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Western · Syndicated

Blair of the Mounties

January 31, 1938 – October 3, 1938 · 36 broadcasts

Sergeant James Blair of the North-West Mounted Police works the Canadian frontier -- Dawson City, the Yukon gold camps, the Hudson's Bay posts, the Saskatchewan prairie -- in fifteen-minute chapters of pursuit and rugged justice. What sets it apart is that the man telling the stories had lived them. Colonel Rhys Davies served in the North-West Mounted Police during the Yukon gold rush and then in British military intelligence in the First World War; he wrote the series out of that career and played Blair himself. The period detail comes with him -- the mechanics of a fur-theft case, the coastal drug traffic of the twenties, the trenches of 1915. It is also a serial that will not sit still. Blair is on leave in England by the eighth chapter, at the front by the thirteenth, retired to a Fraser Valley farm by the twenty-fifth, and a private detective in London for the last ten -- by which point the title has rather outrun the premise. Syndicated on transcription discs and still being sold to stations twenty years later, it ran 36 weekly chapters from January to October 1938. Thirty-four of them survive.

Collection status: 34 of 36 held (94% complete)
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Episode Spine

1938

January 31, 1938 Fire Valley Listen (MP3)
Thirty years on, Blair tells old Angus McGregor how a missing Corporal Leslie was said by local tribesmen to have been carried off by ghosts -- and how the man's mother, an ocean away in England, dreamed the place they would find him.
February 7, 1938 Incident at Long Cooley Listen (MP3)
A blizzard, a robbed woman trapper and a killer with days of head start; Blair gambles on a chinook thaw and a tracker named Joe to close the gap before the trail goes cold.
February 14, 1938 The Trap
February 21, 1938 The Murder of Bady
February 28, 1938 The Phantom Sniper Listen (MP3)
A Montana miner lies dead on the Indian River Trail with only bear tracks around him, and Dawson City has already named the killer the Phantom Sniper.
March 7, 1938 The Murder at Haggets Landing Listen (MP3)
A woman arrives by dog sleigh at Fort McAllister with a story about two fur thieves, one of whom did not survive his own partner's temper -- and Blair closes a killing that has waited since 1903.
March 14, 1938 The Cedar Lake Mystery Listen (MP3)
A doctor takes his wife and a friend north for a holiday at Cedar Lake, and the wife begins arranging a way for her husband not to come home.
March 21, 1938 The Hamilton Mystery Part 1 Listen (MP3)
Blair takes leave in England to stay with his sister and lands in a country murder where the evidence all runs one way, towards Lady Hamilton, and he will not have it.
March 28, 1938 The Hamilton Mystery Part 2 Listen (MP3)
The case turns on an eye. Blair establishes that Lady Hamilton can barely see from the right, which makes nonsense of a witness who watched her sight a rifle from that shoulder.
April 4, 1938 The Cherry Hill Mystery Part 1 Listen (MP3)
Still in England, Blair has days to save a condemned man by explaining how two victims were shot dead without a gun or a bullet anywhere in the case.
April 11, 1938 The Cherry Hill Mystery Part 2 Listen (MP3)
The killings happened beside the grounds of a retired professor who collects ancient weapons, and Blair wants to know how much of that collection he has been using.
April 18, 1938 The Train Wreckers Mystery Listen (MP3)
August 1914: with Canada mobilising for war, Blair works to keep saboteurs off a troop train carrying men to the coast.
April 25, 1938 The Case of Lieutenant Ralston Listen (MP3)
On the Western Front in 1915, Blair is set to find how an enemy agent is getting messages out of the Canadian lines.
May 2, 1938 The Naked Truth Listen (MP3)
Two bank robbers go to ground among a community of Russian sectarians, whose customs turn out to make a poor hiding place.
May 9, 1938 The Clover Creek Mystery Part 1 Listen (MP3)
Renfield, Saskatchewan calls Pete Sutton's drowning an accident until Marshall finds the boards of his boat had been sawn most of the way through.
May 16, 1938 The Clover Creek Mystery Part 2 Listen (MP3)
The town has settled on the drowned man's brother as the killer; Blair refuses the arrest and says they would be taking an innocent man.
May 23, 1938 The Kittilak Lagoon Mystery Part 1 Listen (MP3)
Blair and Marshall go undercover on the Vancouver Island coast, posing as tourists to break a ring running narcotics into British Columbia.
May 30, 1938 The Kittilak Lagoon Mystery Part 2 Listen (MP3)
Short of evidence and out of patience, Blair decides to get inside the house across the lagoon himself.
June 6, 1938 The Robbery at the Canada Western Part 1 Listen (MP3)
Over a hundred thousand dollars is gone from the Canada Western, and the night guard -- a former Mountie -- swears he saw a man at the bank who has an alibi in another town.
