Police-detective drama · CBS
Broadway Is My Beat
February 27, 1949 – August 1, 1954 · 212 broadcasts
Broadway Is My Beat is CBS radio at its most stylish -- a hard-boiled murder mystery told like a prose poem. Homicide Detective Danny Clover works the stretch of Manhattan "from Times Square to Columbus Circle, the gaudiest, the most violent, the lonesomest mile in the world," and narrates each case in dense, aching, streetwise verse over a lush orchestral score. The show began in New York in February 1949 with Anthony Ross as Clover, then moved to Hollywood that July, where producer-director Elliott Lewis reinvented it: Larry Thor took the lead, Morton Fine and David Friedkin wrote the scripts, and Wilbur Hatch and a young Alexander Courage (later of Star Trek fame) scored it, while three sound men built the clatter of a city that never quiets down. The result is one of the era's most atmospheric crime dramas -- less a procedural than a nightly love letter, in blood, to Broadway itself.
Collection status:
166 of 212 held (78% complete)
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Episode Spine
Grouped by year. Jump to the full list below, or open a season on its own page.
- 1949 (32 episodes)
- 1950 (41 episodes)
- 1951 (36 episodes)
- 1952 (52 episodes)
- 1953 (47 episodes)
- 1954 (4 episodes)
1949
February 27, 1949
Premiere Broadcast
A vanished Indiana farm boy named Andrew Jenkins sends Clover chasing a shadowy figure known only as 'Golden' Gold.
March 13, 1949
The Gordon Ellis Murder Case
March 20, 1949
The Eugene Bullock Murder Case
When the betting odds on a welterweight bout swing the wrong way overnight, Clover smells a rigged fight.
April 3, 1949
The Jimmy Dorne Murder Case
April 10, 1949
The Otto Procausch Murder Case
April 17, 1949
(untitled)
April 24, 1949
The Henry Baker Murder Case
Poisoned in Clover's own office, Mary Murdock dies with her husband -- just paroled after twenty years and still living mentally in the 1920s -- as the obvious suspect.
May 8, 1949
The Joan Gale Murder Case
May 15, 1949
(untitled)
A society 'Cinderella girl' disappears, and her wealthy attorney fiance seems oddly untroubled by it.
May 29, 1949
The Rhonda Lynn Murder Case
June 5, 1949
The Joe Quento Murder Case
June 12, 1949
The Eddie Amboy Murder Case
A run of killings inside a vaudeville house opens with the death of Otto Prokosh, an athlete newly arrived from Vienna.
A reformed ex-convict who once did Clover a good turn is accused of a million-dollar jewel heist -- and is dead before the day ends.
A doctor bursts into Clover's office with something urgent to tell him, then dies of a bullet wound before he can get it out.
A scandal-sheet reporter hands Clover a prophecy that arrived in the mail: a woman will be murdered before the night is over.
A pint-sized jockey's odd airport-locker errand pulls Clover into a tangle of $100,000, a dead rider and murderous bookmakers.
A hated novelist is found starved to death -- in a locked room stocked with food.
A telegram reading 'terror follows me' precedes the theft of a jade statuette and two deaths tied to a professor of Oriental art.
A gunman kills the detective escorting a handcuffed prisoner, the prisoner bolts, and Clover hunts them both.
A man from Iowa is found dead outside a run-down sanitarium, his five thousand dollars gone.
With a young man only days from the electric chair for murder, Clover races a Monday deadline to find grounds for a stay.
Sherman Gates is found poisoned in a movie-theater balcony, and the trail leads on to a murdered photographer.
A hysterical 2 a.m. call sends Clover to Greenwich Village, where a beautiful garment-district model has been found hanged.
A rich man is bent on giving away fifty thousand dollars, and his brother is just as bent on stopping him.
On Christmas Eve an ex-con fresh out of Sing Sing, hired to play Santa for the police boys' league, vanishes -- with a miserly landlord dogging him.
A man reported dead in a hit-and-run turns up drunk in a hotel room, then goes out the window.
1950
A rebroadcast: poisoned in Clover's own office, Mary Murdock dies with her husband -- freshly paroled after twenty years and still living mentally in the 1920s -- the obvious suspect.
At four in the morning, John Gale lies dead in a flower shop, the alarm still ringing.
An anonymous midnight call sends Clover to a 116th Street flat, where Roberto Segura lies knifed and a stunned young woman sits nearby with her guitar.
