My hunt went unrewarded, unsurprisingly, and it was years later that I again got involved in the search, when I began to plumb the depths of digitized back catalogues around the world for all things Heyer-related that might be of interest to readers of Heyer Society, both the book and website. In the course of this investigation I stumbled across “The Chinese Shawl” printed in The Quiver – previously, the only known version was a Danish-language translation – and, riding high on that discovery, went further and came upon a listing in the radio program guide printed in the Sydney Morning Herald for Monday, December 6, 1937 that read:

11.45 - Story: “On Such a Night” by Georgette Heyer

Woah. Really?

This was new information.

If nothing else, we now knew that “On Such a Night” was short enough that it could be read aloud in fifteen minutes.

The station it was broadcast on was Sydney’s 2GB, and armed with this knowledge, a new avenue of research opened up. The game was afoot! I was filled with a new zeal—could I actually be the one to crack this mystery, all these years after my first attempt? After Jen, and so many learned others, had already attempted it? And could it be that it would go beyond ceaselessly sifting through microfilm and delicate copies of long-ago publications, but I’d be able to chat to radio buffs about the history of the medium, as well?

My first stop, of course, was 2GB, to inquire if perhaps they had archives going back that far. When my initial e-mail went unanswered for a month, I called into their offices, only to be told by a disinterested operator that they did not have either physical copies nor transcripts of their programs from further back than the 1970s. Fair enough.

I then reached out to Ian O’Toole, curator of the Sydney-based Kurrajong Radio Museum, with whom I had a most instructive chat about how radio stations used to record their programs – on pressed vinyl discs similar to LP records, but much larger – and how they would then dispose of them indiscriminately when their storage capacity was reached. The hitch in his voice was obvious when he told the anecdote of how a Brisbane station manager would take his employees down to the banks of the river on Friday afternoons and they would frisbee years-old broadcasts into the water. I’m a collector of the old and rare myself, so that tale of thoughtless, wanton destruction similarly affected me.

Ian’s collection, sadly, did not boast the needful, but he sent me to the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, in the hope that there might be something there. Within hours I heard back from Zsuzsi Szucs (which has got to be one of the greatest names ever, not to mention a phenomenal Scrabble score), the institute’s collection coordinator, who regretfully told me that they only had four 2GB recordings from the period, and none were what I was seeking – and, of course, the odds of that being the case would have been pretty astronomical. Then she sent me links to the short story collection Snowdrift and Georgette Heyer’s Wikipedia page, which I am sure was very kindly meant.