It is late.
The house has gone quiet. There is one lamp still burning somewhere. Perhaps a book is open. Perhaps there is work that should have been finished two hours ago. Perhaps someone is driving through a dark stretch of interstate with another hundred miles before the next motel.
Or perhaps somebody simply cannot sleep.
A voice comes through the radio.
Nero Wolfe is complaining about being disturbed.
Archie Goodwin is explaining, with considerable satisfaction, precisely how Wolfe has been disturbed.
A body has turned up somewhere it ought not to be.
The mystery begins.
Eventually it ends.
But the radio doesn’t.
Another voice appears. Another room. Another crime. Another set of footsteps in another dark street.
And then another.
All night long.
For several years, that was one of the small traditions of Chesterton Radio.
Before The Open Door became our continuous stream, we used to build nights of radio.
We would choose something worth listening to, gather enough of it to last until morning, turn on the stream—and leave the light on.
Mysteries were especially suited to the idea. So were great actors, detectives, authors, historical events, holidays and the occasional subject that was simply too peculiar to resist.
The resulting live broadcasts often lasted six, eight, ten or eleven hours. When the night was over, many remained on YouTube as enormous archived programs.
Eventually there were roughly 148 Chesterton Radio programs with the words “All Night Long” in the title.
Looking through them now feels a little like opening a forgotten cupboard at the station.
There are some remarkably good things in there.
So tonight, metaphorically at least, let’s turn the light back on.
Nero Wolfe Gets the First Night
There really isn’t anyone else who could begin this.
Nero Wolfe – All Night Long runs nearly eight hours.
More than 107,000 people have watched or listened to the archived broadcast.
But the number is less interesting than the fact that Wolfe is almost absurdly well suited to the format.
Wolfe himself does not particularly want to go anywhere.
He has his brownstone. He has Fritz. He has his orchids. He has his beer. He has Archie Goodwin to go out into New York and encounter all the disagreeable people who insist upon murdering one another.
And Archie tells us about it.
That makes Wolfe unusually comfortable company for a long evening.
An individual mystery has a beginning and an end. But spend seven or eight hours with Wolfe and Archie and something else happens. The brownstone itself becomes familiar. The office becomes a place. Wolfe’s habits become part of the rhythm.
You aren’t simply hearing another detective story.
You’re visiting.
Nero Wolfe – All Night Long on YouTube
Suppose We Invite Sherlock Holmes Too
Once you’ve decided that Nero Wolfe deserves an entire evening, a certain kind of radio logic takes over.
Why not invite Sherlock Holmes?
Sherlock Holmes & Nero Wolfe – All Night Long put two of the great detectives into the same evening—not together in some invented crossover, but side by side on the radio.
It was part of the fun of these nights.
There was no particular requirement that an All Night Long broadcast resemble a carefully footnoted anthology. It could instead answer the much more important question:
What would be fun to listen to tonight?
Holmes and Wolfe?
Yes.
That sounds like a very good night.
Sherlock Holmes & Nero Wolfe – All Night Long on YouTube
A Man Walking Through Chicago at Night
Then there is Night Beat.
If any radio program was meant to be heard after midnight, this may be it.
Frank Lovejoy plays Randy Stone, a newspaperman working the night beat in Chicago. While most of the city sleeps, Stone walks.
He encounters lonely people, frightened people, criminals, eccentrics, lost souls and ordinary human beings whose lives have suddenly become extraordinary.
The premise becomes even better when the program itself is playing through the night.
Somewhere, Randy Stone is walking Chicago while somewhere else a Chesterton Radio listener is driving across Kansas or washing the last dishes of the evening or lying awake at 2:17 in the morning.
For more than ten hours, the city remains awake with you.
Perhaps that gets close to what was special about these broadcasts.
Night Beat with Frank Lovejoy – All Night Long on YouTube
Thirteen Mysteries Before Breakfast
Some nights required less explanation.
13 Radio Mysteries – CBS Radio Mystery Theater – All Night Long is almost eleven hours long.
There are thirteen mysteries.
The door creaks.
You know what to do.
CBS Radio Mystery Theater is particularly interesting to us now because we’ve been returning to it through our CBSRMT Companion pieces—going back into individual broadcasts and considering not only the plot but the ideas, people and moral questions inside them.
But an All Night Long broadcast offered another way of experiencing the series.
Don’t analyze thirteen episodes.
Just enter the theater.
One ends. Another begins.
At some point you realize you’ve heard that famous door again.
