Lucille Fletcher; Wrote ‘Sorry, Wrong Number’

Lucille Fletcher, who wrote the 1940s radio suspense drama “Sorry, Wrong Number” and expanded the script into a motion picture version starring Barbara Stanwyck, has died. She was 88.

Fletcher died Thursday in a Langhorne, Pa., hospital after a stroke.

The versatile writer, who was married to the film composer Bernard Herrmann and later to John Douglass Wallop III, author of the book that became the basis for the musical “Damn Yankees,” kept her maiden name professionally. In addition to her radio work, she wrote books and did the libretto for Herrmann’s opera based on “Wuthering Heights.”

Fletcher is best known for her scripts from the heyday of radio drama, and her works featured such performers as Orson Welles, Vincent Price and Ida Lupino. Her forte became the thriller, notably the ghost story “The Hitchhiker” that Welles performed in the 1940s.

In introducing one of her plays on his “Mercury Summer Theater of the Air” in 1946, Welles said: “Our story tonight, ladies and gentlemen, is an original for radio by that most original of radio writers, Miss Lucille Fletcher. Its title, ‘The Search for Andy LeFeve.’ ”

Fletcher’s most popular play, “Sorry, Wrong Number,” became a perennial of high school and community stages, prompted two operas and spawned the 1948 motion picture, which netted Stanwyck an Oscar nomination, and a 1989 television version starring Loni Anderson.

The story, concerning a wealthy, married invalid who overhears a phone conversation about her own murder being planned, received the Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America.

Agnes Moorehead played the woman in the 1943 radio broadcast that aired as a production on the CBS program “Suspense.”

“I like to take an agonizing situation which is baffling and haunting, in which a sympathetic leading character is endlessly in doubt, tortured by circumstance, and then see what happens,” Fletcher told the Washington Post in 1963.

Her book career began with “The Daughters of Jasper Clay,” published in 1958 by Holt. Her later novels included “ . . . And Presumed Dead,” “The Girl in Cabin B54” and “Eighty Dollars to Stamford.” Her last book was “Mirror Image,” published by William Morrow in 1988.

Violet Lucille Fletcher was a native of Brooklyn, N.Y., and a 1933 graduate of Vassar College. She got a job at CBS as a publicity writer and soon turned to short stories and radio plays to earn extra money.

Her first success came when one of her magazine short stories, a comic tale called “My Client Curly,” was spotted by the radio dramatist Norman Corwin. He adapted the story for radio, and the tale also became the basis for the 1944 Cary Grant film “Once Upon a Time.”

Fletcher’s marriage to Herrmann ended in divorce. Wallop, whom she married in 1949, died in 1985. Survivors include two daughters, a sister and two grandsons.