It's a Crime, Mr. Collins
A Show Built From Someone Else's Blueprint
Radio historian Jack French put it plainly in his book Private Eyelashes: Radio's Lady Detectives (BearManor Media, 2004): It's a Crime, Mr. Collins was "a flagrant rip-off of The Adventures of the Abbotts in which only the names had been changed." That isn't an offhand insult — it's an accurate description of how Mutual built the show. The Adventures of the Abbotts featured a San Francisco private detective and his wife, drawn from Frances Crane's Pat and Jean Abbott novels. It's a Crime, Mr. Collins featured a San Francisco private detective named Greg Collins and his wife Gail, who narrated each week's case. Crane had included a color in the title of every one of her novels, the Abbotts radio series carried that convention forward, and Mutual copied it wholesale here. Every episode of Mr. Collins contained a color word in its title. The one thing Mutual changed substantially was the character names — which, French notes, was enough to avoid paying royalties to Crane.
The show aired on Mutual on Thursday nights at 8:30, beginning August 9, 1956, and ran for twenty-nine weeks before ending February 28, 1957. Each half-hour episode was transcribed in New York.
The Cast
Mandel Kramer played Greg Collins, the "infamous private eye" at the center of each case. Kramer was born March 12, 1916, in Cleveland, Ohio, where his father ran a shoe store. He attended Cleveland Heights High School, studied law for a couple of years at Case Western Reserve University, then trained at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and spent a year with the Cleveland Play House before starting radio work at WTAM in Cleveland. He relocated to New York City with $150 in savings and bluffed his way into his first professional audition. From there he became a fixture in the New York radio ensemble — appearing on Perry Mason (as one of two actors to play Lieutenant Tragg), Counterspy (as Harry Peters, for fourteen years), This Is Your FBI, Gang Busters, Casey Crime Photographer, Philo Vance, Adventures of the Thin Man, and many others.
The connection to the Abbotts series ran deeper than format. Kramer had been the last actor to play Pat Abbott on NBC's revival of The Adventures of the Abbotts in 1955, making him the most literal possible bridge between the two shows. The role of Greg Collins was, in a real sense, a continuation of the same character under a different name with the same actor.
The character "Uncle Jack" — the offscreen figure to whom Gail narrated each week's case — was played by Richard Denning, born Louis Albert Heindrich Denninger Jr. on March 27, 1914. Denning had starred opposite Lucille Ball in My Favorite Husband on CBS Radio from 1948 to 1951, the series that directly preceded I Love Lucy, and had played Jerry North in the radio version of Mr. and Mrs. North from 1952 to 1954. He later became known to television audiences as Governor Paul Jameson on Hawaii Five-O from 1968 to 1980. Kramer, for his part, had played the comedic supporting role of Brooklyn taxi driver Mahatma McGloin on that same Mr. and Mrs. North.
The Format and What Gail Brought to It
Gail Collins narrated the week's case to Uncle Jack after the fact — a feminine-viewpoint device taken directly from Jean Abbott's role in the Abbotts series. The commentary had a domestic, comic edge: Gail's observations included attention to shoes, perfume, and the female clients who kept turning up and competing for Greg's attention. The jealousy was played for mild humor rather than drama. The cases themselves ranged fairly widely — a "plumb loco disease" in the American Southwest, gangster crime on the French Riviera, a murder on an island in the Florida Keys. The international scope gave the writers room to move around, even if the structural formula stayed fixed.
After the Run
No episodes of the American Mutual broadcast are known to survive. The show ran its twenty-nine weeks and left no recorded trace.
What does survive is a separate production. Crawford Productions in Australia syndicated its own version of the series over twenty-eight stations beginning March 4, 1957 — just four days after the American run ended. The Australian version starred Keith Eden (1917–2003), a Melbourne radio staple, as Greg Collins, with Mary Disney as Gail. It ran for fifty-two weeks, nearly twice as long as the American original, and followed the same color-in-the-title convention throughout, with episodes including "The Dull Blue Treasure," "Death Wore Green," "White Plumes, Red Blood," and "The Ghost in the Sea Blue Dress." Around twenty-four episodes of the Australian version are known to circulate, though they are sometimes mislabeled as episodes of the American Mutual series. They are distinct productions.
Kramer kept working steadily after radio ended. He played Police Chief Bill Marceau on the soap opera The Edge of Night from 1959 to 1979, becoming the longest-tenured cast member by 1976, and received a Daytime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actor in 1979. He also appeared in more than 130 episodes of CBS Radio Mystery Theater from 1974 to 1982. He died January 29, 1989, in Chappaqua, New York, at age 72.