Detective drama · NBC (1944) / syndicated (Frederic Ziv, 1945-1950)
Boston Blackie
June 23, 1944 – October 25, 1950 · 233 broadcasts
Boston Blackie followed the reformed jewel thief of Jack Boyle's pulp stories into a second career as a freelance sleuth -- "enemy to those who make him an enemy, friend to those who have no friend" -- forever one step ahead of the exasperated Inspector Farraday. The character reached radio twice. NBC ran a summer series in 1944 with Chester Morris, fresh from Columbia's Blackie films, opposite Richard Lane's Farraday. Then producer Frederic Ziv rebuilt the show for first-run syndication (1945-1950), casting Broadway's Richard Kollmar as Blackie, Maurice Tarplin as Farraday, and Jan Miner as Blackie's companion Mary Wesley; the transcribed half-hours reached hundreds of local stations and became one of the most successful syndicated programs of their era. Blackie's cases run to jewel heists, impossible alibis, waterfront rackets, and the occasional carnival ghost, always cracked with a con man's flair and a needle aimed at the police. Kollmar, incidentally, was married to columnist Dorothy Kilgallen -- who turns up in a 1949 episode to grab a scoop. This collection gathers the surviving broadcasts from both runs.
Collection status:
199 of 233 held (85% complete)
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Episode Spine
Grouped by year. Jump to the full list below, or open a season on its own page.
- 1944 (12 episodes)
- 1945 (38 episodes)
- 1946 (53 episodes)
- 1947 (52 episodes)
- 1948 (52 episodes)
- 1949 (26 episodes)
1944
A society woman first fingers Blackie for robbing her grandfather, then begs him to recover her stolen Jonathan diamond before her fiance returns -- and the gem keeps vanishing from a safe that should be empty.
Sent to Fifty Hunter Street to save a friend's bank, Blackie is knocked out, robbed of his gun, and framed for murder, then escapes jail disguised as a woman to clear his name.
July 7, 1944
The Canteen Fund Mystery
Charity-ball funds vanish and Shorty is found knocked cold beside the rifled safe, leaving Blackie the prime suspect on Inspector Farraday's list.
A $200,000 emerald called the Star of the Nile disappears from a train under Blackie's nose, and a tip about a midnight safecracking sets up a theft Farraday can't quite stop.
Black-market hijackers run Blackie off the road and pressure him to join them; a cattle rancher's plea pulls him deeper, until she suddenly swears she has never met him.
A bloodstained coat bearing Blackie's own label ties him to a caretaker's murder at the Devon estate, where a valuable gun collection is being ransacked one room at a time.
A woman leaves with a false Blackie and turns up dead with his gun in her hand, until a phone call reveals the wrong girl was killed and uncovers a wartime Nazi plot.
Blackie saw a trusted old clerk pocket the pearls missing from Gordon's jewelry, but to free her from a blackmailer he must lift a ruby -- straight into Farraday's waiting trap.
August 18, 1944
The Uninvited Corpse
Farraday rushes to Blackie's apartment on word that Blackie is dead, and finds a corpse that is not his.
August 25, 1944
Counterfeit Gas Coupons
A flood of counterfeit wartime gas coupons puts Blackie on the trail of the ring behind them.
September 1, 1944
(untitled)
September 15, 1944
(untitled)
1945
April 11, 1945
(untitled)
April 18, 1945
(untitled)
A thief posing as Blackie steals the Wentworth diamonds and kills two guards, and Farraday finds the gems in Blackie's own apartment.
Blackie and Shorty fish John Walters out of a lake wearing brand-new shoes, and the fine print on an insurance policy points to his killer.
Mary borrows Blackie's gun to face down a pestering ex-boyfriend; when the man dies in his burned home, Blackie plants a decoy threat to shield her, and Farraday isn't buying it.
Blackie is strong-armed into guarding a threatened millionaire who is shot dead inside a sealed room, leaving a houseful of resentful heirs as suspects.
May 23, 1945
(untitled)
May 30, 1945
(untitled)
A woman posing as Mrs. Boston Blackie blackmails a political candidate, Mary fears the romance is over, and Farraday pins a murder on Blackie that turns on a single sofa.
