Author: Yours Truly Johnny Blogger

EP0236: Box 13: The Biter Bitten

Alan Ladd

Dan Holiday is called to a hotel to find an escaped venomous snake.

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Original Air Date: November 24, 1948

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EP0235: Yours Truly Johnny Dollar: The London Matter

Edmond O'Brien

Johnny takes an ocean voyage in pursuit of narcotics smugglers.

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Original Air Date: June 22, 1950

Tracy Gallagher’s blog post  on the Great Detectives of Old Time Radio

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EP0234: Sherlock Holmes: The Terrifying Cats

Basil Rathbone

An opera singer with a deadly fear of cats turns to Holmes for help.

Original Air Date: February 25, 1946

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EP0233: Let George Do It: Your Money or Your Life

Bob Bailey

George takes a case for free to put a loan shark out of business.

Original Air Date: February 28, 1949

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EP0232: Jeff Regan: It All Comes Back to Me Now

Paul Dubov

A woman with amnesia shows up at International, asking for help. All she can remember is that she wanted to kill someone and she has a gun with two bullets missing in her purse.

Original Air Date: April 26, 1950

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EP0231: Box 13: Double Trouble

Dan Holiday is told he has to be in a small town by 3:30. He arrives early, but the murder still happens and Holiday is accused of the crime.

Original Air Date: November 17 1948

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It’s Another Case for Nick Carter or Nick Carter and the Case of the Missing Serials

There were few radio detectives with more endurance than Nick Carter as played by Lon Clark. It’s first airing was April 11, 1943 in the middle of World War II and it went off the air on September 25, 1955, 5 days after Dragnet aired its last episode. Clark made more than 722 appearances as Nick Carter, a detective character who predated Sherlock Holmes by 1 year.

Nick Carter’s radio adventures are usually some of the most cleverly written detective stories on the radio, with excitement, thrills, and taut cleverly written mysteries.

Carter, like many other radio detectives has a lot of lost episodes. However, unlike the Rathbone-Bruce Sherlock Holmes episodes, missing Nick Carter stories aren’t mostly or entirely from the World War II era. Given the rare World War II episodes of Sherlock Holmes, The Thin Man, and Mr. and Mrs. North, Nick Carter has to have done well during World War II. About 50 World War II episodes of Nick Carter are floating about. These generally feature one of radio’s most distinctive openings:

(Pounding on the Door)

Woman: What is it? What is it?

Man: It’s another case for Nick Carter, Master Detective.

There are some missing war episodes and among the most curious are those from a 20-week period where Nick Carter went to a five day a week 15-minute serial format from April to September 1944. Outside of the 56 Yours Truly Johnny Dollar serials, the only intact radio detective serial stories are a 1936 Charlie Chan story and a 1954 Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Person story. The rest exist only in fragment and none of the Carter serials are in circulation.

However, it’s the post World War II shows that are in much shorter supply.  Particularly those shows after 1948. After episode 366, “A Clue Called X”, 354 of the next 356 episodes are missing including the last 312, with no Carter episode from the 1950s in circulation.

The number of Carter radio plays is circulation is somewhere between 85 and 135 episodes depending on whose set you’re looking at. There are a lot of duplicates and mislabeled shows, so it’s tough to say for sure. This is why Lon Clark as Nick Carter didn’t make my 100 club list  as I haven’t verified the episodes and there hasn’t been a clear independent audit of the Carter shows. That leaves near to 600 episodes missing from general circulation. The good news of this?

Many of these episodes may not be lost forever, but may only be out of circulation. The Radio Goldindex of radio shows usually tracks pretty closely to what’s in circulation, but on Nick Carter, Goldin has far more Carter episodes than are currently circulation. He catalogs 358 episodes or nearly triple what’s in circulation. Among the episodes Goldin lists are several of the Nick Carter serials which are either complete or complete enough to listen to. In addition there are more than 100 episodes from 1949-50 that Goldin has listed that aren’t in general circulation. This gives hope that the shows exist within collecting circles and will eventually become available to fans of the master detective.

EP0230: Yours Truly Johnny Dollar: The Arrowcraft Matter

Edmond O'Brien

Johnny Dollar investigates the fatal sinking of several Arrowcraft Boats.

Original Air Date: June 15, 1950

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EP0229: Sherlock Holmes: The Camberwell Poisoning

Basil Rathbone

Holmes and Watson investigate the poisoning of the hated head of a monied family.

