Casey, Crime Photographer: "Loaded Dice" 9/4/47
A friend of Casey is accused of murder. The one clue that might point to the real killer is a pair of crooked dice found in a dead man's pocket.
Click HERE to listen or download.
Showing posts with label Flashgun Casey. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Flashgun Casey. Show all posts
Friday, July 21, 2023
Friday, November 20, 2020
Friday's Favorite OTR
Casey: Crime Photographer: "Chivalrous Gunman" 8/14/47
A criminal allows a pretty girl to getaway even though she witnessed him committing two murders. But all is not what it seems with either the crook or the girl.
Click HERE to listen or download.
Friday, April 14, 2017
Friday's Favorite OTR
Casey, Crime Photographer: “Bad Little Babe” 3/2/50
Casey was usually a fairly traditional mystery, but this episode has a more hard-boiled feel to it than usual. Casey’s trying to get the goods on a gangster who murdered a judge. At the same time, he’s hoping to talk some sense into the late judge’s daughter, who is dating her father’s alleged killer and seems to be enjoying her walk on the wild side of life.
The episode centers around the question of whether the judge’s daughter has really gone bad. It’s a question to which the answer might end up getting Casey killed at the episode’s climax, which manages to pile several plot twists atop one another to create an effective sense of real danger. It all makes for a very enjoyable tale.
Click HERE to listen or download
The episode centers around the question of whether the judge’s daughter has really gone bad. It’s a question to which the answer might end up getting Casey killed at the episode’s climax, which manages to pile several plot twists atop one another to create an effective sense of real danger. It all makes for a very enjoyable tale.
Click HERE to listen or download
Friday, October 3, 2014
Friday's Favorite OTR
Casey, Crime Photographer: "Wedding Breakfast" 10/9/47
Casey must solve a murder involving a missing pearl necklace, a hopelessly drunk prime suspect and a sick dog.
Click HERE to listen or download.
Casey must solve a murder involving a missing pearl necklace, a hopelessly drunk prime suspect and a sick dog.
Click HERE to listen or download.
Friday, March 28, 2014
Friday's Favorite OTR
Casey, Crime Photographer: "Great Grandfather's Rent Receipt" 10/30/47
Casey takes time out from solving mysteries to tell a story about his Great-Grandfather, who once had to fulfill a very unusual request made by a dead man in order to prove he had paid the rent on his farm.
Click HERE to listen or download.
Casey takes time out from solving mysteries to tell a story about his Great-Grandfather, who once had to fulfill a very unusual request made by a dead man in order to prove he had paid the rent on his farm.
Click HERE to listen or download.
Friday, December 6, 2013
Friday's Favorite OTR
Casey, Crime Photographer: "Murder in Black and White" 3/18/48
A picture of a guy standing over a murder victim with a gun seems to be all the proof needed to solve the case. But Casey soon discovers that pictures can indeed lie.
Click HERE to listen or download.
A picture of a guy standing over a murder victim with a gun seems to be all the proof needed to solve the case. But Casey soon discovers that pictures can indeed lie.
Click HERE to listen or download.
Friday, July 12, 2013
Friday's Favorite OTR
Casey: Crime Photographer: “Tough Guys” 3/4/48
A fun episode. Two crooks seem likely to get away with robbery and murder. Casey comes up with a plan to separately feed the pair false information, turning them against each other.
Friday, April 19, 2013
Friday's Favorite OTR
Casey, Crime Photographer “King of the Apes” 5/1/47
An animal trainer performing with a circus is killed by one of his trained orangutans during his act. But it’s possible the ape had been trained to commit the murder.
To catch the killer, it’s not just a matter of figuring out who did it—or rather who got the orangutan to do it. It’s also a matter of luring him or her into a trap in order to prove it. And that might just get someone else strangled by a trained ape.
Click HERE to listen or download.
Click HERE to listen or download.
Friday, January 20, 2012
Friday's Favorite OTR
Casey, Crime Photographer: “The Piggy Bank Robbery” 1/29/48
A burglar enters an apartment at night, but ignores money and valuables to steal a child’s piggy bank.