Mary talks a desperate young woman out of suicide and into her troubles with a bully named Oscar Wolfe.
Unable to get in to see Sam Bellows, Blackie tells Farraday he has murdered the man, only for Bellows to turn up genuinely dead with a knife in him.
Larry Brown owes Blackie a hundred dollars and is on the run, terrified for his life.
Blackie breaks it off with Mary as a ruse; when a vault crew grabs her, they make the worst mistake of their careers.
The Worthington pearls end up in Blackie's raincoat and a dead man in his apartment, and the jewels finally surface inside Farraday's own tobacco jar.
Blackie's car is used in the hit-and-run death of an heiress, and a fair-minded Farraday lets him run down whether her boyfriend, father, or brother is to blame.
A lavender letter lures Blackie after the $50,000 a dead gangster hid, just as three of the crook's ex-cellmates hit the street chasing the same money.
A shipboard business trip goes wrong when Blackie and Mary find a dead woman in Mary's cabin, and Farraday, as ever, likes Blackie for it.
Mary's old friend, a nightclub cigarette girl, is accused of murder, and Blackie's search for the truth leads to a hypnotist's act at the Boulevard Club.
A frightened woman drags Blackie to a house for protection and winds up dead, and the rooms seem to have changed when he returns with Farraday -- all but the jimmy scratch he left on the door.
A wealthy widow hires Blackie to break up her own tiara for charity, but rarer pearls vanish and her daughter-in-law is strangled, until a cat's paw fingers the killer.
August 27, 1945
(untitled)
September 3, 1945
(untitled)
A lawyer insists his client was framed for murder, but the case turns on forgery and a killer picking off the witnesses one by one.
A parking attendant spots blood on Blackie's sleeve just as a vengeful ex-con named Fred Arlen leaves jail and turns up murdered.
A crooked card game passes the Westfield diamond around town, and once a switchboard operator and another man are killed the stone goes missing entirely.
A man is accused of swapping a paste copy for a $25,000 diamond bracelet, and the imitation's maker holds the key.
A gambler pressures a boxing champ to throw a fight; when the champ wins and then dies in a fall, Farraday likes Blackie for the killing.
John Richards is murdered and his diamond stolen, Blackie is shot, and Mary's little dog Mutsie turns up the clue that cracks the case.
With Shorty jailed for a stickup Blackie doubts he pulled, Mary goes undercover at a suspect's family farm and vanishes, the family swearing she was never there.
A man surfacing from amnesia finds a corpse and hires Blackie to learn whether he himself is the killer.
Blackie pries a bank gang's hidden loot location from a jailed accomplice, then is snatched from his bed and dosed with truth serum while Shorty, Mary, and Farraday race to find him.
A foreman is shot on the 21st floor of a high-rise job; bedridden with laryngitis, Blackie predicts a second identical killing and solves both without leaving his room.
A departing handyman boasts of stealing his employers' $50,000 pearls, and an insurance man is murdered outside Blackie's door before Blackie recovers the necklace and names the killer.
Serving as a movie-set consultant, Blackie watches an actress shot dead inside a trunk during a take, then the prop man stabbed with Blackie's own knife.
A civic-forum panelist collapses from poison on live television just as he is about to make an accusation, and everyone at the table shared the same water pitcher.
Jewel thieves lift the Masters diamond at a dinner party where the hostess is then found dead, and the family heir soon turns up hanging from a chandelier.
1946
Blackie and Mary take in a carnival where the sword swallower is murdered, a suspect turns up dead, and the bearded lady proves to be a man.
January 8, 1946
Harlin Escapes
January 15, 1946
(untitled)
Blackie warns Mary not to look behind his dining-room doors, where a body lies -- but by the time Farraday searches, the corpse is gone and a stolen pearl necklace turns up in the safe.
A witness who swore he saw a man murder his wife recants on the stand, claiming Farraday beat the lie out of him, and the D.A. gives the inspector 48 hours -- so Farraday turns to Blackie for help.
Strangers keep mistaking Blackie for a Mr. Peterkin, and after a jeweler insists on the same odd name and is then found dead, Blackie must unravel the reason for the ruse.