13 Radio Mysteries – CBS Radio Mystery Theater – All Night Long on YouTube
Sherlock and Agatha
Another evening brought together two names requiring almost no explanation:
Sherlock and Agatha.
Holmes on one side. Christie on the other.
Eight and a half hours between them.
What interests me about broadcasts like this now is that they remind us that the audience for old radio was never interested merely because something was old.
Oldness isn’t much of a recommendation.
A bad story does not improve because it has accumulated dust.
People returned because they recognized something: Sherlock Holmes. Agatha Christie. A detective story. A world they wanted to enter again.
That distinction matters.
Chesterton Radio has never really been about preserving things merely because they came from another era.
The worthwhile question is whether they are still alive.
A good mystery generally is.
Sherlock and Agatha – Detective Mystery All Night Long on YouTube
Then Vincent Price Walks In
At some point in a proper night of radio, the room should become slightly stranger.
Enter Vincent Price.
His voice alone could change the temperature of a broadcast.
Vincent Price – Mystery Horror Drama All Night Long ran for more than ten hours, moving the evening away from the detective’s study and toward darker territory.
Price illustrates another way these collections worked.
Sometimes the organizing principle wasn’t a series or even a genre.
It was a person.
A voice.
A presence.
Put Vincent Price at the center and otherwise unrelated stories suddenly belong to the same evening.
There is also something pleasing about knowing that you can fall asleep while Vincent Price is speaking and wake up several hours later to discover that Vincent Price is, somehow, still speaking.
Whether this is reassuring depends upon the listener.
Vincent Price – Mystery Horror Drama All Night Long on YouTube
The Cupboard Marked “Odd Mysteries”
Some collections had famous names.
Others had names like:
Odd Mysteries on the Radio.
I still rather like that.
It doesn’t tell you exactly what you’re getting.
That’s the point.
This particular cupboard contains more than eleven hours of radio. You open the door because somebody has written ODD MYSTERIES on it and you would like to know what qualifies a mystery for admission.
More than 11,000 people apparently had the same instinct.
Here Chesterton Radio wasn’t merely presenting a particular star or famous detective. The station itself was doing the choosing.
That old function of radio is worth remembering.
The listener didn’t always have to know precisely what he wanted.
Sometimes the station said:
Here. Try this.
And sometimes that was better.
Odd Mysteries on the Radio – All Night Long on YouTube
Hitchcock Takes the Late Shift
Eventually Alfred Hitchcock appears.
Of course he does.
Hitchcock – All Night Long gave another evening over to suspense.
But Hitchcock brings something different from Vincent Price.
Price’s presence suggests the Gothic, the macabre, the theatrical.
Hitchcock suggests the perfectly ordinary door at the end of the perfectly ordinary hallway behind which something has gone very badly wrong.
That is excellent material for midnight.
It is perhaps somewhat less excellent material for 3:00 a.m.
Which is exactly why we included it.
Hitchcock – All Night Long on YouTube
But It Wasn’t All Murder
This next one is important.
Pearl Harbor – Radio Collection – All Night Long drew more than 23,000 views.
It also reveals something easily missed if we look only at the detectives.
All Night Long wasn’t actually a mystery series.
It was a way of programming radio.
A night could belong to a detective.
But it could also belong to history.
The Pearl Harbor collection has a special power because radio was not merely a later storyteller of that history. Radio was one of the principal ways Americans experienced the history as it happened.
The voices, bulletins, speeches and broadcasts belong to the event in a way that a modern documentary narrator never quite can.
For people hearing the news in December 1941, the radio wasn’t recreating history.
History was coming out of the radio.
Listening decades later does something peculiar to time. The event is safely in the past, and yet the medium still carries some trace of its original immediacy.
That is another kind of night worth spending with the radio.
Pearl Harbor – Radio Collection – All Night Long on YouTube
And there were many such departures from mystery.
Jimmy Stewart got a night. So did Lux Radio Theatre and John Dickson Carr. There were Halloween nights and Christmas nights, film noir, strange mysteries and lost mysteries. Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre and Bela Lugosi turned up. Jack Benny turned up.
At some point we even did Pirate Radio All Night Long.
Once you have accepted the premise, there are remarkably few reasons to stop.
And Then There Was Saturday Night Theatre
There is one broadcast I would save for last.
On April 22, 2023, Chesterton Radio ran Best of Saturday Night Theatre – Count Down – All Night Long.
More than ten hours.
Listener favorites.
A countdown from seven to one.
The archived broadcast went on to attract more than 48,000 views.
But that isn’t why it belongs at the end of this little tour.
