Easy Money
A Detective Unlike the Others
Most crime-detective radio heroes of the 1950s were tough guys — hard-drinking, hard-talking men who solved cases with their fists as often as their brains. Detective Mike Trent, the central character of Easy Money, took a different approach. A former professional magician turned investigator, Trent exposed swindlers, con men, and racketeers by beating them at their own game. He wasn't hardboiled in the Philip Marlowe or Mike Hammer mold. He relied on his sense of righteousness and his magician's sleight of hand rather than on brute toughness — and that made him a genuinely unusual figure in the crime-detective landscape of his era.
The show's thematic backbone was stated plainly in its premise: "when you gamble with a professional, he isn't doing any gambling." The con men and racketeers Trent pursued weren't unlucky victims of circumstance — they were people whose own greed made them vulnerable. Trent simply found the angle they hadn't considered.
The Show and the People Behind It
Easy Money premiered on NBC Radio on October 3, 1954, produced out of Chicago. It was created and written by George B. Anderson, an advertising executive for the Chicago Tribune who also wrote radio plays. Each episode was largely self-contained, built around Trent and his secretary, Patsy Ryan, who appeared regularly throughout the run.
Larry Haines — born Larry Hecht on August 3, 1918 — starred as Trent. By any measure, Haines was one of the busiest radio actors working, estimated to have appeared in more than 15,000 radio programs during the 1940s and 1950s. He had just come off playing Mike Hammer in the short-lived Mutual series That Hammer Guy (1953–54), making Easy Money his second consecutive crime-detective lead. The two roles made an interesting contrast: Hammer was pure menace, while Trent was more cerebral.
Supporting him regularly was Maurice Tarplin, born April 1, 1911, in Boston, best known to radio audiences as the narrator of The Mysterious Traveler on Mutual. Tarplin was also a novelist, and his presence gave the series a connection to some of the more atmospheric crime programming of the period.
What the Episodes Covered
The surviving episodes show a consistent focus on organized schemes and the people caught up in them. The premiere, "Football Pool Racket," had Trent forced to work for a football pool kingpin while trying to figure out how multiple winning tickets were being cashed. "Galloping Ivories" put him up against a big-time gambler running a crooked craps game targeting wealthy young victims. In "The Gem Switch," a $5,000 ruby stolen from a jewelry store and replaced with a duplicate gave Trent a problem that called directly on his background with illusion and misdirection. "Basketball Pool Racket" began with a basketball player being shot and led Trent into a confrontation with a large basketball pool cartel.
The range of schemes — jewel switching, sports pool fixing, crooked dice — gave the show variety within a consistent moral framework. The con men and racketeers changed each week; Trent's method and outlook stayed the same.
What Survives
Easy Money ran a short course. Five episodes are known to survive: "Football Pool Racket Premiere" (October 3, 1954), "Galloping Ivories" (November 14, 1954), "The Gem Switch" (December 19, 1954), "Basketball Pool Racket" (January 9, 1955), and "Charity Benefit Racket," dated May 18, 1955 — which, if accurate, pushes the run somewhat later than the other four episodes suggest. Whether the series continued beyond that point or simply produced a handful of episodes across a few months isn't entirely clear from the surviving record.
It's a small body of work, but the episodes that remain give a clear enough picture of what Anderson, Haines, and Tarplin were building: a crime-detective show with an unusual lead character and a premise that treated greed itself as the engine of every crime.