A husband begs Blackie to deliver a $50,000 kidnap ransom for his wife -- so Blackie leaves the kidnappers a note and keeps the cash.
A man acquitted of shooting his wife can't be tried again, but her brother asks Blackie and Farraday to dig up the evidence that would have convicted him.
Blackie outbids a man in a green hat for a vase Mary wants, and when a wounded messenger dies delivering it, fingerprints expose the bidder as a bank robber.
A man boasts he will kill Thomas Evers and beat any proof, and pulls off a seemingly perfect murder from 25 miles away that only Blackie can crack.
A colorblind woman warns Blackie away from Lee Chow's, and when he goes anyway he finds the owner murdered and himself framed as the only patron.
Shorty brings a hysterical maid claiming to have seen a ghost to Blackie; when she turns up dead and a famous pianist reports her own ghost, Farraday is left tied in knots.
A fashion designer confesses to Blackie that he is really a con man, and after a $25,000 safe robbery and the designer's murder, Blackie hunts the real killer.
A woman phones Blackie to say she is about to be killed, and by the time he races to the rescue she is already dead.
A rookie ballplayer's brother is buried in gambling debt, and a killing pins evidence on Blackie as a gambler schemes to force the star to throw games.
Mary's stolen car is disguised with a swapped engine and resold; when the mechanic who did the work is shot by his boss, Blackie and Farraday trace the ring.
Farraday accuses a psychiatrist of murdering his patient, Frances Fielding, but Blackie believes the doctor is framed, with the victim's brother and a damning diary in the mix.
Hired to solve diamonds vanishing daily from a jewelry firm's 12th floor despite searches of every worker, Blackie goes undercover as the case turns deadly.
Blackie and Mary find a millionaire dead on a park merry-go-round, and when the carousel's owner is killed on his own ride, the victim's widow and her lawyer draw scrutiny.
A pawnbroker entrusts Blackie with a possibly stolen diamond, then is shot, and a tip places Blackie at the scene -- but for once Farraday takes him at his word.
An escaped convict Blackie sent up heads straight for his apartment, and the trail leads Blackie to a waterfront dive where the man's daughter has fallen in with a gang.
An old man's death by apparent heart failure looks like murder to his granddaughter, while Farraday juggles three near-identical killings across town -- and a dentist supplies the answer.
A killer hands off his gun for safekeeping; Blackie steals it back and airmails it to Farraday, then boards a plane out of Boston that vanishes with Blackie its only passenger.
An extortion gang terrorizes shopkeepers, so Blackie tails a collector to a fatal crash and uses a motel key to impersonate the dead man at the Hooded Gang's next meeting.
A dying eccentric mails his three heirs broken flagstones and promises to pay whoever brings one in; the first to try is murdered, and Blackie hurries to find the killer.
1947
A murderer hiding under an assumed name at a quarry is buried by a dynamite blast, but Blackie suspects he's alive, and a trail of mint candies leads to a sweet solution.
A woman covets a $10,000 mink, Farraday suspects Blackie of a fur-theft ring after finding a coat in Mary's flat, and the greedy woman is smothered to death in her own Persian lamb.
An insurance man hunting a wanted killer loses the only photo in a rooming-house fire, and a firebug subplot leads Blackie to where the fugitive is hiding.
A smooth pair snatch the Willebrandt diamonds for their boss to fence, until Blackie wrecks the plan and the gems go missing.
A smuggler fished from a lake carries a card naming Blackie, then turns up alive on a tugboat ride and dead again, and a near-drowning finally unlocks the mix-up.
Two escaped cons hide in the city while a threatened crooner is forced to sing a coded song on the radio -- so Blackie cracks the code and takes the singer's place to trap the gang.
A musical-comedy star vanishes from her dressing room under Blackie's nose and is murdered, and a broken mirror proves very bad luck indeed.
A young man caught in a stolen-goods ring vanishes, and his parents ask Blackie to find him -- discovering there is more than steaks for sale at Arden's butcher shop.
A boxer refuses $10,000 to throw a fight and is beaten so he can't compete, so Blackie bets big on the replacement and forces the fixers into the open.
