TV Review: Front Page Detective

Front Page Detective TV show

TV Review: Front Page Detective

This series was broadcast on the DuMont Network from 1951-1952, starring Edmund Lowe as David Chase.  Mr. Chase was a newspaper columnist in the style of Walter Winchell, seeking interesting tidbits of news and gossip, with many people sending him items.  Often, his column or his investigative activities involved him in crimes that he would solve.

Front Page Detective TV show

Like many of the DuMont shows, some of the episodes are in the public domain, and I watched three of them on DVD.

“Little Black Book” has Mr. Chase returning from Washington, D.C. by plane to discover his mail has piled up at the manager’s office, there’s a dead body in his closet, and two rival gangsters are looking for a little black book.  It turns out they don’t mean the one Mr. Chase’s girlfriends are listed in.  Mr. Chase is a flirt, and doesn’t treat women with much respect.  The case is more or less solved by the apartment manager finally delivering the mail.

“Murder Rides the Night Train” sees Mr. Chase taking the train back to Washington, D.C.  It seems that a prominent gangster has been subpoenaed to appear before a Congressional committee (this was the era of the Kefauver hearings) and there’s a rumor some of his former associates want to rub him out.  And gee, one of them is also on the train.  Despite Mr. Chase and the gangster’s bodyguard warning him to be careful, the gangster is shot.  When he’s alone in his compartment, Mr. Chase standing in front of the closed door, with the window locked from the inside.

Astute viewers will figure out how it was done fairly easily.  For everyone else, there’s a really annoying bit where a particular phrase is said over and over as Mr. Chase realizes where he heard it before.

“Seven Seas to Danger” involves diamond smuggling, with Mr. Chase becoming involved because he’s interviewing a particularly colorful old lady who runs a dockfront warehouse.  Some nice turns in this one, although the final resolution of the climactic showdown is a bit of a letdown.

All the episodes feature quite a bit of smoking.  That really stands out nowadays.  It’s a light diversion, but not a series that would be suitable for a remake.

Front Page Detective magazine

So far as I can tell, this show has little or nothing to do with the Front Page Detective magazine, a long-running periodical that featured lurid retellings of “true” crime stories.  Have a cover of one of their issues anyway.

2 comments

    1. The half-hour mystery shows tend to be a bit light on the actual mystery; they have no time to set up more than one clue and also get everything else done.

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