Recent Listens

Boston Blackie: Derailed Gold Train (episode 461224) and Old 86 Is Missing (episode 470924). Episodes from OTRCAT’s compilation of railroad-themed episodes of classic radio shows.

Boston Blackie comes across in these programs as a kind of Americanized version of Lord Peter Wimsey. Certainly Wimsey must have inspired his debonaire attitude, his evident ready access to money, his logical approach to problem-solving, and his habit of getting involved in mystery cases as a kind of hobby. From our side of the Atlantic, he seems to have derived the crushing fists that every self-respecting American private eye is obliged to possess, an American accent, and the sentimental American fondness for the underdog. As the introduction proclaims, he’s an “enemy to those who make him an enemy, friend to those who have no friend.”

Interestingly, the character seems to have originated as a criminal in his earliest fictional appearance. Just one more example of how far a character concept can drift, I suppose.

In Derailed Gold Train, Blackie uses good basic investigative skills to solve a mysterious sequence of events that seem to have no logical cause or connection to each other. Unlike certain fictional detectives, he doesn’t sit around in a parlor or a penthouse apartment and intellectually ratiocinate his way to an infallible solution. When it’s necessary to identify a wrecked car, he doesn’t, say, immediately recognize it as a rare model produced in a limited edition and purchased only by a handful of ultra-wealthy customers whose names he just happens to have memorized. Instead, he pries open the wreck, takes down serial numbers, notes its mechanical characteristics, and then checks with a car dealer who can identify it from such information. It’s quite refreshing to hear a fictional detective tale in which the investigative methods actually make logical sense, and the correct answers are not necessarily obvious from the beginning. Beware of red herrings, O unwary listener!

In Old 86 Is Missing, a train has mysteriously disappeared between stations. Decades later, Clive Cussler used a similar plot device in 1981’s Night Probe!, and relied on the same inevitable solution that Blackie discovers. There is a limited number of things one can do with a stolen train, after all.

Improbable coincidences and improbably complicated criminal schemes rear their ugly heads in the plots of these episodes, and Blackie, for all his physical and intellectual prowess, seems to have a bad habit of getting himself into tight spots in which the unexpected timely arrival of the police proves very convenient indeed. But the series is enjoyable, and for the most part it plays by the unwritten rules of the honestly-written detective story.

For those who enjoy such things, Boston Blackie features a lot of incidental organ music, some of it quite good. Oddly, each episode also includes several uninterrupted minutes of energetic organ music at its close, far more than the few seconds that one would expect as a musical transition to the next program. Did the radio station keep an organist hanging around the studio to fill up whatever time the dramatic performance failed to occupy? Did they have dead air to fill because they failed to sell enough advertising on these particular dates? After a few minutes, I found myself wondering if the series should have been called Boston Blackie And The Mad Organist.