Friday's Favorite OTR

 The Adventures of the Saint: "Nursemaid" 7/15/51

Simon is hired to convince a young lady not to date a gangster. Unsurprisingly, he ends up having to solve a murder.

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Friday's Favorite OTR

 The Saint: "The Amnesia Victim" 2/25/52

A man claiming to have amnesia hires Simon to find out who he is--and why he is carrying a bag full of cash. 

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Friday's Favorite OTR

 The Saint: "Fishes Gotta Eat" 4/29/51

Simon agrees to help a woman find her missing husband. Not surprisingly, this leads him to a murder.

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Friday's Favorite OTR

 The Adventures of the Saint: "The Cowboy" 7/1/51

In this episode from Tom Conway's run as The Saint, Simon is hired to bodyguard a Texas cattleman, but later becomes a target himself.

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Friday's Favorite OTR

 The Adventures of the Saint: "Monkey" 12/10/51

Simon ends up in possession of a small monkey that belonged to a murdered man. For reasons unknown, people are willing to kill to take that monkey away from him.

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Friday's Favorite OTR

The Saint: "Shipboard Mystery" 3/11/51

While investigating one crime, Simon has a run-in with a thug who thinks he's investigating another crime entirely.

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Friday's Favorite OTR

The Saint: "The What Not What Got Hot" 3/4/51

Someone steals Simon's furniture. To the surprise of absolutely no one who is listening to this episode, tracking down the stolen furniture soon evolves into a murder investigation.

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Friday's Favorite OTR

The Saint: "Hawthorne House Mystery" 4/8/51

Simon and Louie investigate a haunted house and find... a murder!

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Cover Cavalcade

Very effective cover from a 1948 edition of my favorite Saint novel.

Friday's Favorite OTR

The Saint: "Tuba" 1/21/51

Why would the manager of a roadhouse hire the world's worst tuba player to play in the house band? Simon looks into this and soon finds himself dodging bullets.

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Friday's Favorite OTR

The Saint: "Cake That Killed" 1/8/50

Simon Templar stops by a bakery to buy a loaf of bread. The beautiful lady working there gives him a cake, which inexplicably leads to being threatened by mobsters followed by stumbling over a couple of corpses. Simon takes it all in with aplomb, though. This sort of thing happens to him all the time.


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Friday's Favorite OTR

The Saint: “It’s Snow Use” 10/28/50

A woman on a skiing trip asks the Saint to pretend to be her husband in order to protect her from her ex-husband. She also wants her ex-husband protected from his new wife so that alimony payments don’t stop.

All this inevitably leads to a murder and a body being hidden in a unique spot—as well as Simon using snowballs to stave off an assassin.

Just another day in the life of the Saint.

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Friday's Favorite OTR

The Adventures of the Saint: “The Case of the Lonesome Slab” 1/22/50

A beautiful woman fleeing a murder scene stumbles across Simon Templar. This is the sort of thing that happens to Simon with astonishing regularity, so he accepts it with aplomb and is soon investigating a case that involves both the theatrical world and the publishing world. The killer will rack up at least one more victim before Simon straightens it all out.

The clue that points to the killer is one that most experienced mystery fans will probably spot, but the episode is still a typically entertaining one in this always excellent series. Vincent Price is, as usual, perfect in the role of the Saint.

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Friday's Favorite OTR

The Adventures of the Saint: "Bookstore Murder" 3/18/51

A small rental bookstore keeps checking out the same book over and over again. The book is The Birds and Bees of East Orange, possibly the most uninteresting book in the world, which makes its popularity that must more inexplicable.

That the book is being used as a dead drop for villains isn't that hard to figure out. But soon there's a murder mixed into the whole thing and Simon Templar is once again tasked with sorting out the whole matter.

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Friday's Favorite OTR

The Adventures of the Saint: “Fighter’s Contract” 7/23/50

Yet another episode in which Vincent Price handles with perfect aplomb the often hilarious verbal by-play with various suspects and witnesses. This time around, the case involves an up-and-coming boxer, his manager and the manager’s wife. The wife, we are assured, is a “real tomato” and may be, um, in training (so to speak) with the young boxer.

