Friday's Favorite OTR

The Adventures of Frank Merriwell: “Stolen Masterpiece” 6/5/48



Back in the days of the dime novel, Frank Merriwell had been an enormously popular character—a star college student and athlete who had a tendency to fall into a variety of adventures.


By the 1940s, Frank’s star had fallen (to the point where today his name hardly ever rings a bell with anyone), but he had a brief and pretty good run on radio before vanishing from the pop culture landscape. The show was an interesting one in that it didn’t try to update Frank, but kept him back in the turn-of-the-century gaslight era that had originally spawned him.


“Stolen Masterpiece” begins with Frank and his friend Bart on summer vacation in New York City. They’re doing a favor for Bart’s father in picking up a valuable painting that the dad had recently agreed to purchase. But neither Frank nor Bart are art experts and it’s not until well after they’ve handed over the cash that they learn the painting delivered to them is apparently a forgery.


What follows is a well-written whodunit, with Frank and Bart running down several apparently false leads before Frank performs a pretty nifty bit of deductive reasoning to solve the case and ID the thief.

This episode can be downloaded HERE