Box 13

The Idea Behind the Ad

Box 13 ran on a premise simple enough to fit in a two-line newspaper ad. Dan Holiday, a fiction writer who had left the newspaper game behind, placed a notice in the Star-Times that read: "Adventure wanted—will go anywhere, do anything—Box 13." That ad, week after week, pulled in everything from a racketeer's desperate victim to a psychotic killer looking for company. The conceit gave the writers an easy on-ramp for any story they wanted to tell, while keeping Holiday at the center as a man who invited trouble on purpose and then had to think his way out of it.

What set the show apart from the hard-boiled detective programs crowding the dial in 1948 was that Box 13 didn't depend on a fresh corpse every week. Sponsors were growing wary of the new-murder-every-Sunday formula, and Holiday's premise let the writers offer adventure and a code of honor without always reaching for a killing. One week brought blackmail, another a shanghaiing, another a swindled insurance claim or a poet's missing manuscript. The 30-minute slot kept the plots tight: trouble arrived, caused havoc, and got resolved before the half-hour ran out.

Alan Ladd and Mayfair Productions

Alan Ladd played Holiday, and the role suited what Ladd brought to radio — a cool, slightly detached presence that made the character credible even when the plots leaned toward the extreme. By 1948 Ladd was a major film star, fresh off This Gun for Hire and several years before Shane, and Box 13 was partly a vehicle built around that fact. He and Bernie Joslin had formed Mayfair Productions — named for the chain of Mayfair Restaurants Joslin had previously run — specifically to take advantage of what they saw as a coming boom in radio syndication. Ladd served as co-producer alongside Richard Sanville. The show was transcribed onto 16-inch discs at 8511 Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, distributed independently, and also carried over the Mutual Broadcasting System, which gave it a different kind of reach than a single-network show.

One of the quieter details the program carries is how far back Ladd's radio roots ran. He had started in the medium at KFWB in 1935, hired at $19 a week by a man named Russell Hughes — who turned out to be the same writer who scripted Box 13 more than a decade later. At his busiest in those early years, Ladd was working as many as 20 shows a week, including a stretch as the Richfield Reporter on the show of that name. By the time he built his own production company to make a radio drama centered on himself, he knew the medium from the inside out. Hughes wrote most of the 52 episodes, sometimes in direct collaboration with Ladd.

The People Around the Leads

Sylvia Picker, who played Suzy — Holiday's scatterbrained office manager who screened his mail and ran interference — had also crossed paths with Ladd back at KFWB. The recurring police figures gave the show its institutional friction without turning into outright antagonism: Edmund MacDonald played Lieutenant Kling, described less as a foe than as a cop trying to keep a civilian out of police business, with Luis Van Rooten's Inspector Black alongside him.

Beyond the regulars, Box 13 drew on a deep bench of West Coast radio talent. Betty Lou Gerson, Lurene Tuttle, Alan Reed, and John Beal rotated through supporting roles, and the guest list pulled in Frank Lovejoy, Gerald Mohr, Irene Tedrow, Tom Collins, Jo Gilbert, Lou Krugman, Bill Johnstone, and, in some episodes, Raymond Burr. Rudy Schrager wrote and performed the music. Vern Carstensen worked double duty as announcer and director.

When It Aired

Sources disagree on exactly when Box 13 first reached listeners. The WOR premiere in New York is dated August 22, 1948, but the show appears to have aired in several U.S. markets as early as October 1947, and the West Coast run is logged from March 15, 1948 through March 7, 1949. The series totaled exactly 52 episodes — a number confirmed across multiple catalogs — and the run carried into 1950 in syndication. The first episode was "The First Letter," followed by titles that telegraphed the show's range: "Insurance Swindle," "Blackmail Is Murder," "Actor's Alibi," "Shanghaied," "Book of Poems," "The Great Torino," "Damsel in Distress," "Diamond in the Sky," "Look Pleasant, Please."

After the Series

Ladd never quite let Box 13 go. In December 1954 he appeared in a CBS General Electric Theater adaptation of the radio episode "Daytime Nightmare," retitled "Committed" for television, with Russell Hughes — by then at Columbia Pictures — reworking his old radio script. The pilot was produced by Jaguar Productions, Ladd's own film company, but it didn't go to series. Jaguar tried again in 1956, this time without Ladd in the lead; his wife Sue Carol was reported to be handling casting, and that attempt also went nowhere. Shortly before his death in January 1964, Ladd announced plans for a feature film version in which he would return as Holiday, with thirteen cameos drawn from stars he'd worked with over the years — William Bendix, Veronica Lake, Brian Donlevy, Macdonald Carey among them. He didn't live to make it. In 2010, writers David Gallaher and Steve Ellis reimagined Box 13 as a comic book series for ComiXology, a reinvention rather than a continuation, sixty years after Dan Holiday last opened his mail.