right|thumb|250px|Front cover of the November 1951 issue

The Mysterious Traveler was an American media franchise created by Robert Arthur and David Kogan. All versions of the franchise focused on suspense and crime fiction, with occasional elements of horror or science fiction.

Magazine

right|thumb|250px|[[Luis van Rooten on The Mysterious Traveler]]

Grace Publishing's 1951–52 Mysterious Traveler digest-sized magazine ran for five issues with cover paintings by famed pulp illustrator Norman Saunders. The publisher was David Kogan, and managing editor Robert Arthur also contributed many stories.

Comic books<!--'Tales of the Mysterious Traveler' redirects here-->

Trans-World Publications' one-shot Mysterious Traveler Comics #1 (Nov. 1948) had a direct tie-in with the radio series, including the story "Five Miles Down", taken directly from an episode scripted for the radio program. Only a single issue was published.

Charlton Comics published a separate Tales of the Mysterious Traveler<!--boldface per WP:R#PLA--> comic book for 13 issues from 1956 to 1959, followed by two more issues in 1985 shortly before the company went under. Steve Ditko illustrated many stories in this title. Stories intended for future issues saw print in Renegade Press's Murder. In 1990, Eclipse Comics published a large-format paperback collecting 19 Ditko stories from the Charlton title. Some of those stories were reprinted in Pure Imagination's Steve Ditko Reader.

Short story and biography

Anthony Boucher's 1950 detective story anthology, Four-and-Twenty-Bloodhounds, paired each story with a brief biography of the detective. In the case of "The Big Money" by Robert Arthur, Boucher apologized to the reader:

:The most disquieting moment in editing this anthology came when I received the biographical questionnaire filled in by the Mysterious Traveler. In answer to the first blank, born __, he had simply inserted: ?. And the succeeding answers were equally disconcerting and not in all cases publishable—though I have forwarded a copy to Miskatonic University for its files. Suffice it that no one—not even his nominal creators, Robert Arthur and David Kogan—knows whether the Traveler is detective, criminal or neither. He is only a sly, insinuating, knowing voice heard weekly over MBS, and here makes his first appearance anywhere in print.

Influence

Writer Harlan Ellison, in a 1981 column, wrote that he stumbled across a particular episode of Quiet, Please in his childhood. He remembers the title of that episode as "Five Miles Down." Ellison writes, "I heard something I have never forgotten... What I heard that Sunday afternoon, so long ago, that has never left my thoughts for even one week, through all those years, was this:

:"There is a place just five miles from where you now stand that no human eye has even seen. It is...five miles down!"

Ellison goes on to relate the plot (at least as he remembers it after several decades, admitting that time might have altered some of the details), and asks, "[H]ow many stories you heard or saw or read fifteen years ago, ten years ago, even five years ago...do you remember that clearly today? And I heard 'Five Miles Down' at least forty years ago. And it's still with me."

Ellison's recollection was inaccurate: he relates the story being broadcast "early in the Forties" on Quiet, Please when it was in fact a late-1940s episode of The Mysterious Traveler.

In 2004, Ellison took part in a recreation of the "Five Miles Down" script from The Mysterious Traveler (by Robert Arthur and David Kogan) at a convention of the Society to Preserve and Encourage Radio Drama, Variety and Comedy. He "acted and helped direct the show" and recalled hearing the episode when he was growing up.

See also

  • List of Charlton Comics publications
  • The Whistler

References

Listen to

  • The Mysterious Traveler 70 single episodes – OTRR official – stream and download
  • OTR Network Library: The Mysterious Traveler (65 1938–52 episodes) RealPlayer required. The first of the 66 episodes available is actually from The Mercury Theatre on the Air, not the Mysterious Traveler
  • The Mysterious Traveler radio shows (seven 1944–1951 episodes)
  • The Mysterious Traveler (77 episodes on the Internet Archive)
  • Jerry Haendiges Vintage Radio Logs: The Mysterious Traveler
  • OTR Plot Spot: Mysterious Traveler – radio show plot summaries and reviews.