June 13, 1938 The Robbery at the Canada Western Part 2 Listen (MP3)
Blair believes the guard, which means the alibi is the crime, and works out how the money left the building.
June 20, 1938 The Goose Lake Robbery Listen (MP3)
Blair goes back to 1899, to a stolen gold shipment and the empty bullion sacks a duck hunter later found sunk in a lake -- which still leaves the question of where the gold went.
June 27, 1938 Star Ruby of Talangor Part 1 Listen (MP3)
In Victoria, a visiting prince of Talangor is murdered, his servant has vanished, and the Star Ruby is gone.
July 4, 1938 Star Ruby of Talangor Part 2 Listen (MP3)
The ruby had been taken from a temple before it ever reached Victoria, which raises the question of whether the prince was killed for the stone or for the theft of it.
July 11, 1938 Ching Wo the Baker Listen (MP3)
A miser's gold dust vanishes and he is certain the baker he underpays has taken it. Most of the town has the truth worked out well ahead of the Mounted Police.
July 18, 1938 Strange Case of Henry Peterson Listen (MP3)
Blair's service is over and he is farming in the Fraser Valley, but an old crime resurfaces when Sergeant Rafferty takes the men who committed it.
July 25, 1938 The Return of Inspector Blair Listen (MP3)
Retired and married, Blair is asked to look again at a wealthy man's supposed suicide, and Inspector Marshall gets his old chief back on a case.
August 1, 1938 The Feminine Touch Part 1 Listen (MP3)
Blair and his wife Margery settle in London and he opens as a private investigator; his first client is the defence of the man accused of murdering the actress Virginia Stewart.
August 8, 1938 The Feminine Touch Part 2 Listen (MP3)
Margery, fresh from a mystery novel in which the butler did it, sets out to help by proving the dead actress's servant guilty.
August 15, 1938 Lord Waverton's Dilemma Part 1 Listen (MP3)
The Earl of Waverton, Minister of the Air, shoots two men at the safe holding the papers from a secret conference, and puts Blair on to finding out who they were. The trail runs to a kidnapped doctor, a body put out of an aeroplane, and an interest in Britain's air defences.
August 22, 1938 Lord Waverton's Dilemma Part 2 Listen (MP3)
Blair takes the doctor to a country house with two aircraft and a professor for an owner, and the doctor finds proof it is where he was brought; meanwhile a blackmailer reaches Waverton.
August 29, 1938 Lord Waverton's Dilemma Part 3 Listen (MP3)
Lady Waverton brings Blair a blackmail story of her own, turning on whether the husband she buried is dead at all, and Waverton is left choosing between his marriage and his country.
September 5, 1938 The Disappearance of Alexander Pressman Listen (MP3)
On holiday in England, Blair looks into the disappearance of a wealthy man who had cheated every one of his partners, and concludes he will never be found.
September 12, 1938 The Most Famous Spy Listen (MP3)
Blair tells a London reporter what the Secret Service actually knew about Mata Hari, against the legend that grew up after her.
September 19, 1938 The Ibex Mystery Part 1 Listen (MP3)
The cross-Channel boat Ibex is stopped mid-Channel with her engines dead and half a million in gold is taken; Blair traces cipher signals to the coast and is met with a machine gun.
September 26, 1938 The Ibex Mystery Part 2 Listen (MP3)
The gunman wore the same green as the raiders of a second gold ship, Blair concludes a government is behind the piracy, and he breaks the cipher.
October 3, 1938 The Ibex Mystery Part 3 Listen (MP3)
A decoded signal names the next ship, the Navy puts submarines in the water, and Blair goes after the gold and the men who took it.
The Story

Sergeant James Blair of the North-West Mounted Police works the Canadian frontier -- Dawson City, the Yukon gold camps, the Hudson's Bay posts, the Saskatchewan prairie -- in fifteen-minute chapters of pursuit and rugged justice. What sets it apart is that the man telling the stories had lived them. Colonel Rhys Davies served in the North-West Mounted Police during the Yukon gold rush and then in British military intelligence in the First World War; he wrote the series out of that career and played Blair himself. The period detail comes with him -- the mechanics of a fur-theft case, the coastal drug traffic of the twenties, the trenches of 1915. It is also a serial that will not sit still. Blair is on leave in England by the eighth chapter, at the front by the thirteenth, retired to a Fraser Valley farm by the twenty-fifth, and a private detective in London for the last ten -- by which point the title has rather outrun the premise. Syndicated on transcription discs and still being sold to stations twenty years later, it ran 36 weekly chapters from January to October 1938. Thirty-four of them survive.

Full story — coming soon while it's being curated.
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