Nightbeat

While not technically a detective story, Randy spends most nights solving a mystery or helping people in the streets of 1950's Downtown Chicago. 

He heads out looking for human interest stories to fill his column, also called "Nightbeat", and meets an assortment of the city's night folks.  Most of them, naturally have a problem, many of them are scared. Sometimes he is able to help them, sometimes he's not. Sometimes he's just too late.  That's part of the charm of the show -- sometimes he fails.

It is a great show that stands up extremely well today. Frank Lovejoy (below) is the perfect actor for the part. He is very believable as the "tough-guy with a heart of gold" The plots and scripts are excellent.  You really get a feel for Downtown Chicago, the 1950's and what the nightlife was like. 

The show aired on NBC from February 6, 1950 until September 25, 1952 -- a sadly too short run.

You can download many of the circulating episodes of Nightbeat for FREE at the Internet Archive -

• Nightbeat (Opens in New Window)

For all you Crime Fighting Superhero fans, Frank Lovejoy can also be heard as the voice of the Blue Beetle.

On a recent trip to San Diego we made it up to Hollywood and the Walk of Fame.  Here I am posing with Frank Lovejoy's Star.  This is actually his television star. I didn't find his star for radio. Click here to see more pictures and read about my trip to Hollywood.

Here's what reviewer, Telegonus, had to say about Nightbeat on the Internet Archive (it's a little more "highbrow" than I write, but it's pretty good.) --

Good Stuff, Evokes Its Era Nicely
NIGHTBEAT was a very good series about a peripatetic newspaperman, Randy Stone, excellently portrayed by Frank Lovejoy. Some of the episodes are prosaic and predictable, others quite moving. The series doesn't quite reach the heights of its better known contemporary, DRAGNET, but it has a nice feel for big city life circa 1950, give or take a year or two, and some of the writing is first rate. The setting is Downtown Chicago, and the show "uses" the city effectively and realistically. Someone had clearly done his homework on this one. I wish the writers had reached a little higher, though, been more experimental, tried a little harder to be original. Still, on its own terms, NIGHTBEAT was a well above average series."

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