A young man's apparent suicide looks staged, and Clover wonders whether his blind girlfriend's father had a hand in it.
A rebroadcast: a society 'Cinderella girl' disappears while her wealthy attorney fiance stays oddly calm about it.
Dion Hartley coolly tells Clover he is about to be murdered but won't name the killer -- and after the death, Clover finds himself drawn to a suspect.
Rhoda Lynn keeps pressing Clover to find who poisoned her father, in a case turning on a singularly odd murder weapon.
Fresh out of prison, Joe Quito takes a knife in the subway minutes after he stops to talk with Clover.
A newlywed couple is found shot to death in a car pulled from the river -- and no one can say how it got there.
A nightclub cigarette girl, Francine Green, keeps dodging attempts on her life.
Hope Anderson turns up shot in a fountain, her boyfriend takes a bullet too -- and so does Clover.
A bank teller embezzles twenty thousand dollars to ransom his kidnapped wife.
Poisoned mid-act, Jane Arnold dies assisting a magician at a Fuzzy Bears lodge meeting.
A pensioned-off ex-policeman is found dead, his death called a suicide.
A couple is found shot in Lover's Lane, and the trail runs to a dry cleaner and his girl.
A bread deliveryman is bludgeoned to death, his girlfriend savagely beaten as well.
A rich old man of the racetrack set turns up murdered.
Frank Briscoe is shot in his apartment in the middle of a phone call, with a hundred thousand dollars behind it.
Celia Jordan vanishes, then phones Clover only to die of poison in front of him, her apartment left torn apart.
A saloon pianist is shot dead on a revolving platform above the bar.
A young boxer is found dead in an alley.
The girl her high-school class voted most likely to succeed is slain in her rooming house.
The Coreys telephone police about their own murder-suicide pact, and Clover races a frantic plea for help.
A dazed woman is found wandering, unable to recall her own name, a blood-smeared letter opener in her purse.
John Webster is found with his throat knifed in a funeral parlor.
Harold Clark is shot dead by a neighbor, and soon after Henry Gaynor is poisoned.
Wealthy Laura Burton is found strangled with half a bathrobe sash in a waterfront hotel -- then a second woman turns up strangled with the other half.
A Chicago hoodlum is shot dead in a flophouse, and his bodyguard soon dies under the same roof.
Joan Fuller, a rich woman's maid, is found knifed and floating in the Central Park lake.
A vanished woman and a Bowery derelict stabbed in a flophouse -- Clover hunts the thread that ties them together.
Ken Mitchell lies stabbed to death, and in the next room Ruth Corey is dying too.
Ben Justin, shot twice in the back, dies in the ambulance while his wife seems unmoved -- then she herself is killed by a bomb.
1951
April 7, 1951
Fred Bayer
In the garment district, Thomas Hart turns up with shears buried in his back; when a second victim dies the same way, Clover too takes a knife.
A retired securities man is found dead the morning after a party at his Fifth Avenue apartment.
Clover answers a call to a Broadway taxi-dance hall and finds the dying girl is someone he knows -- Georgia Gray, knifed by a five-dollar dance partner.
Harry Foster is stabbed in the park, the only witnesses a small boy and a deranged cripple known as 'The Looker.'
Murdered in an alley with no wallet but a costly watch and a parking ticket, Charles Crandall then proves to be very much alive.
Al Martin is found stabbed and Eleanor Corbett thrown from a window, and Clover hunts the link between them.
A wealthy man is shot dead at high noon in a crowded Times Square by a killer who has only a month left to live.
Frank Dunn, a bartender, is found shot across the silk sheets of his hotel bed, and a woman's phone call deepens the mystery.
A fourteen-year-old girl is beaten dead with a pistol butt, the first of three killings done the same way.
Pablo Molari is found murdered outside a boys' clubhouse.
A cornered armed killer holed up in a second-floor flat vanishes when police break in -- carried out inside a coffin.
July 15, 1951
Alice Gleason
Having sworn he would blow his brains out, David Blaine appears to have made good on it.
July 29, 1951
Jimmy Sloan
Howard Crawford drowns in a city swimming pool.
August 12, 1951
Richard Folger
August 19, 1951
Roget, the Giant
Elizabeth Price dies of a heart attack after someone slips poison in among her heart pills, and her stepson hurries in from Vermont.
Tom Keeler is found shot dead in bed with two different bullets in him -- either one of them fatal -- as if murdered twice.
A celebrated torch singer applies for a gun permit, then shoots the man who has been pestering her.
