The overall tone of The Whistler over its thirteen year run focused on crime and the undoing of those involved in such heinous acts. Normally average citizens were often drawn to commit their crimes by one poor decision, circumstances, or even on occasion, happenstance. The Whistler’s sardonic comments, dark humor, and illicit irony kept such stories from becoming maudlin and made them great thrillers instead.

 

The Whistler was a program built around an everyman concept. As The Whistler related the descent into murder and lawlessness each week, it was not on lost on the listeners that most of the protagonists of the shows were, in essence, just like them. This gave The Whistler a level of relativity to its audience that most other shows simply could not manage. The simple fact that most listeners could, in even some little way, identify with the criminals in the program endeared many to The Whistler in a unique way.

 

The characters in the stories told on The Whistler were not always bad people, but more likely just average citizens, like the show’s listeners. Regardless, the usual outcome for the protagonists was hardly ever positive. There were episodes, however, that The Whistler’s final words did not necessarily spell out death and gloom for those involved. A few shows actually ended on, if not on a happy note, at least with the possibility of hope for those involved. This actually makes The Whistler, as a whole, a show as focused on humanity itself as it is on the darker side of things.

 

Thrill to chilling tales of crime told only as The Whistler can in this remarkable Radio Archives collection. Restored to sparkling digital quality in The Whistler, Volume 12, these twelve original CBS broadcasts, were aired from July 8, 1946 to November 11, 1946.