Philo Vance — 1949
52 episodes broadcast in 1949.
A thoroughly nasty magician is knifed inside a locked, bolted dressing room -- an impossible killing a rival illusionist all but dares Vance to solve.
January 11, 1949
The Midway Murder Case
January 18, 1949
The Supreme Murder Case
Rival collectors covet a supposedly copper idol that Vance suspects is solid gold, and one of them soon turns up dead.
The crooked executor of a young heiress's estate is shot, after a fortune-teller's crystal ball seemed to foretell it.
An airline pilot is stabbed in the ready room, with his co-pilot and a jealous passenger both holding strong motives.
A blackmailing 'professor' tries to squeeze $100,000 from a dentist who dies before he can pay. (The surviving recording is very crackly.)
A dress-shop owner is shoved under a truck, and a passing news photographer's snapshot of the crowd holds Vance's clue.
The operator of a phony-charity racket is murdered, and Vance is certain the killer will be nursing a bruised cheek.
A widely loathed stage actor is murdered, leaving nearly everyone in the company with a motive.
A rich recluse guarded by a high wall, an alarm beam and a gun is murdered anyway, and Vance disputes the tidy solution the police reach.
A stockbroker who ruined a client with bad advice -- while romancing a gangster's girl -- is found murdered.
A long-overlooked woman who has just come into money predicts her own murder and asks Vance not to avenge it.
A cowboy movie star is thrown from his horse and dies on set as a ring vanishes from his finger -- an 'accident' Vance reads as murder.
One Green sister is murdered, then the second is killed in exactly the same way, as Markham is warned to keep Vance off the case.
An ex-racketeer's girlfriend is shot dead in his imported car, and the answer turns on a British motor and an English manservant.
One holdup man shoots his own partner, who dies clutching a coded note reading 'Live On.'
Markham prosecutes a man caught over a corpse with the murder weapon, even as he grows sure the defendant was framed.
A universally despised man announces his own murder at police headquarters -- then drops dead of poison.
A torch singer moonlighting as a blackmailer -- the so-called Broadway Butterfly -- turns up dead, and one of her marks offers Vance $20,000 for some letters.
A racket boss is gunned down despite his bodyguard, and the organ-grinder who might have witnessed it is murdered too.
Bloodied ducks spotted on the golf course put Vance onto a counterfeiting ring -- and a murderer.
A wealthy man is run down on Mistletoe Road with all the evidence aimed at his brother -- keep an eye on a freshly painted 1942 Plymouth.
A gambling-house owner reports she is about to be murdered, but it is her gardener and ex-fiance who die; watch the sandwich.
Vance is beaten to warn him off a man he has never met, who then dies right after boasting his burglar-proof safe was cracked.
A racing driver is killed at the wheel of a tampered car, pulling Vance into the rivalries of the speedway.
Kidnappers seize Vance himself, and the man he was meant to protect is killed while the detective is held blindfolded.
The blackmailing owner of a penny arcade is shot dead as Vance and Markham stand in his shop; a single cent is worth watching.
The murder of a small men's-shop owner draws Vance into a gambling operation built on numbers and horse bets.
A 'cheesecake' photographer is killed and his fleeing 'murderer' dies in a crash, but Vance doubts the dead man behind the wheel is the killer.
Racketeer 'Tick-Tock' Maxwell is murdered, and a crook cheerfully confesses to robbing the safe -- as his alibi.
An eccentric millionaire bent on landing a giant tuna goes missing, and two murders follow before Vance reels in the killer.
A shotgun-happy gang boss dies in a bombing just as his former sweetheart leaves the country for South America.
A newspaperman's wife is strangled, and the motive hides in the sheet-music trade and a song called 'The Blue Penny.'
A false brother joins forces with a real one to claim a $250,000 inheritance, and a killing follows the family quarrel.
A millionaire is robbed and murdered and his butler vanishes, the case tied to an old woman in the park who refuses all help.
A man in a checkered suit seems to commit three robberies in three places at once and vanish from each.
At a southwestern dude ranch, a shooting leads Vance to a machine that supposedly prints genuine dollar bills.
A suspected smuggler is killed and a famous diamond stolen, the culprit pausing for a cup of tea.
A business executive is knifed in his office, with his wife, his assistant and a clerk all under suspicion.
A man claiming to be 400 years old tries to sell his secret of long life, and Vance cannot yet prove him a fraud.
November 1, 1949
The Revealing Ring Murder Case
November 8, 1949
The Mental Murder Case
A manufacturer is shot surprising a safecracker whose combination only he and his secretary knew; a cab ride to nowhere is the clue.
A woman tells Vance two of her dreams have already come true -- and the third is that she will kill a man.
A man on the telephone during a thunderstorm remarks 'What a night for murder' and is shot on the spot.
A married guest at his ex-girlfriend's engagement party is murdered under cover of a magician's disappearing-birdcage trick.
In a locked bedroom, a man is strangled by a disembodied gray glove glimpsed through the keyhole.
A Chinatown robbery-murder sets Vance after a killer who demands a single $15,000 dish of Din Yip Har.
A hood named Tommy Orchid murders a man who merely resembled Vance -- and does not forgive his own mistakes.
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