Why? Well, the odd crime later becomes intertwines with the brutal murder of an ex-criminal.
The mystery really isn’t that hard to figure out, but it unfolds logical and leads up to an ending that Casey finds particularly satisfying.
Click HERE to listen or download.
Friday, November 11, 2011
Friday's Favorite OTR
Casey, Crime Photographer: “Tobacco Pouch” 9/18/47
A delusional shoplifter who thinks he’s a new Robin Hood and a tobacco pouch picked out of a pocket leads to Casey impersonating a hit man. There’s a somewhat predictable but still nifty twist at the end of this one.
Click HERE to listen or download.
Friday, July 15, 2011
Friday's Favorite OTR
Casey, Crime Photographer: “Treasure Cave” 9/25/47
The character of Flashgun Casey was originally created in 1934, in a series of short stories written by George Harman Coxe.
Flashgun was a hard-boiled, tough news photographer who took pride in doing his job well, but whose empathetic nature would often sink him deeper into a criminal investigation than simply snapping a few pictures.
Coxe’s stories are fun and fast-moving—worthy additions to the hard-boiled genre.
But when Casey came to radio, he was softened up quite a bit. A pretty girl reporter, Ann Matthews, became his regular partner in what was a much more traditional whodunit.
For fans of Coxe’s original character, this is a bit disappointing. But, on the other hand, the show was well-written and well-produced. The mysteries were fairly constructed and intriguing. If Casey didn’t have the same strong personality as his prose counterpart, at least he was likeable and believable as a crime-solver.
In this episode, Casey, Ann and Captain Logan (their regular police contact) end up investigating a series of mysterious deaths in a remote cave. Supposedly, the cave is haunted by the ghosts of pirates and each of the victims died in some strange way related to old-time piracy—one was drowned, one was cut down with a cutlass and the third was shot with a flintlock pistol.
Our heroes soon figure out what’s going on (though not in time to stop another murder—this one via a flint-tipped arrow) and catch the real, very non-ghostly killer. It’s a good mystery---a bit spooky at first, but with an understandable motivation for the crimes eventually revealed.
It’s too bad the hard-boiled Casey never made it to radio. Shows like Sam Spade, Pat Novak and Philip Marlowe clearly demonstrated that the hard-boiled style translated very well to radio. But the radio Casey we do have is a nice guy. And he’s good at catching crooks. It was enough to make the show still enjoyable to listen to today.
Click HERE to listen or download
The character of Flashgun Casey was originally created in 1934, in a series of short stories written by George Harman Coxe.
Flashgun was a hard-boiled, tough news photographer who took pride in doing his job well, but whose empathetic nature would often sink him deeper into a criminal investigation than simply snapping a few pictures.
Coxe’s stories are fun and fast-moving—worthy additions to the hard-boiled genre.
But when Casey came to radio, he was softened up quite a bit. A pretty girl reporter, Ann Matthews, became his regular partner in what was a much more traditional whodunit.
For fans of Coxe’s original character, this is a bit disappointing. But, on the other hand, the show was well-written and well-produced. The mysteries were fairly constructed and intriguing. If Casey didn’t have the same strong personality as his prose counterpart, at least he was likeable and believable as a crime-solver.
In this episode, Casey, Ann and Captain Logan (their regular police contact) end up investigating a series of mysterious deaths in a remote cave. Supposedly, the cave is haunted by the ghosts of pirates and each of the victims died in some strange way related to old-time piracy—one was drowned, one was cut down with a cutlass and the third was shot with a flintlock pistol.
Our heroes soon figure out what’s going on (though not in time to stop another murder—this one via a flint-tipped arrow) and catch the real, very non-ghostly killer. It’s a good mystery---a bit spooky at first, but with an understandable motivation for the crimes eventually revealed.
