A Salute to the Law – Detective Nick Harris
The Real Man Behind the Cases
What set this series apart from most of its radio contemporaries was something fairly rare: its central character actually existed. Detective Nick Harris wasn't a writer's invention. He was Nicholas Boilvin Harris, born February 2, 1882, a Los Angeles criminologist and private detective whose career stretched across decades of the city's history. Before opening his own agency, Harris worked as a police reporter for the Los Angeles Times and was subsequently invited to join the Los Angeles Police Department by the department's own captain — a path that gave him an unusually deep familiarity with both how crimes were committed and how they were solved.
In 1906, Harris founded his detective agency, which has been described as the oldest USA-owned detective agency, and later established the Nick Harris Professional Detective School alongside it. By the time the radio series dramatized his work, he had accumulated enough real cases to keep a writing staff busy for years. Adapting those actual investigations gave the stories a grounding that purely fictional detective dramas couldn't easily replicate.
The Broadcast Years
The earliest confirmed broadcast date in the catalog is July 1, 1938, and the latest is April 7, 1940 — but those dates represent only a slice of a considerably longer run. Various sources place the full span of Nick Harris radio programming as beginning as early as 1923 and continuing into 1942, which would make it one of the longer-running locally produced crime programs of the era. The episodes catalogued here fall in the middle of that arc, and the show carried at least two identities across its life: "Nick Harris Detective" (or "Nick Harris Program") was the broader title, with "A Salute to the Law" used as a subtitle or alternate broadcast title for the same series.
The show originated from KECA in Los Angeles, which operated as an ABC affiliate and served as its broadcast home from the mid-1930s into the early 1940s. One secondary source describes the program as airing on CBS from 1939 to 1940, which conflicts with the KECA account — and neither claim is firmly corroborated by a primary source. What's clear is that the show was rooted in Los Angeles, which made sense given that Harris himself was a Los Angeles institution and the cases the series dramatized came directly from that city.
What the Episodes Look Like
Ten episodes survive in the catalog, and their titles give a reasonable picture of the show's range. "Murder on Impulse," "Fatal Ace of Spades," "Drops Of Blood," and "Murder in a Hospital" point toward the harder-edged cases. "The Female Ogre," "A Woman's Wrath," and "The Altar of Sacrifice" suggest the series wasn't shy about dramatic framing. "The Law In Action" leans closer to a procedural tone.
The most structurally notable item in the catalog is a two-part story: "The Young Shoplifter Part 1" aired July 1, 1938, and "The Young Shoplifter Part 2" followed exactly one week later on July 8. That consecutive-week arc indicates the writers were occasionally willing to let a case breathe beyond a single episode, even in a format where self-contained stories were the norm. The subject matter — a shoplifter, not a murderer — also suggests the show wasn't exclusively concerned with violent crime. Harris himself died January 1, 1943, not long after the run appears to have concluded.