Radio Crime Log: Missing, Simenon

Not much on the box this week. However, those of you who own a radio - and I sincerely hope that means all of you - should be alerted to a couple of crimey things with dramatic potential.

Missing In Action is BBC Radio 4’s Afternoon Drama, on Thursday at 2.15pm. Sadly, it’s not an adaptation of Chuck Norris’s action franchise – my god, I’d listen to that – but a drama about a woman who believes she sees her lost soldier husband in a supermarket.

The blurb will now tell you much the same thing, but using more words:

Natalie’s husband was listed in Helmand as Missing In Action. Then one day, she spots him in a supermarket. But is this man really him? Her belief is so overpowering, that the man himself begins to wonder if she might be right. Or perhaps he wants her to be?

It’s Clare Lizzimore’s first play for radio.

Not so long ago I believe we mentioned the superhuman writing output of Georges Simenon. To find out how many novels the Maigret author unleashed on the world - and I know you have an insatiable curiosity about these things - you just have to click here.

On Friday, at 2.15pm, Radio 4 begins the first of three adaptations of some of his psychological thrillers under the banner of The Other Simenon.

The blurb doesn’t know when to stop:

In A New Lease Of Life, Maurice Dudon, a reclusive bachelor who works as an accountant with no emotional or private life except for furtive and ritualistic visits to a prostitute every Friday, finds his life changing after he is seriously injured in a car accident. In a private nursing home he forms a growing relationship with a nurse, but is it all fate or is his life being manipulated?

The Chuck Norris for Radio 4 Campaign starts here. Who’s with me?