It belongs here because Saturday Night Theatre is still with us.
The mysteries, plays and dramas we were gathering into those overnight broadcasts eventually became part of something larger at Chesterton Radio.
Today we write about them. We create companions to them. We put old productions beside new ideas. We ask what these stories were trying to say and why they remain worth hearing.
So this particular All Night Long broadcast feels less like an artifact from an old version of Chesterton Radio.
It feels like a bridge.
Best of Saturday Night Theatre – Count Down – All Night Long on YouTube
Why All Night?
There is an obvious question.
Why would anybody want a ten-hour radio program?
Surely almost nobody sat down at 8:00 p.m., pressed play, stared dutifully at the screen for ten hours, and emerged triumphant at six the next morning.
That wasn’t really the point.
The length was part of the promise.
The radio would still be there.
You could make dinner while Nero Wolfe investigated a murder.
You could read for an hour.
You could go downstairs and discover Sherlock Holmes had replaced him.
You could work late with Randy Stone walking the streets of Chicago.
You could fall asleep during one mystery and wake during another.
You could get into the car.
You could come home.
You could make coffee before dawn.
And the station was still playing.
This is one of the curious differences between radio and much of our modern on-demand life.
On demand gives us extraordinary control. We select precisely what we want, precisely when we want it. We pause it. Resume it. Skip it. Save it. Queue it.
All of that is useful.
But something was lost when every piece of entertainment began waiting obediently for us to command it.
Traditional radio doesn’t wait.
You turn it on and discover what is happening.
Something began before you arrived.
Something will continue after you leave.
Other people are hearing it at the same time.
That gives even a tiny radio station a peculiar sense of place.
You haven’t opened a file. You’ve arrived somewhere.
That, I think, is what All Night Long accidentally rediscovered.
The Door Is Open Now
Chesterton Radio is different today.
We now have The Open Door, our continuous stream.
It doesn’t have to make it until morning.
It simply keeps going.
In one sense, The Open Door is a descendant of those old overnight experiments. The question behind both is the same:
What if Chesterton Radio were simply there whenever somebody wanted to listen?
But that doesn’t make All Night Long unnecessary.
It may make it more interesting.
Because now an All Night Long broadcast doesn’t have to impersonate a radio station for ten hours.
We already have the station.
All Night Long can become an event again.
One night for a detective.
One night for an author.
One night for supernatural mysteries.
One night for Christmas.
One night built around an anniversary in history.
And perhaps, increasingly, one night for something that didn’t exist when many of those original broadcasts were made:
Chesterton Radio’s own stories.
Something Has Changed at the Little Station
Chesterton Radio now has original fiction.
We have Harker.
We have begun imagining the early adventures of Young Father Brown.
There are new mysteries and Living Fiction, new essays and deep dives, Saturday Night Theatre Companions and CBS Radio Mystery Theater Companions.
We’re no longer limited to opening the radio archives and asking what treasures we can find there.
We can make new things and put them beside the old ones.
That raises an intriguing possibility.
Someday an All Night Long broadcast might begin with a story written for Chesterton Radio.
Then another.
Then another.
A whole night in a world that didn’t exist until we made it.
Not yet.
But it’s possible.
And perhaps that is where the story becomes interesting again.
All Night Long
Looking back through these broadcasts, I’m struck by how little planning there was behind the larger idea.
We weren’t inventing a grand new media format.
We were running a little radio station.
Night was coming.
We had good things to play.
So we played them.
Somehow that simple idea produced nearly 150 nights bearing the same three words.
And years later, people are still finding them.
Maybe that’s enough of a reason to do it again.
It is late.
Most of the lights are off.
There is a lamp burning somewhere.
Someone is reading.
Someone is driving.
Someone is awake who would rather not be alone with the silence.
A mystery ends.
For a moment, nothing.
Then another voice comes through the radio.
Another story is beginning.
And somewhere, someone else is listening too.
All Night Long is coming back.
Which night should come first?
If we bring All Night Long back, what should the first new edition be?
Nero Wolfe? Sherlock Holmes? CBS Radio Mystery Theater? Saturday Night Theatre? Harker? Something supernatural? Something completely unexpected?
Tell us in the comments.
I have a feeling the listeners ought to choose the first night.
Keep the little station on the air
If Chesterton Radio has become part of your day—or your night—please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support helps us create original stories, essays, deep dives and programs, and helps keep this peculiar little independent radio station going.
And whenever you simply want to turn on the radio and see what’s playing, The Open Door is always open:
Listen live at Chesterton Radio’s Open Door