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A Case For Dr Morelle

English Old Time Radio from the 1950s.

This is a vintage radio drama series about a criminal psychologist, Dr Morelle, who solves murder cases which are too complex for the police. Morelle is played by English film actor Cecil Parker, and is alternately helped and hindered in his investigations by his secretary Miss Frayle, played by film actress Sheila Sim.

The series was created by writer Ernest Dudley, who conceived the character during an air raid in 1942. The curmudgeonly and sarcastic psychologist is thought to be based on Hollywood actor and producer Erich von Stroheim; and as played by Cecil Parker the character certainly has a touch of the aristocrat about him.

In a nod to the Baker Street residence of Sherlock Holmes, Morelle's London office is situated at 221b Harley Street. Most of the stories begin there, with his long-suffering secretary patiently enduring her employer's endless sarcasm.

Each of the stories is self-contained, with Morelle solving the mystery in the final scene. Unusually for the time, he solves each case not by hunting for clues in the manner of Sherlock Holmes, but instead through a psychiatrist's insight into the personality of the killer: using his professional experience to consider the suspects, in order to determin which of them matches the deduced personality of the murderer.

Thirteen episodes were broadcast on the BBC Light Programme in 1957, aired weekly from April 23rd to July 16th.


Episodes 1, 7, 8, 11 and 12 in this collection are encoded from off-air recordings made in 1957. Episodes 3, 4 and 13 were recovered in Australia, where they had been broadcast on station 3LO Melbourne (probably in the 1960s). Episodes 2, 5, 6, 9 and 10 are encoded from repeats on BBC Radio 7 in the UK during 2007, and are consequently of higher technical quality than the others.


The files listed in the column VBR MP3 are not in fact variable bit rate files. This is a column for files which do not fall into any of the Archive's standard bitrate categories. Those on this page are either 32 Kbps at a sample rate of 22 kHz (those recorded in 1957), 64 Kbps at a sample rate of 44 kHz (those recorded from 3LO Melbourne), or 80 Kbps at a sample rate of 48 kHz (those recorded from BBC Radio 7, which are MPEG 1.0 Layer II files as encoded by the BBC).


This audio is part of the collection: Old Time Radio

Keywords: Old Time Radio; OTR; Drama; A Case For Dr Morelle; Dr Morelle; Morelle

Individual Files

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Reviewer: DaNess - - June 12, 2009
Subject: Ay Ed!
Thank you so much for this upload, truly one of the more underrated detective shows of OTR, great stuff man.

Reviewer: Ed 999 - - May 16, 2009
Subject: In answer to some of the reviewers...
.To baisers voles: If the streaming player doesn't work on your computer, try downloading the individual files from the links further down the page. All of them will play in Winamp 5.

To DuskinEdina: All thirteen shows will play in Winamp 5 or in Media Player Classic. These are not all mp3 files: some of them are mp2 files, which Windows Media Player cannot cope with. But re-encoding them would further damage the audio quality.

To solidgranite: These are old-time radio shows! The source material is more than 50 years old, and the sound quality of the recordings naturally reflects this. These are historic recordings: to further process them would damage them. Some hiss and crackle is natural for this type of historic AM radio material: you are hearing the broadcasts as they originally sounded.

To buccoman: Unfortunately, only thirteen editions of this show were ever made. Cecil Parker was a busy film actor, and was too much in demand in the movies to spend much time on radio work. In fact I don't know of any other occasion when he appeared on a radio show.

To manumoka: Sorry you didn't like these. But I disagree with your review. Cecil Parker is English, not American! He delivers his lines in a very laid-back English acting style, giving a pretty accurate imitation of an upper-class Englishman of the 1950s. Parker specialised in "under-playing", as it was known; and his acting style here is identical to his movie roles, in which he was very successful

Reviewer: manumoka - - May 15, 2009
Subject: Disappointing
The stories are below average, even for the radio detective genre. The acting is generally good, but Cecil Parker is very ineffective delivering the lines of Dr. Morelle. His emotionless delivery sounds like he's reading a rehearsal run-through.

Reviewer: buccoman - - April 9, 2009
Subject: AWESOME
there has to be more of these somewhere HELP!!!!

Reviewer: solidgranite - - March 30, 2009
Subject: Extremely Low Quality
I dl'd 3 of the episodes, and was careful to avoid those which had reported problems. Even so, the sound quality was AWFUL. I made it thru the first few minutes of each, then closed them. They were so poor in quality that I couldn't even get thru an entire episode.

Perhaps the original poster could resubmit them in another form, but as they are now, they are of extremely low quality.

Reviewer: DrSativa - - March 9, 2009
Subject: good period radio show.
great stuff to listen to. To those who have had some playing issues, I have no problems listening to the episodes with 'Winamp'.

Reviewer: DuskinEdina - - February 27, 2009
Subject: Wonderful Show!!
I just happened across this show. I have never hear about. The Stories are wonderful, I wish I could find writing like this in more shows. This is really a jewel of a find.

Only issue is how some are recorded/saved. Episode 2, 5, 6, 9, and 11 are some different format that won't play with Windows Media Player 11. I need some add-in for WMP but when I try to find one... I can't. Can anyone help?

They will to go into and I can play them in iTunes. But they will NOT load on to my iPod.

Can the person that uploaded change them to a normal MP3?

The Eight that would download to my iPod are all wonderful.

My rating is for the show quality. Not the files type problems.

Reviewer: baisers voles - - February 19, 2009
Subject: great!
really enjoyed these... but could only get three of the episodes on the streaming player to work..
still this should not be missed.. my rating is based on the episodes i was able to listen to ..