Original Air Date: February 18, 1946

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EP0228: Let George Do It: Journey Into Hate

Bob Bailey

*At the request of a concerned sister, George is off to Hawaii to investigate a myserious wire, and finds danger and murder.

Original Air Date: February 21, 1949

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EP0227: Jeff Regan: Some Enchanted Carhop

International is retained to find the sender of anonymous gifts that is disturbing a carhop waitress.

Original Air Date: December 21, 1949

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Quote of the show: “It looked empty, like a beer can after a picnic.”

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EP0226: Box 13: House of Darkness

 

*A blind man contacts Holiday when he finds a mysterious message in braile in a library book.

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Original Air Date: November 10, 1948

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The Immortal Detectives

Listening to vintage radio, you get a sense of how fleeting fame and popularity can be. There was a time when names such as Michael Shayne, John J. Malone, Philo Vance, Nick Carter, and Mr. and Mrs. North held a spot in the public imagination. Yet, today these names would be mostly unknown except to diehard fans of old mysteries.

On the other hand, if you mention Sherlock Holmes the recognition is universal. Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade, ditto. So which detectives have been with us a long time and have come out from beneath the rubbles of historyfor their stories and characters to find new generations on a mass level.

The list of “immortal detectives” is short:

Sherlock Holmes

Father Brown

Nero Wolfe

The Hardy Boys

Nancy Drew

Poirot

 Miss Marple

Sam Spade

Philip Marlowe

Mike Hammer

Sherlock Holmes has survived so long because he’s definitively iconic reperesentative of what a detective is. He captures the imagination of writers who come up with new plots for him long after Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stopped. And let’s not forget that the original stories were solid entertainment in their own right with no requirement of updating.

Father Brown survives because of the intellectual strength  of the puzzles, as well as the many devotees of Chesterton among Catholics and other traditionalists.

Nero Wolfe survives through the fact that Stout, like Agatha Christie wrote his books over the course of several decades, allowing them to seep into the culture. Both the character of Wolfe and Archie, as well as the original mysteries written by Stout arrest the public’s imagination. The most recent Nero Wolfe TV series ended in 2002, and I don’t expect we’ve seen the last of Wolfe. Of course, Wolfe may inspire writers andproducers more than it does a mass popularity.  There’ve been five Nero Wolfe radio shows, two movies, and two TV series, and the most successful version was the latest TV series.

The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew continue to be introduced to boys and girls at a young age. While the characters have changed quite a bit since they were introduced in 1927 and 1930 respectively,  the never-ending supply of new books assures them a long life, and that movies and TV shows will emerge from time to time.

Poirot and Marple are the most enduring characters of the late Agatha Christie, and that has translated into numerous television adaptations that have been shown on PBS. Though, there have been other adaptations as well. Agatha Christie’s Great Detectives Poirot and Marple was a Manga and Anime adaption of the two characters’ adventures.

As to Sam Spade, he lives on as the prototype of hard boiled fiction. While there haven’t been any Spade movies since the Maltese Falcon and only one novel and a collection of short stories written by Dashiel Hammett, the character continues to live on through that film, a recent BBC radio production, and an even an authorized prequel novel, Spade and Archer. One big reason for Spade’s survival is that the Maltese Falcon is often read for its literary value in events such as The Big Read where a library group will read through the same book.

Philip Marlowe has inspired numerous film and television productions, the latest occurring in 1998 when James Caan took the role for Poodle Springs. The movies, the influence of Chandler, and the nature of Philip Marlowe as a “knight in tarnished armor” helps to keep him in circulation.

Mike Hammer’s survival is due to a combination of books, movies, TV shows, and the 1980s Television version which updated and iconisized Hammer for a new generation of fans. The success of doing that was in the longevity of Mickey Spillane, who was able to keep the character fresh through many years of change.

These ten have made it through at least 50 years of existence. Of course, it’s an open question as to how many of these will remain popular in 2060, and whether such detectives as Columbo, The Rockford Files, and Monk will still be remembered by the general public, or like so many other once-popular sleuths, be only remembered by the mystery superfans.

EP0225: Yours Truly Johnny Dollar: The Collegio Diamond Matter

Edmond O'Brien

Johnny Dollar investigates a jewelry theft tied up in a murder.

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Original Air Date: June 8, 1950

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EP0224: Sherlock Holmes: The Guileless Gypsy

 Basil Rathbone

A man hires Holmes alleging that Gypsies have threatened to kill his nephew, the heir to a large estate, but Holmes suspsects something far more sinister is afoot.

Original Air Date: February 11, 1946

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