It’s too bad the hard-boiled Casey never made it to radio. Shows like Sam Spade, Pat Novak and Philip Marlowe clearly demonstrated that the hard-boiled style translated very well to radio. But the radio Casey we do have is a nice guy. And he’s good at catching crooks. It was enough to make the show still enjoyable to listen to today.
Click HERE to listen or download
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Will the real Flashgun Casey please stand up?
There was a great loyalty in Casey… He had been a photographer a long time and for all his crabbing and profanity, his clashes with [his editor], his grumbling over the injustices he suffered, he would not change his job with the President…
… That’s how it was. Day after day. Picturing the contemporary drama of life but never thinking of it that way; thinking of it only as a job he liked and always knowing one thing: if you got a picture, no one could ever deny it. Stories could be faked but to get a picture you had to be there.
That’s from the 1942 novel Silent are the Dead, by George Harman Coxe. It’s a good, concise description of Jack “Flashgun” Casey, the tough, hard-drinking, Boston-based news photographer who was the protagonist in an excellent series of stories in Black Mask magazine during the heyday of the pulps. Casey’s tougher traits, though, are balanced out by some other qualities—his intense loyalty to his friends and his profession and his empathetic nature.
It’s these qualities in Casey that make him an effective hard-boiled hero. The best stories from that genre combine a cynical world-view with the knowledge that there actually is a difference between right and wrong. The protagonist, by upholding his code of honor, would give the stories a moral backbone that raised them to a level they would not have otherwise reached. The code was often a very personal thing, centering around keeping one’s word or an unflagging loyalty towards something worthwhile. It reminded us that, though we might be up to our hips in corruption, we were each still individually responsible to hang on to our own moral worth. Casey, who was always reluctantly being pulled into criminal investigations when all he sets out to do is get a good picture, is just such a protagonist.
The Casey stories had great plots as well. Silent are the Dead involves several murders, a a blackmail scheme and assorted convoluted motives, all twisting together into an emotional ending. The short story “Once Around the Clock” has Casey helping out a drunken and (seemingly) worthless ex-con who is falsely accused of murder. In “Two-Man Job,” Casey takes a picture that links armored car guards to a robbery and murder plot. All great stuff, written in straightforward prose that moves the stories along at a fast pace.
But when Casey came to other media, he was never quite the same guy.
A 1936 film titled Women are Trouble (based on a short story of the same name) has never shown up on DVD, so I’ve never had a chance to see it. But a 1937 Casey film, titled Here’s Flash Casey was recently released on disc.
In this film, Casey reverts from being an experience photographer to a young guy just out of college, hoping to get a job at a big newspaper. The film doesn’t try to replicate the hard-boiled feel of Coxe’s stories at all, but instead goes for the sort of fast-talking, wise-cracking style seen in better known films such as The Front Page. Its loosely structured plot follows Casey through his struggle to get a job and his pretty much unintentional involvement in breaking up a blackmail ring. Judged on its own merits, it’s not a bad film—the main characters are likable and a fair percentage of the wise-cracks are pretty good. But this particular Casey just isn’t the same guy we come to like so much in Coxe’s original stories.
Yet another Flashgun Casey had quite a long career on radio. Running from 1934 to 1950 (then again from 1954-55), Casey, Crime Photographer gave Casey a regular partner (pretty reporter Ann Williams) and cast him in the mold of a traditional amateur detective, with a talent for deductive reasoning that was often as useful to him as his skill with a camera. Once again, the tough, hard-boiled aspects of the character were left behind, though the guy we are left with was amiable enough and the individual episodes were well-plotted mysteries. It was a solid, enjoyable show, but once again, it gave us a Casey different from both those who had come before him.
There’s one more version of Casey out there I’ve never had a chance to see. He briefly appeared on television in 1951-2 in a live show starring first Richard Carlyle and then later Darren McGavin. Like the movie Women are Trouble, this show has never been released on DVD and I’m uncertain if many episodes still exist. I’d love to see how McGavin (a wonderful character actor) played Casey. Oh, well, perhaps someday.
