Boston Blackie
The Character Behind the Show
Boston Blackie had one of the more distinctive introductions in Crime-Detective radio: "enemy to those who make him an enemy, friend to those who have no friend." The show also described him as "a modern Robin Hood, a little on the gangster side, wise to all the tricks but always reversing to do a lot of good." That tension — a man with a criminal's instincts working on the side of right — gave the character his appeal. Blackie's specialty, as the show framed it, was making fools of the police, which provided both the comedy and the conflict that ran through every episode.
The character had been around a long time before he reached radio. Jack Boyle created Blackie while serving time at the Colorado State Penitentiary at Canon City, publishing the first stories in The American Magazine in 1914 under the pen name "No. 6606" — his actual prison number. Between 1914 and 1920, Boyle produced 23 short stories about the character, scattered across The American Magazine, The Red Book, The Strand, and Cosmopolitan. In those originals, Mary was Blackie's wife and getaway driver, not the girlfriend-and-secretary the radio show would reshape her into. Hollywood took to the property almost immediately: silent films ran from 1918 to 1927, starting with Boston Blackie's Little Pal (Metro, 1918), directed by E. Mason Hopper, with Bert Lytell as Blackie and Rhea Mitchell as Mary. Columbia revived the franchise in 1941 with Meet Boston Blackie, which led to the run of 14 Chester Morris films through 1949 — and somewhere in there, in After Midnight with Boston Blackie, the character finally got a real name: Horatio Black.
The NBC Summer Run
Chester Morris came to the NBC version already identified with the role from those Columbia pictures, and Richard Lane brought Inspector Faraday over from the same series — the only time in Boston Blackie's long career that the film cast carried directly onto radio. The show launched on June 23, 1944, in a Friday-night slot at 10, sponsored by Rinso and filling in as a summer replacement for The Amos 'n' Andy Show. Lesley Woods played Blackie's girlfriend Mary Wesley, Harlow Wilcox announced, and writers Milton and Barbara Merlin handled the scripts. The run was 13 scheduled episodes and wrapped on September 15, 1944 — short by design, given its summer-fill purpose.
The Syndicated Years
The version of the show most listeners encountered was the syndicated run produced by Frederic W. Ziv, which began on April 11, 1945, and ran until October 25, 1950 — those dates reflecting the New York broadcast schedule. Ziv placed the show on various network outlets, mostly Mutual, across many 30-minute timeslots, and by November 1945 it was running on 52-week contracts on stations like WJZ in New York and WTMJ in Milwaukee. Beyond Rinso, the syndicated sponsors included Lifebuoy Soap, Champagne Velvet beer, and R&H Beer. The production generated more than 200 episodes, making it one of the longer-running Crime-Detective properties of the era.
Richard Kollmar took over as Blackie, with Maurice Tarplin stepping into Faraday (Frank Orth also played the inspector in some episodes), and Jan Miner played Mary. Kenny Lyons and Ralph Rosenberg wrote the syndicated stories. The core dynamic stayed intact — Faraday heading up the official investigation while Blackie ran circles around him — but the syndicated run leaned harder on comic friction, with the humorless inspector forever on the receiving end of Blackie's bad puns and wordplay. Tony Barrett played Blackie's sidekick Shorty, a character carried over from the films (where he'd been called "The Runt") with the name softened for radio. Frank Lovejoy turned up regularly as a villain. Media critic John Crosby summed up the appeal neatly when he described Blackie as having "no visible means of support" and solving crimes "apparently more for the fun of it than for sordid cash."
Kollmar's life off-mic was its own kind of double act: starting April 15, 1945 — four days after Boston Blackie premiered in syndication — he co-hosted Breakfast with Dorothy and Dick on WOR with his wife, newspaper columnist Dorothy Kilgallen. That show eventually drew an audience of 20 million and ran until 1963. Jan Miner, meanwhile, would later become nationally famous to a different generation as "Madge" in the Palmolive dishwashing liquid commercials.
On to Television, and After
Ziv had originally intended Boston Blackie to be his first syndicated television series, but the runaway success of the Hopalong Cassidy TV show led him to produce The Cisco Kid first. A pilot did air on WLWT in Cincinnati on August 17, 1949, with Bob Middleton as Blackie and Laura Frazer as Mary, but the full series didn't go into production until 1951. When it did, Kent Taylor played Blackie, Lois Collier — picked over 60 other actresses who'd sought the part — played Mary, and Frank Orth carried over from radio as Faraday; Collier and Orth appeared in all 58 episodes. Ziv shot the series in space rented from Eagle-Lion Films, 26 black-and-white episodes in season one and 32 in color in season two, at roughly $21,000 an episode. John Crosby again weighed in, classifying the production as a "triumph in cost accounting over art" against the audience-filmed spontaneity of I Love Lucy.
The character outlasted his media. Boston Blackie turns up in the 1957 Coasters song "Searchin'," lined up with Charlie Chan and Sam Spade as a figure of relentless pursuit. Errol Morris's 1988 documentary The Thin Blue Line includes a witness citing Blackie as her childhood inspiration for wanting to be a detective, and the Philip Glass score even has a cue titled "Boston Blackie." On Mad Men, Bert Cooper uses the nickname for John F. Kennedy. And in Robert B. Parker's 2007 novel Now and Then, when Spenser tells Hawk to follow that car, Hawk's reply is to call him Boston Blackie. Not bad for a character a convicted bad-check writer invented in a Colorado prison cell.