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Contents ( 80)
  1. CONTENTS
  2. ACTING ON IMPULSE
  3. CONTENTS
  4. INTRODUCTION
  5. “A PROPOSAL TO CICELY”
  6. INTRODUCTION
  7. A PROPOSAL TO CICELY
  8. THE END
  9. READING “A PROPOSAL TO CICELY”
  10. “THE LITTLE LADY”
  11. INTRODUCTION
  12. THE LITTLE LADY
  13. I.
  14. II.
  15. III.
  16. THE END
  17. READING “THE LITTLE LADY”
  18. “LINCKES’ GREAT CASE”
  19. INTRODUCTION
  20. LINCKES’ GREAT CASE
  21. I.
  22. II.
  23. III.
  24. IV.
  25. V.
  26. VI.
  27. VII.
  28. THE END
  29. READING “LINCKES’ GREAT CASE”
  30. “THE BULLDOG AND THE BEAST”
  31. INTRODUCTION
  32. THE BULLDOG AND THE BEAST
  33. THE END
  34. READING “THE BULLDOG AND THE BEAST”
  35. “ACTING ON IMPULSE”
  36. INTRODUCTION
  37. ACTING ON IMPULSE
  38. I.
  39. II.
  40. III.
  41. IV.
  42. THE END
  43. READING “ACTING ON IMPULSE”
  44. “WHOSE FAULT WAS IT?”
  45. INTRODUCTION
  46. WHOSE FAULT WAS IT?
  47. THE END
  48. READING “WHOSE FAULT WAS IT?”
  49. “THE CHINESE SHAWL”
  50. INTRODUCTION
  51. CONT
  52. THE CHINESE SHAWL
  53. I.
  54. II.
  55. III.
  56. IV.
  57. V.
  58. VI.
  59. VII.
  60. VIII.
  61. THE END
  62. READING “THE CHINESE SHAWL”
  63. “THE OLD MAID”
  64. INTRODUCTION
  65. THE OLD MAID
  66. THE END
  67. READING “THE OLD MAID”
  68. “LOVE”
  69. INTRODUCTION
  70. LOVE
  71. I.
  72. II.
  73. III.
  74. THE END
  75. READING “LOVE”
  76. THE SEARCH FOR “ON SUCH A NIGHT”
  77. GEORGETTE HEYER’S BIBLIOGRAPHY
  78. FURTHER READING
  79. COMING SOON!
  80. OCTOBER 29, 2019

But then, fifteen minutes isn’t very long. Perhaps “On Such a Night” was one of Heyer’s longer short stories, and it required five days to complete the thing. Or… maybe even more days?

I called Jen. “So… this is weird,” I said. “You know how I found ‘On Such a Night’ in the radio listing for that one day in 1937? I’ve now realized it was broadcast every day for that whole week.”

“What?”

“So I’m wondering… could it be a short story we already know? Like, one of the longer ones – maybe even ‘Lady, Your Pardon’, which was published in the Women’s Weekly in 1936? You did say that Heyer mentioned in her notes that she didn’t remember a short of that title, and I know you’ve said that ‘Pharaoh’s Daughter’ was the original title of that one, but could it be that ‘On Such a Night’ was her first stab at it—”

“No,” Jen said definitively. “Because we have correspondence about her deciding what to call it: whether to say ‘Faro’ or ‘Pharaoh’. And we know she was furious with Woman’s Journal editor Dorothy Sutherland for renaming it, although I’ve never found it published there and have always thought that she must have made a mistake, and it must have been the Women’s Weekly editor she should have been angry with. Wait, let me check…” After a moment, she is back, clearly with her primary source material at her fingertips. “Here we are, Georgette’s list of her novel and story sales, typewritten by her, and with notes in her own hand.”

“Wow.”

“Yes, it’s quite remarkable. And ‘On Such a Night’… here it is, under short stories. Oh, that’s interesting.”

“What?”

“It says here it was sold to the Australian Women’s Weekly.”

“What?!”

“‘Serial rights’ to the Australian Women’s Weekly.” A pause. “She—she must have made a mistake… She must have. I’ve been through the whole of it—”

“Me too!”

“And so it must have been a different magazine. But why she would have—”

She trailed off, and there was a helpless silence as we both digested the implications of this.

“Let me take another look at the Wireless Weekly,” I said, trying to remain positive, “and see what else I can find out about these broadcasts. I’ll call you back.”

Subsequently, I started digging into the following edition of the Wireless Weekly, and discovered that, actually, “On Such a Night” didn’t just run for five days. It didn’t even run for ten days. I kept going further and further forward in time, until at last I found that the last broadcast of “On Such a Night” on Radio 2GB took place on Friday, January 14, at 11:45 a.m.

Then I went backward, and found a Wireless Weekly listing for it on Friday, December 24, though no earlier. So not only had it been broadcast over more than one week, it had been broadcast in two separate years. I turned away from Wireless Weekly, and went back to the Telegraph radio programme listings. According to that source, “On Such a Night” by Georgette Heyer was first broadcast on Wednesday, November 17, 1937. And assuming it did indeed run every weekday until January 14, 1938, as the schedules seemed to indicate, then this “short story” was apparently read aloud on no fewer than forty-three days over the course of ten weeks. That was over ten hours of airtime dedicated to it—call it at least seven or eight hours, factoring in station ID and a jingle and probably commercials either side.