Stage star Lily Nelson is discovered with both wrists slashed.
Patrolman Ed Koster burns to death in a subway blaze, the arsonist dead alongside him.
A man fears his wife is marked for death -- but it is the handsome young ski instructor who turns up dead, a ski pole through his chest.
Two die in Spanish Harlem -- one knifed in an alley, one shot through a window.
Joe Blair, a vagrant spending a night in a swank hotel, is found knifed, and a second body soon turns up in the alley.
For a bet, a rich man is slumming on the Bowery when rotgut liquor poisons him.
A young boy is pulled dead from the Central Park lake, and Clover is mugged while staking out the park.
December 1, 1951
Clinton Pace
Mary Smith is slain at the cut-rate Hotel Savannah.
A drunk reports the death of Lucille Baker, who has been strangled.
A Christmas fantasy in which, for once, Danny Clover plays second fiddle to Sergeant Tartaglia in the hunt for the missing scimitar of Genghis Khan.
1952
John Dobson dies of poison -- the second Dobson husband to do so within two years.
Just acquitted of killing his wife, John Welch vows to find the real murderer; then Larry Moore turns up beaten and, by day's end, dead.
A body pulled from the river is identified by her father as Lynn Halstead -- but it isn't, and the real Lynn Halstead surfaces later.
February 2, 1952
Herbie Jensen
February 9, 1952
May Stewart
A milkman named Raymond Grant is beaten to death, and Clover wants to know why.
February 23, 1952
Jessica Howard
March 1, 1952
Maria Osborne
In Spanish Harlem, Eve Hunter is stabbed to death with a barbed dart from the bullring.
On a rainy night, Broadway producer Gordon Merrick is murdered in his hotel room.
A bill traceable to a robbery five years gone resurfaces, pointing to a man paroled only a month before.
March 29, 1952
Celia Mason
John Elgin's death looks like a fall from his own roof -- unless he was pushed.
A death at the Globe Secretarial School: the victim is Lois Conrad.
April 19, 1952
Mark Alison
April 26, 1952
Dave Selby
May 3, 1952
Louis Webster
May 10, 1952
Joe Quito
Irene Hall and another beautiful woman are both dead with two suspects in custody, and Clover must sort out who did what to whom.
Harry Moore has been killed, and his oddly detached wife draws Clover's eye.
June 9, 1952
Wanda Korvat
Lila Hunter -- herself a murder suspect the police had been hunting -- is fished out of the river.
Joey Croft, who ran a Coney Island funhouse, is found stabbed and buried in the beach sand.
June 30, 1952
Mason Victor
July 5, 1952
Stacey Parker
July 12, 1952
Joe Dane
July 19, 1952
Leo Bruce
July 26, 1952
Paul Tudor
A pickpocket is killed just after finishing a strange errand on Park Avenue.
August 9, 1952
Ralph Walker
August 16, 1952
Joan Howard
August 23, 1952
Dr. Lyle
August 30, 1952
Althea Cornish
September 6, 1952
Herbie Ford
September 13, 1952
Joe Nelson
A ballerina is certain she will be murdered -- but it is her dancing master who is found hanged.
A dock foreman turns up shot, drowned, and his feet encased in concrete.
In a rented furnished room, Ruth Nelson is knifed to death.
Robert Turk's throat is cut in a flat reeking of incense and opium, where a seven-armed idol looms and a parakeet lies with its neck wrung.
Mary Trevor is knifed in the subway, and Clover probes her strange tie to a millionairess.
A skeleton and a thousand dollars in cash surface beneath the cellar of a building being torn down -- Bob Foster, shot twice by two different guns.
Jazz musician Kenny Purdue is murdered, the clues drifting in the marijuana haze around his new widow.
A middle-aged woman dies following a date with a college football star.
Shot while burgling a house, Johnny Clark turns out to be a shoe-salesman ex-convict sitting on a fortune in loot.
A sniper has missed five women; on the sixth, his aim is better.
December 13, 1952
Donald Wayne
After Charles Ralston's car runs down and cripples Jimmy Barton, Ralston himself turns up murdered.
December 27, 1952
Paul Clark
1953
January 3, 1953
Douglas Haydn
Lona Hanson vanishes from her blood-spattered, ransacked home, and prizefighter Julio Rio falls under suspicion.
Clover is knocked cold arresting a murderer, and then a sweet little old lady walks in and confesses.