A mystery writer used these three as characters in his latest novel. Now one of them may be planning to murder him, or perhaps murder one another. Simon looks into it, but soon one of the characters is indeed killed. But Simon doesn’t miss a beat in his barrage of witty barbs before finally nailing the killer.

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Friday's Favorite OTR

The Adventures of the Saint: "Horrible Hamburger" 9/10/50


This is a just-plain fun episode. Simon Templar is trying to get a friend's house on Long Island for a dinner, but Louie the Cab Driver gets lost. So they stop at an out-of-the-way diner for a bite to eat. The situation grows very strange when, soon afterward, they find a corpse stuffed in the trunk of Louie's cab.


What follows is a nicely constructed little mystery that ends with Simon and Louie taking cover in an open grave while someone takes potshots at them. There's a wonderful supporting character tossed in--a pretty farmer's daughter who comes on to an uncomfortable Simon.  She's just a little too young for him.


Actually, it's nice to know Simon has some standards. He once ended an episode by making out with the widow of a recent murder victim.


Vincent Price and Larry Dobkin (as Simon and Louie) have a wonderful rapport in this series. This episode highlights that rapport nicely.


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Friday's Favorite OTR

The Saint: “Prove I Did It” 11/07/49


Vincent Price is best remembered as a horror movie icon, playing larger than life and characters in countless scary films. But he was a great actor with a wide range, as it demonstrated weekly on radio when he played Simon Templar, alias The Saint.


This was a clever and pleasurable show, giving us solidly plotted mysteries during which Simon could suavely spout off countless one-liners and witty comebacks while investigating yet another murder.


In this episode, he’s approached by a man named Potts, who confesses to having just killed his partner in a jewelry business in self-defense. But the body has disappeared and the police don’t believe Potts’ confession. So he asks Simon to prove his guilt.


This is odd enough, but when the supposedly dead partner shows up quite alive at Simon’s apartment, it gets downright bizarre. Soon, someone really is murdered. Potts’ young, beautiful wife and a stoic butler are tossed into the mix. But Simon meets it all without losing his natural cool and soon has the whole thing figured out.


Like all the best Saint episodes, this one is both funny AND a good mystery. (I love the part where Simon asks Potts "Do you have any enemies?" and then--without missing a beat--adds "Are you married?") The writers never let the humor get in the way of good storytelling (or visa versa), giving us one of the most persistently entertaining old-time radio shows.

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An Unusual Bit of Piracy

The Saint Overboard, by Leslie Charteris (1936)


Because of my fondness for old-fashioned mysteries and pulp adventures, I end up reading about an awful lot of occasions in which beautiful women in need of rescuing from horrible danger turn up on the doorsteps of heroes.


This has pretty much led me to expect this to one day happen to me. It never does, though, forcing me to exist in perpetual disappointment.


Sigh.


But at least I can read about beautiful women in need of rescuing. Simon Templar, aka the Saint, pretty much stumbles over them by the gross.


In The Saint Overboard, the plot jump starts in the first few paragraphs when a beautiful woman shows up at Simon’s doorstep. Well, actually, she swims up to his yacht, but the idea is the same.


The girl is Loretta Page, a private eye working to catch a particularly dangerous bad guy who has already done away with at least three other detectives. To the surprise of no one, Simon soon becomes involved.


It all turns out to revolve around a plot to illegally salvage gold off of recently sunken ships before the insurance companies can launch a legal salvage operation. The potential haul reaches into the tens of millions of dollars and the villains are more than willing to kill to protect their take.


The novel contains just a few scenes of straightforward action—instead, Charteris depends on building up suspense based on Simon and Loretta each taking on a sort-of undercover role without really being sure if the leader of the gang is on to either of them.
The leader, named Kurt Vogel, plays multi-layered mind games with them both in an attempt to trick them into giving themselves away.


It’s all done very well, with the tension inherent in the story growing quite thick by the end. Vogel is smart enough (and scary enough) make a good villain, while Loretta is smart and brave enough to be more than just a damsel in distress. Charteris’ prose is witty and fast-moving, but he can generate some pretty strong emotional reactions from his readers when he wants to. This time, the emotion comes not just from the danger to Simon and Loretta, but from their respective willingness to make some pretty serious sacrifices for each other when the chips are down.


On a geekier note—there are several scenes in the story that take place underwater, with Simon and several other characters clad in those bulky pre-aqualung diving suits. And those old-school suits are just plain cool.