A racketeer's grip on neighborhood teens fuels a stolen-car ring, and Blackie uses a decoy car as bait to catch a cop-killer and break the racket.
An amnesiac calling himself Sam Fisher hires Blackie to recover his true identity, while his wife and a friend pursue plans of their own around a dead cabbie and an ugly tie.
Someone is robbing the city's horse-betting parlors while bragging he is Boston Blackie, and the real Blackie is holding $20,000 in charity money the crooks unwisely grab.
A store owner in Valley Junction recognizes the wrong man and is murdered before Blackie -- waylaid off the bus at gunpoint -- can reach him on foot.
Two feuding spinster sisters share a junk-filled mansion until the money-holding one is murdered and the other vanishes, with her fortune left to a young newsboy.
A man receives a phonograph record predicting his own murder, and it comes true on the spot, leaving Blackie to sort a rival suitor from a resentful brother.
A kidnapped heiress is briefly stashed in Shorty's apartment before being snatched back, and Blackie -- away on the West Coast -- solves the case entirely by long distance.
A man is shot while writing a letter to Blackie, and a ballplayer is steered toward a girl paid to make him throw a game.
A wife overhears her husband asking whether her life insurance still pays if she's murdered; he's jailed and bailed, and then she is shot dead.
Thugs drown a man in a bathtub and dump him in the zoo's sea-lion pool, and his grief-stricken girlfriend may not be as broken up as she seems.
Blackie breaks into prison to shield a friend's son from being framed for a murder that then happens in a cell -- leaving Blackie trapped inside and Mary to spring him.
Blackie gives a lift to a hitchhiker who turns out to have drowned three years earlier, and the ghost story is used to wreck his credibility in a trial he smells is rigged.
A woman is stalked by a man who appears everywhere she looks, and when she phones Blackie from a party for help he arrives to find neither the woman nor the party.
Blackie infiltrates a gang to gather evidence and shoots a night watchman with blanks, only for the man to be found really shot dead and Blackie's alibi to evaporate.
After a robbery kills two people, a mother turns in her unemployed son when she finds the loot and murder weapon in his dresser, but Blackie doubts his guilt.
An ex-con refuses to let gamblers use his pet shop's back room and is murdered in Blackie's apartment, after which the killer sacks Blackie and dumps him in the river.
A smuggler flying imported woolens in by helicopter kills his partner for the profits, but the dying man names him -- even as Mary swears the killer was hosting her at the time.
A harmonica player shot by his jealous girlfriend staggers, dying, into a racketeer's place, leaving the crime boss holding a very awkward corpse.
A construction crew fronts for bank robbers who shoot a guard during the Parkway job, and one victim ends up sealed inside a wall.
A waxworks maker builds a perfect figure of Blackie -- and one of an unseen incoming racketeer -- so when a rival mob photographs the wax boss to kill him, they target Blackie by mistake.
A mayor is shot from a rooftop and a bystander murdered at his door, and Mary's whim not to buy a hat in the rain gives Blackie the clue that untangles who was the real target.
An informer warns Farraday of an armored-car heist and is killed for it, so the mob orders Blackie dead and a load of new cars stolen instead.
A man murders his wife, entombs her under a basement floor, and burns the house down, but the buried body isn't where his accomplice says -- and the obvious killer isn't the killer.
A man is murdered in the middle of an open field during an inspection tour, and the puzzle is not only who did it but how.
A man is killed and Mary is framed for it because Blackie refused to play his part in Buckley's protection racket.
A shoeshine boy fronting a counterfeit-money ring is caught between two bosses and killed, and Blackie polishes off the case Farraday can't.
A shipowner's cargoes are lured onto a reef by a phantom lighthouse, and a keeper's mysterious fatal fall deepens the mystery until Blackie sheds light on it.
A car bomb kills the wrong man in a borrowed car, and a munitions maker who had threatened the intended victim becomes Farraday's chief suspect.
A locomotive hauling a million dollars in uncut diamonds departs and never arrives, its crew found back at the terminal, and the entire train seems to have vanished.
A gambler marked for death by loan sharks refuses all help and kidnaps Mary, vowing to kill her if anyone intervenes so he'll die in the chair, forcing Blackie to save her alive.
