Boston Blackie — 1947
52 episodes broadcast in 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.
◆ ◆ ◆