Friday's Favorite OTR

Richard Diamond, Private Eye: “Timothy the Seal” 2/5/50


Dick Powell started his career in movies playing in light-weight musicals. In 1949, he suddenly grabbed some tough guy cred by playing Philip Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet (adapted from the novel Farewell, My Lovely—the studio changed the title so no one would mistake it for another Powell musical).

Powell proved himself quite adept at playing a tough P.I. A few years later, he began a run on radio playing another tough guy—Richard Diamond. Maybe not quite as tough as Marlowe, though. He usually ended each episode singing a song to his girlfriend. I can't picture Marlowe ever doing that. The scripts had an element of tongue-in-cheek to them as well. The show was similar in a very general way to Sam Spade, in that it injected humor and self-awareness into hard-boiled stories without sacrificing good storytelling.

In this episode, Diamond is hired to protect someone named Timothy, who will be brought to his office later. The client will not tell him Timothy’s last name or describe him in advance. Diamond doesn’t like it, but the client is paying too much to turn the job down.

Diamond is being threatened by thugs even before he meets the guy he’s supposed to protect. And when he does meet him, Timothy turns out to be… well, the episode title gives that away.

Soon there’s a murder and someone snatches Timothy away from Diamond. What’s going on? Diamond manages to figure it all out in the end, leaving time for him to still get in a song before the episode closes.

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