A man buys himself an alibi for the murder of his rich aunt, but when the aunt is killed and then the alibi witness too, the case becomes a real puzzler for Blackie.
A hired killer arrives to murder a man's wife, but the plan backfires when a grudge-holding third party finds the intended husband tied up and helpless.
A guard is murdered and a million-dollar diamond stolen in mid-air aboard a chartered plane, after the pilot blacks out and the courier is left bound.
A henchman lures Blackie into a warehouse gunfight and slugs him, then a real robbery kills a guard and a film of Blackie at the scene forces him to go underground to trap the gang.
Blackie is paid $1,000 simply to deliver a worn-out old shoe to the police.
A gangster-run company that specializes in contract murder becomes Blackie's target -- until one of his enemies hires the firm to kill Boston Blackie himself.
An armored van crashes on a foggy night; the driver dies, the surviving guard is later found murdered, and Blackie is called in to solve the robbery.
With Farraday on vacation, an ambitious deputy warns Blackie off the returning Murdock gang, so Blackie beats the gang to a half-million in jewels and is left holding the empty safe.
A gangster realizes a lookalike killing at the wrong address was meant for him, and Blackie and Farraday plant a coded newspaper item to trap the assassins.
December 10, 1947
The Arnold Murder Case
A man steals four rings from a jewelry store, but when he is caught he no longer has them.
Blackie sends Mary to draw out a returning jewelry racketeer, then finds her apartment building peopled by strangers who claim she never lived there.
Blackie wonders why a known diamond smuggler would bother bringing a simple door buzzer and battery set into the country.
1948
A jealous stable owner who threatened a mystery writer is himself found dead by a horse's stall, and while Farraday blames the horse, Blackie sifts three suspects to prove murder.
An inventor is shot in a secret hotel room before Blackie can review his plans, and a rubber plant reveals how the killer found the room -- so Blackie disguises himself as an old man to solve it.
A boxer is shot dead in the first round, and with a gambler and a thieving manager both in the frame, his girlfriend asks Blackie to find the killer.
A disc jockey keeps getting odd record requests whose titles and times signal crimes to come, in an episode featuring a guest turn by bandleader Guy Lombardo.
Mary catches Blackie in an apparent affair with Helen Carver, who is really working for a crook and wants Blackie to crack a safe and destroy some papers.
Readers of a hit novel are being murdered while the pseudonymous author is shaken down, and a rival who knows his secret and an Alaska-expedition disappearance figure in it.
A deputy inspector sees Blackie flee a murdered man's house gun in hand, leaving Blackie to build his defense from three clues: a flattened nail, a homburg hat, and five shots.
A man shoots his wife and, apparently at the same moment with the same gun, a man twenty miles away, giving himself an airtight alibi -- until Blackie figures out the trick.
A trucking-line owner is murdered and his partner charged, but behind it all is a girlfriend's greed for a mink coat.
A man is killed before he can drop $50,000 at Blackie's, and the trail leads to a racket that smuggles wanted hoods out of town.
A widely hated man is shot for refusing to keep paying blackmail, and Blackie makes himself the killer's next target by claiming to know who did it.
A wrestler idolizing Blackie wants to meet him against his crooked manager's wishes, and the dirty game he's caught in turns deadly.
An escaped killer comes gunning for Blackie, and a man who hates Blackie even more kidnaps him to keep from being blamed for the revenge.
A photographer is shot dead in his studio and the shotgun turns up in a suspect's car, but the real puzzle is how the weapon was smuggled in and out.
An escape-artist magician drowns when his rope breaks at the circus, and thrown knives -- and a knife-practicing suspect -- suggest the accident was murder.
Two swindlers running an auto-insurance racket turn to murder when one of their marks refuses to play along.
A man is killed by a bomb thrown through his window, and the bombers, with a witness to silence, build a second bomb meant for Blackie.
The Bolo gang breaks out of prison using a hidden way of signaling the inmates, and Blackie must crack the communication trick -- and a taunting con's silly song -- to stop them.
May 12, 1948
The Case of the False Confession
The police are certain they know who committed a murder, until another man confesses to it and Blackie refuses to believe him.