Trumpet player Joey Condon phones police to say he is dying, while a friend finds his death darkly amusing.
Helen Selby has been murdered, and the key to her killer lies with some old men.
Peggy Warner is found poisoned in an alley.
A rookie cop is stabbed, and his wife goes wild, trying to kill his sailor friend.
A universally hated pet-shop owner, John Perry, is found stabbed and dying.
A disturbed old man squats in a squalid room, hiding the weekly cash from his rich son -- and has shot someone dead with his .38.
A practical joker is beaten to death, and a woman is found hanging.
A wealthy, urbane man is told his wife has been found murdered in the trunk of a car.
A man who has been hoarding odd objects, convinced he will be killed, is knifed by an unknown attacker on a subway platform.
Wealthy real-estate man Frank Dayton is found stabbed to death with a letter opener in his apartment.
Myra Fuller is set to wed a murder suspect, but she is hiding a great deal more than that.
Harry Gray is murdered -- an unusual victim, carrying shrapnel in his neck.
Margaret Royce vanishes -- the report coming from a very odd sister and an even odder companion.
Sybil Crane is knifed and dumped in the street, and proves to have been more than she seemed.
A meek, obedient wife is found drunk with a knife in her hand.
A heavyset redheaded woman is dumped on the waterfront, seven slugs in her.
At the Ruxton Hotel, John Nelson is knifed to death.
George Lane is knifed to death in a run-down flophouse.
A woman named Joan is knifed to death, in a case that shadows a seemingly perfect marriage.
Surrounded by books, Sophie Bretton is shot dead.
A wealthy old cotton importer dies of alkaloid poisoning, and a nurse under suspicion ends up on a ledge, threatening to jump.
A boxer who once killed an opponent in the ring is pulled beaten and dying from the river.
A woman in silk kneels over her husband, shot in the spine, refusing to believe he is dead.
A high-end jeweler is found murdered in the apartment of a couple whose wife is a kleptomaniac -- and perhaps a killer.
Shot in the back, Phillip Tyler leaves behind a marriage strained by his odd bond with another woman.
Hilda Bruce is found murdered, her young son stunned at her side.
Mrs. Webb wakes from a dream of suffocation to find a pillow pressed over her face, just as her husband comes home.
A woman who vowed she would be dead within four years beats her own deadline by four days, with the help of poison and a car wreck.
A father and son, the Kroegers, are found murdered in a double killing.
Larry Burdette is found stabbed on a subway platform.
Wealthy Michael Austin is shot in the back and left paralyzed, and Clover sets out to learn who and why.
September 19, 1953
William Jackson
An old jeweler is robbed and murdered, and his young girlfriend is soon found dead as well.
October 3, 1953
Frankie Spain
A Central Park tennis hustler named Frankie Spain is beaten to death.
Harriet Temple is found strangled in her apartment, her husband oddly unmoved.
During a party on East 63rd, a neighbor finds Cora Lee dead in the bathtub, beaten and drowned.
Two public stenographers are murdered, and a strange young man is questioned.
November 4, 1953
Paul Holland
Janice Bennett is certified dead by the very doctor who fathered her, and her husband soon turns up hanged.
1954
At 4 a.m. Clover is caught between a weeping woman who insists Garrett killed her friend Peg Miller, while Garrett insists the woman is out of her mind.
July 18, 1954
Julie Roland
Julie Roland disappears amid a threatened suicide.
After a swim at an athletic club, a man is found slugged in the locker room following a scuffle over rifled pockets.
Days after a quarrel with Mike Paulos, Floyd Decker drops out of sight, and the street says he has been murdered.
The Story
Broadway Is My Beat is CBS radio at its most stylish -- a hard-boiled murder mystery told like a prose poem. Homicide Detective Danny Clover works the stretch of Manhattan "from Times Square to Columbus Circle, the gaudiest, the most violent, the lonesomest mile in the world," and narrates each case in dense, aching, streetwise verse over a lush orchestral score. The show began in New York in February 1949 with Anthony Ross as Clover, then moved to Hollywood that July, where producer-director Elliott Lewis reinvented it: Larry Thor took the lead, Morton Fine and David Friedkin wrote the scripts, and Wilbur Hatch and a young Alexander Courage (later of Star Trek fame) scored it, while three sound men built the clatter of a city that never quiets down. The result is one of the era's most atmospheric crime dramas -- less a procedural than a nightly love letter, in blood, to Broadway itself.
Full story — coming soon while it's being curated.
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