Simon Templar has always been a fun character. A thief who steals most often from other thieves, he always ends up showing a sense of honor and justice that makes him the hero almost in spite of himself.


That’s it for this month’s book. Next month, I think we’ll jump back in time a few centuries and take a look at St. Peter’s Fair, by Ellis Peters.

Cab Drivers and Comic Relief

I suppose not even independently wealthy men like Lamont Cranston or Simon Templer can afford to pay for a parking space in New York City. In both The Shadow and the Saint radio shows, the two crime fighters always depended on cab service to get around.

In both cases, the men habitually used the same cab and the same driver. In both cases, the characters of the cab drivers were meant to provide comic relief.

Comic relief characters have always, of course, been a part of the pop comic landscape. Heck, in the B-movies of the 1930s/40s, you often got two comic reliefs for the price of one. In the Boston Blackie movies, for instance, Blackie himself was assisted by another reformed thief known as the Runt, a character played largely for laughs. At the same time, Blackie’s nemesis Inspector Farraday was often pulling out his hair in frustration because his partner, Detective Sgt. Matthews, himself often proved to have a light bulb or two out upstairs.

On radio, they often served a duel purpose. Aside from (hopefully) generating laughs, they also provided the main character with someone off whom to bounce expository dialogue. Hopalong Cassidy rode with California Carson, while the Cisco Kid rode with Pancho. Though both California and Pancho were reasonably useful in a fight, for the most part they existed to perform their various comic relief duties.

Back east, comic relief often came in the form of cab drivers. The original Green Lantern comic book character, for instance, featured cabbie Doiby Dickles in this role.

In the radio version of The Shadow, Lamont Cranston and Margo Lane would often employ the services of Moe Shrevnitz, better known as Shrevvy. The Shadow was a wonderful show, pure melodrama done so well, that it is still satisfying to listen to today.

Shrevvy’s shtick was simple: Aside from being just a little dense, he had a habit of saying everything twice: “I was gonna ask you to do a favor for me; I was gonna ask you.” Or “Which is the residence we’re looking for; which is the residence?” It was hilarious.

Well, okay, it wasn’t hilarious. It was mostly just annoying. Rather than chuckling at poor Shrevvy, we most often want to just smack him one.

The actors who played Shrevvy over the years included Alan Reed, who would later provide the voice of Fred Flintstone in the original animated TV series. Reed was a skilled voice actor with excellent comedic abilities, but the character of Shrevvy didn’t give him anything to work with. The writers of the Shadow were superbly qualified at generating drama and suspense, but they were just plain lousy at comedy.

Fortunately, Shrevvy only occasionally popped up in an episode and was usually only around for a minute or two before the Shadow got back to the business of foiling evil.

Shrevvy did have his one moment of glory, though. This came in the 1946 episode “Gorilla Man.” As the climax approached, Margo Lane was being stalked through a house by a gorilla. A pistol shot at the last moment kills the beast and saves the beauty. Was it the Shadow who fired the shot? No, it was Shrevvy the cab driver. It was almost enough to make you forgive his annoying speech pattern. Almost—but not quite.

When Vincent Price began to play the Saint on radio in the late 1940s, he too got a cab driving comic relief. In this case, though, the cabbie is both funny and likable. Louie (I don’t think we ever find out his last name) is played by radio veteran Lawrence Dobkin, who was adept at both straight roles and comedic ones. The dialogue and one-liners are sharply written and Louie’s common-man demeanor plays nicely off the Saint’s suave personality. Whereas Shrevvy was one of the few weak links of The Shadow, Louie was one of the strengths of The Saint.

Louie, as did Shrevvy, also gets his heroic moment during the course of his series. In a 1950 episode that is darker in tone than was usual for The Saint, a woman is murdered trying to protect her child from kidnappers. Louie, setting aside his one-liners for the time being, gets a tire iron out of the cab’s truck and does more than his share of avenging the brave woman’s death.

I originally intended this entry to be a part of my “They aren’t real, but by golly, they should be” series. But, whereas the world would be a nicer place if Louie were in it, I’m not sure I mind Shrevvy’s absence from reality. He really, really does need to be smacked. It's better that he remain fictional.