May 19, 1948
The Corpse That Wouldn't Stay Dead
A man written off as dead in a gang war ten years earlier is identified by both the police and Blackie as a traffic-accident victim.
May 26, 1948
The Five Cent Murder Case
A man appears to have been murdered over a single nickel -- a counterfeit that, had it been genuine, would have been worth a fortune to collectors.
June 2, 1948
Murder at the Race Track
A harness racer keeps losing when his horses break stride, and after the driver is murdered Blackie steps in.
June 9, 1948
(untitled)
June 16, 1948
(untitled)
A man is shot outside his home with a gun a city councilman reported stolen, and the killers race to silence the victim's wife before Blackie and Farraday can reach her.
A professor punctual for thirty years is late to class because he's been murdered, and Blackie returns to his old college to sort a rival, a missing student, and a recruited athlete.
Blackie and his friend Charlie Kingston are robbed of diamonds by three thugs, one of whom is killed by another over the split, and Blackie tricks the survivors into betraying their alibi.
Blackie is framed for the murder of John Cummings, and Farraday keeps him locked up to lull the real killer.
A crook has an informer killed by a hitman who resembles movie star George Allen, so Blackie enlists the star to help catch his double and break a counterfeit-ticket racket.
A cabbie watches a fare walk into a vacant lot and vanish, and when a strangled man turns up with strange papers on him, the lot holds the answer.
A man goads Blackie into knocking him down, then kills two brothers and names Blackie as his alibi, leaving Blackie to prove the impossible five-minute trip that breaks it.
A man is three hours from execution for killing his wife, and Blackie's race to find an alibi witness nearly gets the sentencing judge killed too.
A door-to-door salesman leaves a deadly package and a housemaid dies in her employer's place, so Blackie starts making deliveries of his own to hand Farraday a killer.
A man poisons his wife by phone as she takes what she thinks is medicine, and his razor-blade alibi collapses when Blackie notes he uses an electric shaver.
A joke about buying Mary a dime necklace is taken as a fence's code, drawing Blackie into a stolen-goods ring whose boss unknowingly employs one of his own victims' wives.
A millionaire buys a fifteen-story office building that has vanished into an empty lot by the next morning, and Blackie recovers the building and solves a murder besides.
September 15, 1948
(untitled)
September 22, 1948
(untitled)
A woman flirts with her golf instructor, and her jealous husband sets out to teach the man a lesson.
A man is offered $50,000 for a single one-dollar bill.
October 13, 1948
(untitled)
A hit-and-run at the docks is finished off by a fake ambulance crew.
October 20, 1948
(untitled)
October 27, 1948
(untitled)
November 3, 1948
(untitled)
November 10, 1948
(untitled)
November 17, 1948
(untitled)
November 24, 1948
(untitled)
December 1, 1948
(untitled)
A man and the victim's wife stage a perfect murder by lightning in a meadow, but a missing lab lightning rod tips off an assistant who then dies too.
December 15, 1948
Too Late Jailbreak
A man breaks out of jail to kill his target, only to arrive a little too late.
Blackie and Farraday nab a jewel-store thief with no loot on him, and Blackie -- realizing the rings were tossed into a sidewalk Santa's bucket -- goes undercover as Santa Claus to recover them.
December 29, 1948
(untitled)
1949
A wealthy friend is fleeced at a fourth-floor gambling den that has vanished by the time Blackie returns, so he stakes out the bank to trace the crooked check.
A man pays $5,000 to sleep at Blackie's and is shot dead in a panic over the time when all the clocks are broken, in a nightclub-option murder that draws real-life columnist Dorothy Kilgallen -- Kollmar's wife -- in for the scoop.
A body turns up on a boat marooned in the middle of a street as a movie publicity stunt, but the corpse is the film's own director, and the case is weird enough that Farraday wants Blackie.
A man in Africa reads that he's been declared dead by a brother grabbing the money, and as he asks Blackie to prove his identity, the witnesses who could vouch for him are murdered.
Mary asks Blackie to get a songwriter to publish her cousin's tune, and when one of the publisher's writing team is shot, suspicion swirls around a partner's wife.
