Salute to the Law
February 13, 1934 – April 7, 1940 · 13 broadcasts
A Salute to the Law is an early law-enforcement docudrama -- crime-and-punishment stories "a la Dragnet and Calling All Cars," built around the real Los Angeles private detective Nick Harris. It is in fact the same syndicated transcription series known elsewhere as Nick Harris Detective; the thirteen surviving quarter-hour episodes here span 1934 to 1940, drawn from a Los Angeles set reported to have originated on station KECA. The real Nicholas Boilvin Harris (1882-1943) was an ex-newspaperman who opened his own detective agency in 1906 and founded a professional detective school, and the show dramatizes cases in that mold. Its register is frankly moral: crime is folly, the law is certain, and the officer is a guide as much as an enforcer -- with a recurring story of a young woman drawn into crime and redeemed by the detective who catches her. Organ interludes carry the emotion between scenes, and the titles run to the pulp -- The Case of the Avenging Angel, Fatal Ace of Spades, Drops of Blood, The Female Ogre. No broadcast log survives and no cast is billed, so these thirteen fragments stand on their own: a minor but genuine artifact of how a working detective's name became dramatized radio in the transcription era.
Episode Spine
Grouped by year. Jump to the full list below, or open a season on its own page.
1934
1938
1939
1940
A Salute to the Law is an early law-enforcement docudrama -- crime-and-punishment stories "a la Dragnet and Calling All Cars," built around the real Los Angeles private detective Nick Harris. It is in fact the same syndicated transcription series known elsewhere as Nick Harris Detective; the thirteen surviving quarter-hour episodes here span 1934 to 1940, drawn from a Los Angeles set reported to have originated on station KECA. The real Nicholas Boilvin Harris (1882-1943) was an ex-newspaperman who opened his own detective agency in 1906 and founded a professional detective school, and the show dramatizes cases in that mold. Its register is frankly moral: crime is folly, the law is certain, and the officer is a guide as much as an enforcer -- with a recurring story of a young woman drawn into crime and redeemed by the detective who catches her. Organ interludes carry the emotion between scenes, and the titles run to the pulp -- The Case of the Avenging Angel, Fatal Ace of Spades, Drops of Blood, The Female Ogre. No broadcast log survives and no cast is billed, so these thirteen fragments stand on their own: a minor but genuine artifact of how a working detective's name became dramatized radio in the transcription era.