Night Beat 1950 (ep039) The Black Cat

One of the factors boiled into the Hard-Boiled Detective genre was the notion that they had simply seen too much of the dark underbelly of society. Night Beat's Randy Stone is a newspaperman rather than a private eye, so his weapon of choice is a typewriter rather than a .38 snub-nosed revolver, but he finds as much or more human tragedy than other radio-noir characters.

Stone works the night desk of the fictional Chicago Star newspaper. The stories he uncovers will appear in the paper's Early Bird edition, which places a time constraint on each adventure. A real-life newspaperman in this position would have a series of sources lined up to feed him stories. Stone wanders the neon and shadows of late-night Chicago, personally searching out subjects to write about.

Even though he avoids gunplay, there is a better than average chance that when the night is done Stone will be typing his story with bruised knuckles. Randy Stone was intended to be even more hard-boiled than he turned out. Film noir star Edmund O'Brien played the role in the audition program but was not in the regular production, having assumed the role as the second Johnny Dollar. Frank Lovejoy got his showbiz start on New York's Radio Row. He appeared on Gangbusters and narrated the first season of This is Your F.B.I. Lovejoy also played the title role of The Blue Beetle.

By the time Night Beat debuted on NBC on February 6, 1950, the Hard-Boiled Radio Noir genre was facing a double whammy. Radio drama in general was beginning to have to compete with the shiny-new medium of Television for sponsor dollars, but the sponsors who did stay with radio were concerned with the proliferation of violence gumshoes were so ready to provide. Journalist Randy Stone was more of a "thinking man's" investigator.

As the sun rose over Lake Michigan and another Chicago night came to an end, Night Beat's Randy Stone would file his story for the morning edition, and listeners are left to wonder, was the writer going to indulge in the show's sponsor's products, Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer and Wheaties; taken together, surely the breakfast of heroes!