Death of a Gangster

New Zealand Listener, Volume 41, Issue 1051, 16 October 1959, Page 16

Death of a Gangster

HE Voice of America play, The Rat on Lincoln Avenue (1YA) was a magnificent piece of radio. Produced by the University of North Carolina with the author, John Ehle, in the cast, it used the form of a crime thriller to put across some pungent social propaganda. For the occasion was that Chicago night in 1934 when the vicious gangster, John Dillinger, was shot down by FBI men as he left a cinema-a fact only gradually revealed during the play-and the drama flashed back and forth between terrified citizens watching what seemed a massing of hoodlums, and waiting detectives, their nerves at full stretch. With its laconic, colloquial, meaning-packed sentences and cross-cutting rhythms like those of a Hitchcock thriller, the play forcibly made points implicit in so many good American movies-the glamour of crime that leads to the over-publicising of the criminal, the average man’s instinctive rebellion against order which complicates the policeman’s job, the temptation of the police to adopt the -methods of their enemies, and the dependence of the rule of law upon the co-operation of the people. Jam-packed with ideas, The Rat on Lincoln Avenue was a beautiful example of radio writing, which dramatised and not merely stated its moral. Golden Wedding NN, early in 1956, the NZBS broadcast Barbara Jefford’s reading of Alan Mulgan’s Golden Wedding, I commented on this page that, for all her professional skill, I felt that the work needed "a male reader, and a New Zealander at that, able to respond more spontaneously to the local references and atmosphere." From Book Shop last week,

I learnt that this pious wish has been fulfilled: With the quite legitimate excuse that book shops sell records these days, Arnold Wall reviewed the new commercial recording of the poem, and played us an extract from it. I can’t imagine a better reader for this work than William Austin, who fulfills both my conditions, and several other more exacting ones as well. He catches the warm, nostalgic quality of the poem admirably, and yet allows the piece to project its own charm without any attempt to impose a "personality" on it, as he did with the very different long poem A. R. D. Fairburn’s To a Friend in the Wilderness, which I remémber as one of the finest radio readings I have ever heard. It is: by such unexpected bonuses that Arnold Wall keeps Book Shop from sinking into the doldrums. Many listeners will share his pleasure that Golden Wedding is available in this excellent rendering. I hope the NZBS will make an opportunity to broadcast the entire recording very soon.

J. C.

R.