The Adventures of Frank Race

May 1, 1949 – February 19, 1950 · 43 broadcasts

The Adventures of Frank Race is a globe-trotting detective-adventure series syndicated in 1949 by Bruce Eells & Associates under the Broadcasters Program Syndicate banner. Its hook is pure postwar: before the war Frank Race was an attorney, during it he served with the OSS -- the wartime spy agency that became the CIA -- and afterward he found that he could not go back to ordinary life, so "adventure became his business" as a freelance troubleshooter and international insurance investigator. Each half-hour drops Race and his wisecracking cab-driver sidekick Mark Donovan into an exotic postwar city, where an insurance claim turns out to hide a crime, a chase, and a woman who is rarely what she seems -- a flavor catalogers have long summed up as "James Bond meets Johnny Dollar." Tom Collins played Race for the first 22 episodes and Paul Dubov for the rest; Tony Barrett was Donovan throughout, with Ivan Ditmars at the organ and Art Gilmore announcing. All 43 episodes survive -- an unusually complete run for a syndicated series of its day.