Nick Carter

Listen to “The Great Detectives Present Nick Carter” on Spreaker.

Nick Carter made his debut in 1886, the year before Sherlock Holmes came on the scene in London. That’s where the comparison ends.  None of Carter’s mysteries or adventures were in the ballpark of the greatest detective of them all, but what Carter didn’t have in quality, he made up for (as best he could) in quantity with hundreds of novels and short stories being written.

Scores of Carter’s books from his first 37 years are in the public domain.  The Nick Carter Collection from  Halycon Press for Kindle has one and only one virtue: you can find all the books therein  without having to search for them in online. Otherwise, most of these can easily be obtained off Project Gutenberg for free.

Nick Carter was a corporate property with multiple authors writing the stories and what exactly Nick’s adventures liked really seemed to depend on who was writing the story and probably the trends of the day.

The Nick Carter franchise would eventually be featured in Hollywood films in 1939-40, a 1960s film, a 1972 telefilm, and a series of 206 spy novels.

Nick Carter’s radio series was perhaps his best-known incarnation from 1943-55. It was a New York-based radio drama by the mutual network that managed to survive from 1943-55 as the radio detective genre went through a wide variety of phases from the romantic detectives to the hard boiled series to the realistic procedures.

 

Stars:

Lon Clark (1912-98): Lon Clark was a veteran New York radio and stage actor. He was best known for his role in the Nick Carter programs from 1943-55. Outside of this, he appeared as a character actor with distinguished roles in radio programs such as Words at War and later programs such as The CBS Mystery Theatre and Theater Five.

 

 

 

Radio Episode Log: (Right-click to download)

 

Christmas Episode (played out of order):

 

Log courtesy of OTRSite.

*Played out of order.

**Episode announced with wrong date. Date in log reflects updated information.

  6 comments for “Nick Carter”

  1. Javier
    April 25, 2014 at 5:27 am

    Hi Adam, been biting my tongue about Nick Carter since the beginning but cant hold it in any longer! Still don’t know what to make of this series. It started with some situations that were frankly insulting to the listener’s intelligence (being trapped in a glass box that was being slowly filled with water and using a glass cutter not to cut around the lock, or a big hole to crawl out, but to cut a hole from which to get his hand out and pick the lock, I mean, really!). This was made worse with the intro, in which they say that Nick Carter was the best detective ever. This annoyed me so much that I changed the name of the series in my mind to “the insulting adventures of Nick Carter”… Then the series got a lot better and I started to enjoy it. That is until EP1230, which is just ridiculous, in which at the end someone who has had an employee, his whole family and his dog murdered in cold blood and was almost murdered himself says he is quite fond of the murderer and doesnt want to call the police! Then the murderer, who is in the same room as four other people including Nick Carter say that when you werent looking (how could they not see it) I have just drunk the bottle of poison that I happened to have on me in just case… Hope this series gets better, because at the moment I don’t know if I am going to get a decent mystery or a ludicrous one. Did you say we have over a year of it?
    Anyway love all the other shows and I still will listen to Nick Carter. Thanks for all the hard work and for the many hours of listening pleasure. Cannot imagine driving without this podcast.
    Javier – near Madrid in Spain

  2. Wes Williams
    September 10, 2014 at 2:11 pm

    Nick Carter was among the first radio detectives to have a catchphrase: “Quiet, Patsy!”

    Though I’ve heard every episode, I don’t enjoy them nearly as much as Philip Marlowe and Johnny Dollar. The character of Nick Carter is written to be just too perfectly competent to be believed, and the sycophantic way Patsy and others regard him is nauseating.

  3. July 2, 2015 at 4:54 pm

    i really enjoy the old episodes as I drive, work, or out for a walk. Keep up the good work.

  4. Vinton Henry
    August 13, 2017 at 10:22 pm

    I agree with the previous listener’s comments. The Nick Carter detective series is simplistic, naive, transparent, unsophisticated and dated. Precisely why I enjoy listening. This series transports me to another time and allows me to dwell there for a little less than 28 minutes. What a great antidote for living in 2017 Los Angeles. Thanks for the radio theater therapy!

  5. Charles Gittens
    February 16, 2022 at 4:19 am

    Can’t get enough of great detectives. Came across due to boredom.
    Very nostalgic and by golly what a throwback to the good ole days

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