← Richard Diamond, Private Detective
Richard Diamond, Private Detective — 1949
36 episodes broadcast in 1949.
April 24, 1949
The earliest surviving episode (the true premiere a week earlier is lost): wealthy Richard Barton brings Diamond a desperate job -- exonerate his imprisoned son Roger, framed for murder -- as two hoods warn the detective off.
May 8, 1949
Ralph Chase wants Diamond's help with his two resentful stepchildren, but a gangster's bullet finds Chase first, tangling Diamond in a fight over the family money.
A frail old woman leaves Diamond a shabby black purse that looks worthless -- yet half the city seems ready to kill to get it back.
The tidy murder-suicide of wealthy Betty Moran looks staged to Diamond, who traces the death back to a blackmailer's squeeze.
June 5, 1949
June 12, 1949
A jealous husband's rage over a gossip-column item about his socialite wife pulls Diamond into a killing.
A mail bomb kills Tom Waxman and his brother takes the blame, but Diamond suspects a shadowy pressure group behind the blast.
A bloodied hat marked B.K. turns up in a gutter and frames a man for a murder that has no corpse -- an early twist on a classic swindle.
Two lifers break out of Sing Sing bent on killing Diamond, and open their campaign by kidnapping Helen Asher.
A killer is slashing women across the city, and the failure to stop him threatens Lt. Levinson's job.
A wife hires Diamond to shadow her straying husband -- and the trail leads straight to a corpse and an adulterous frame-up.
July 30, 1949
A former nightclub photographer hires Diamond to keep her alive; the reason someone wants her dead is buried in her old job.
August 13, 1949
A young man is accused of running down his sweetheart in Central Park -- he swears she was pushed -- as a gangland killing plays out nearby.
A condemned prisoner's last request sends Diamond to death row, then racing to keep the man's teenage brother off the same road to the chair.
A shoplifting widow's suicide, a husband's office affair, and a $300,000 jewel robbery knot together into a single Long Island murder.
A phony spiritualist milks the wealthy Van Dyke family through staged seances, and Diamond is hired to expose the racket.
A cheerfully unhinged visitor named Jerome J. Jerome hires Diamond as a bodyguard -- and it turns out he really does know where a body lies.
Thugs keep beating Diamond for a $200,000 'bundle' he knows nothing about, with a mysterious black bag at the center of it all.
A woman reports a corpse in a room locked from the inside -- the loose end of a blackmail plot against a rich old man.
A newsstand boy stuck with a counterfeit five-dollar bill puts Diamond onto a ring of forgers.
A French hat designer hires Diamond to guard his new fall line from thieves, then turns up murdered before the show.
A mother asks Diamond to find her missing private-eye son, who soon surfaces dead -- with two hard cases hunting for one of his shoes.
A lighter outing built around a song-hating neighbor and an affectionate send-up of radio's other detectives.
Diamond is framed with a fortune in diamonds stolen from the Police Commissioner's own home.
A man deported years earlier is back in the country and the bodies are stacking up -- with Diamond marked as the next name on the list.
A patient treated for amnesia confesses to murder under narcotics, and Diamond digs into what really happened during the man's lost days.
A dreamlike, self-mocking case for a scatterbrained client -- Diamond himself pronounces it the hokiest job he has ever taken.
A newly widowed woman is tormented by her late husband's ghost in a mansion built for mysticism, in a comic haunted-house tale.
A stranger calmly tells Diamond he intends to commit a murder; it takes a yo-yo to disarm the little gunman sent to stop him.
For Christmas Eve, Diamond and his friends stage their own hard-boiled retelling of Dickens' 'A Christmas Carol.'
A retired stockbroker is convinced his stepdaughter and sole heir means to kill him, and Diamond trails the frightened man into an asylum.
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