What if you were innocent of murder—and had the perfect alibi?
Now suppose the only people who could prove it had disappeared.
Peter Cornish’s Deal with Murder, broadcast on BBC Saturday Night Theatre in 1964, begins with a wonderfully simple predicament and steadily tightens the screws. Lynn Harker finds herself facing evidence that points toward her, while the chance encounters that should establish her innocence may be almost impossible to verify.
In this episode of The Saturday Night Theatre Companion, we return to this gripping radio thriller to explore how Cornish constructs the seemingly perfect alibi, manipulates what the listener knows and suspects, and turns witnesses, fingerprints, coincidence and uncertainty into the machinery of suspense.
We’ll also listen closely to what makes the story particularly effective on radio—the voices, pauses, pacing and unseen spaces that allow the listener’s imagination to become part of the mystery.
And beneath the mechanics of the whodunit lies a more troubling question:
If the truth is real but nobody can prove it, what protects the innocent?
🎧 Listen to the complete original production:
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The Saturday Night Theatre Companion
The play ends. The conversation begins.
