Carlton E. Morse's radio adventure serial I Love a Mystery ran on three different networks from 1939 to 1953 and inspired a short-lived film series from Columbia Pictures. A vast improvement over Henry Levin's tentative kick-off, I Love a Mystery (1945), was Levin's follow-up, The Devil's Mask (1946), which reunited stars Jim Bannon and Barton Yarborough as San Francisco private detectives Jack Packard and Doc Long. (Lost in the translation from radio to film was the participation of the partners' occasional British colleague, Reggie York, voiced by several actors - among them a young Tony Randall.) True to their source, Columbia's I Love a Mystery films boast Gothic and macabre flourishes which make them progenitors of such later mystery-horror fare as Hanna-Barbera's animated Scooby Doo, Where Are You? series and the cult television classics Kolchak: The Night Stalker and The X-Files. In The Devil's Mask, the discovery of a shrunken head in the wreckage of a downed plane draws Jack and Doc into the mystery of a missing museum curator and his psychologically damaged daughter (Anita Louise), whose undiagnosed Electra Complex may have driven her to murder. Shot with an expressionist eye for bottomless shadows by cinematographer Henry Freulich, The Devil's Mask augured great things for the franchise but Columbia pulled the plug on I Love a Mystery after just one more film - the aptly titled The Unknown (1946).

By Richard Harland Smith