A man holding $50,000 in bonds to be split among his gang vanishes from a rooftop and is found ten miles away full of bullets, leaving a cryptic 'pepper and salt' clue.
Blackie cancels a cruise to nail a waterfront crime boss after a stevedore who wouldn't pay protection is crushed by a cut-rope crate, and the trail ends in a shootout at the boss's hideout.
A slot-machine racket's bagman fakes a $25,000 holdup and hides the cash in a subway locker, whose key his girlfriend loses in a slot machine, and Blackie's new recorder gets the proof.
A newsboy steers Blackie to a staged-accident racket run out of the Polk Street Mission, which Blackie infiltrates under an alias to expose its unorthodox money-making.
A woman who faked her own death and hid $600,000 is killed before she can double-cross her old gang, and Blackie is shot as the whole affair converges in a wine cellar.
Blackie snatches a murder suspect from Farraday at gunpoint to force out the truth, only to have gangsters kill the man, landing Blackie in jail to solve it with Mary's help.
A perfume-loving swindler runs a crooked charity roulette game and murders his own henchman, and Blackie recognizes the rigged wheels as one craftsman's handiwork.
A collector advertises that he'll store his priceless Amadon pearls overnight, so Blackie steals them to teach him a lesson -- only to find them, and two other stolen sets, all worthless paste.
A gangster fears a fellow mob member who is safely in jail, yet is murdered anyway, and Blackie gets himself locked up to prove the jailed man somehow did it.
Two crooks kill a jewelry-store owner just to grab Blackie's watch left for repair, then steal his gun and frame him, until Farraday's closet mishap turns the tables.
A carnival fortune teller foretells a death with Blackie at its center, and murder duly strikes amid a pickpocket, a monkey-costumed performer, and a deaf carnival owner.
A contractor keeps losing bids to a rival who somehow knows his numbers and is then shot, and the rival's alibi collapses when his witnesses turn up dead over a cliff.
A man is stabbed to death on a Chinatown sightseeing bus, and when the killer tries to blackmail the auction-house boss who hired him, he's barreled into the river.
A small-time racketeer sends proof of a crime kingpin's misdeeds to Blackie's door, but his double-crossing stooge tries to blackmail 'the Senator' instead and pays with his life.
A phony oil-stock ring hires a woman to kill Blackie after an informer is murdered, and Mary and a well-timed whiff of perfume save the day.
Blackie and Mary register under false names at a dude ranch to investigate a lonely-hearts racket behind two disappearing guests, and a search for a coat button ends a murderer's run.
Trailing a stolen-tire racketeer who tacks Blackie's tires flat, Blackie commandeers a faulty motorcycle, crashes, and after the hospital eavesdrops his way to the gang's garage.
Two crooks work a perfume racket, killing the real salesman so one can impersonate him, and a gang member's murder -- and her strangled cat -- expose a suspect's animal phobia.
An elaborately planned bank robbery blows the safe and kills the night watchman, and the mastermind's boast that he planned it that way becomes his undoing.
June 22, 1949
(untitled)
June 29, 1949
(untitled)
The Story
Boston Blackie followed the reformed jewel thief of Jack Boyle's pulp stories into a second career as a freelance sleuth -- "enemy to those who make him an enemy, friend to those who have no friend" -- forever one step ahead of the exasperated Inspector Farraday. The character reached radio twice. NBC ran a summer series in 1944 with Chester Morris, fresh from Columbia's Blackie films, opposite Richard Lane's Farraday. Then producer Frederic Ziv rebuilt the show for first-run syndication (1945-1950), casting Broadway's Richard Kollmar as Blackie, Maurice Tarplin as Farraday, and Jan Miner as Blackie's companion Mary Wesley; the transcribed half-hours reached hundreds of local stations and became one of the most successful syndicated programs of their era. Blackie's cases run to jewel heists, impossible alibis, waterfront rackets, and the occasional carnival ghost, always cracked with a con man's flair and a needle aimed at the police. Kollmar, incidentally, was married to columnist Dorothy Kilgallen -- who turns up in a 1949 episode to grab a scoop. This collection gathers the surviving broadcasts from both runs.
Full story — coming soon while it's being curated.
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