Every time Casey appeared in a new medium, he was born anew, going from tough guy to college kid to clever amateur detective. The Casey from Coxe’s original stories is still the best of the lot, but all of them are worth getting to know. The prose stories, the movie and the radio show each in their own way present us with entertaining stories and a likeable hero.
… That’s how it was. Day after day. Picturing the contemporary drama of life but never thinking of it that way; thinking of it only as a job he liked and always knowing one thing: if you got a picture, no one could ever deny it. Stories could be faked but to get a picture you had to be there.
That’s from the 1942 novel Silent are the Dead, by George Harman Coxe. It’s a good, concise description of Jack “Flashgun” Casey, the tough, hard-drinking, Boston-based news photographer who was the protagonist in an excellent series of stories in Black Mask magazine during the heyday of the pulps. Casey’s tougher traits, though, are balanced out by some other qualities—his intense loyalty to his friends and his profession and his empathetic nature.
It’s these qualities in Casey that make him an effective hard-boiled hero. The best stories from that genre combine a cynical world-view with the knowledge that there actually is a difference between right and wrong. The protagonist, by upholding his code of honor, would give the stories a moral backbone that raised them to a level they would not have otherwise reached. The code was often a very personal thing, centering around keeping one’s word or an unflagging loyalty towards something worthwhile. It reminded us that, though we might be up to our hips in corruption, we were each still individually responsible to hang on to our own moral worth. Casey, who was always reluctantly being pulled into criminal investigations when all he sets out to do is get a good picture, is just such a protagonist.
The Casey stories had great plots as well. Silent are the Dead involves several murders, a a blackmail scheme and assorted convoluted motives, all twisting together into an emotional ending. The short story “Once Around the Clock” has Casey helping out a drunken and (seemingly) worthless ex-con who is falsely accused of murder. In “Two-Man Job,” Casey takes a picture that links armored car guards to a robbery and murder plot. All great stuff, written in straightforward prose that moves the stories along at a fast pace.
But when Casey came to other media, he was never quite the same guy.
A 1936 film titled Women are Trouble (based on a short story of the same name) has never shown up on DVD, so I’ve never had a chance to see it. But a 1937 Casey film, titled Here’s Flash Casey was recently released on disc.
In this film, Casey reverts from being an experience photographer to a young guy just out of college, hoping to get a job at a big newspaper. The film doesn’t try to replicate the hard-boiled feel of Coxe’s stories at all, but instead goes for the sort of fast-talking, wise-cracking style seen in better known films such as The Front Page. Its loosely structured plot follows Casey through his struggle to get a job and his pretty much unintentional involvement in breaking up a blackmail ring. Judged on its own merits, it’s not a bad film—the main characters are likable and a fair percentage of the wise-cracks are pretty good. But this particular Casey just isn’t the same guy we come to like so much in Coxe’s original stories.
Yet another Flashgun Casey had quite a long career on radio. Running from 1934 to 1950 (then again from 1954-55), Casey, Crime Photographer gave Casey a regular partner (pretty reporter Ann Williams) and cast him in the mold of a traditional amateur detective, with a talent for deductive reasoning that was often as useful to him as his skill with a camera. Once again, the tough, hard-boiled aspects of the character were left behind, though the guy we are left with was amiable enough and the individual episodes were well-plotted mysteries. It was a solid, enjoyable show, but once again, it gave us a Casey different from both those who had come before him.
There’s one more version of Casey out there I’ve never had a chance to see. He briefly appeared on television in 1951-2 in a live show starring first Richard Carlyle and then later Darren McGavin. Like the movie Women are Trouble, this show has never been released on DVD and I’m uncertain if many episodes still exist. I’d love to see how McGavin (a wonderful character actor) played Casey. Oh, well, perhaps someday.
Every time Casey appeared in a new medium, he was born anew, going from tough guy to college kid to clever amateur detective. The Casey from Coxe’s original stories is still the best of the lot, but all of them are worth getting to know. The prose stories, the movie and the radio show each in their own way present us with entertaining stories and a likeable hero.
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