front. Howard wrote some of the great vintage sitcoms but his ideas have fallen out of favour. An offer of a new commission seems too good to be true. Perhaps it is.

Sappho's Orchard. By by Natalia Power.When Kate realises her ambition to study classics at Cambridge, she finds her life in emotional turmoil as she is torn between two very different people.

The Strange Petitioner. By Joe Dunlop. A dramatisation of the life of Robert K Andrews, who sat in the House of Commons every day from 1963. He was not an MP, nor was he a Lord; his seat was in the central lobby and by night he lived on the streets of London, which is where he died just before christmas 1997.

Fair Game. By by Dave Simpsona. A psychological thriller. Tom is infatuated with his employee Sue and starts to subject her to sexual harassment.But his whole world starts to tumble around him as he becomes involved in murder and blackmail.

Plain Murder. By C S Forester, dramatised by Robin Brooks. Three men working in an advertising agency are caught taking bribes by their office manager.To evade prosecution, the ringleader resorts to murder, drawing his colleagues into a vortex of violence. With Clive Merrison, Nicholas Woodeson and Geoffrey Whitehead.

Underground. By Tom Holland. A contemporary drama set in the tunnels under London.

A Badger. By Owl-light by Edward Boyd. 'I'll go hunt the badger by owl-light; 'tis a deed of darkness...'.

A Craving For Gold. By John Naismith. Eddie Manson returns to London from Australia and is soon brought into the race to find the loot from a big heist that his father had been involved in. Martin Jarvis as a hard-boiled detective with a Strine accent.

A Far Cry From Brazil. By Robert East. A lighthearted pen portrait of toiling Macclesborough FC down at the rock bottom of the football league.  

Best Plays was another of the prestigious sustaining productions of the NBC Presents family of presentations from the National Broadcasting Company which, over the years, had presented numerous consistently rich, high-production value series' of NBC-produced and financed dramatic productions. Announced almost six weeks previously, NBC decided to wait until the summer of 1952 to introduce the series as a summer replacement for their Theatre Guild series. And indeed, the series was so well received as a summer series that NBC extended the franchise for another full year season.

Where this production differed was in presenting 20th Century, award winning Stage Plays exclusively. The common demoninator for the selections were, for the most part, their previous identification by the New York Drama Critics' Circle as a 'Best Play' of the season. With the exception of Alexandre Dumas and William Shakespeare, the series showcased most of the finest contemporary authors of the modern era--many of them Pulitzer prize winning plays.

http://www.digitaldeliftp.com/DigitalDeliToo/dd2jb-Best-Plays.html

Winterset John
On Borrowed Time
Angel Street
The Hasty Heart
Arsenic And Old Lace
Outward Bound
The Philadelphia Story
Victoria Regina
Elizabeth The Queen
The Mad Woman Of Chaillot
Rope
Skylark
Camille
Mice And Men
St Helena
The Amazing Dr Clitterhouse
Macbeth
The Rose Tattoo
The Petrified Forest

Mortmain dramatised. By Rachel Wilmshurst and produced by Martin Jenkins. A honeymoon couple are trapped in a bizarre nightmare world of possession

Night Train to Dover. Old Time Radio Thriller. On a lonely road a strange man is picked up after having 'car troubles' by a driver destined for Dover and a weekend break to France.

O`Rourke's First Case. By  Vincent Mcinerney. Scouser John O'Rourke is redundant at 40. He uses his enterprise grant to become a private detective. He soon gets a case that's more than he can handle. 

The Artillery Terrace Hot Five Stomp Again. By  David Luck. Arthur Scoley wants to bring a happy memory to his not well Grandad. He would love to here the Hot Five play one more time, but getting them back together after such a long time, is both difficult and amusing.

The Lonely Margins. By  Ted Allebury. To live in the shadowland of espionage , where the only certainties are death and deceit is to live on the lonely margins. - the French Resistence brought James Harmer and Jane Harmer together, The Gestapo broke them apart.

The Psychedelic Spy. By Andrew Rissik. "This five-part thriller has the plot of a Bond movie and the ambience of a Chandler novel and, after just one episode, the stamp of a classic. Rissik's script is studded with brilliant one-liners and doomy humour, while producer Glyn Dearman captures the buzz of the 'sixties with hits from the period, and brings out cracking performances from James Aubrey as the down-at-heel hero, former assassin, Billy Hindle, and Gerald Harper as his oleaginous puppet-master, Sir Richard Snark." (Quentin Curtis, The Independent On Sunday)