No Ghost Required

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 493, 3 December 1948, Page 10

No Ghost Required

‘THE first episode of a new serial from 4ZB usually finds me listening, in the hope that some day I will hear something so enthralling that I won’t be able to wait till next week for the following instalment. So far I haven’t come across anything as gripping as all that, and Unto All Men was no excep‘tion to the general rule; being well-pro-duced, competently acted, and quite interesting enough if there were no alternative programme of, say, good music from elsewhere to claim my attention. But it was decidedly not the sort of thing I should want to follow’up with unfailing regularity, as I might do with a Ngaio Marsh thriller or a series of Brains Trust sessions. The Coming of Avery Mann was the first episode, and as readers may guess from the corruption of "Everyman," the central character is once again one of those abstractions which appear so frequently nowadays on the radio. Avery Mann has been seen before, of course, in different guises (The Passing of the Third Floor Back, Sorrows of Satan) but his exact identity is wisely left obscured in a mist of vague phrases. He drifts in and out of the story, solving everyone’s difficultieS with the skill of a trained psychiatrist, and revealing his supernatural origin briefly before departing; to be ready, we presume, for next week’s episode. In the first story (each is complete in itself) we heard a family’s hostilities , being disentangled with cheerful ability-but surely any enlightened human brain could have coped as easily with these difficulties. That physical infirmity warps the mind, that

a mother loves the weakling of the family, that youth will rebel against age -in the words of Horatio, "There needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave, to tell us this."