Quick as a Flash

The Golden Age of Radio hosted a big club of newspaper reporters whose zeal for truth and justice led them to fight crime as they fought deadlines. Randy Stone of Night Beat; Dan Holiday of Box 13; and of course Clark Kent are just a few of the reporters who went above and beyond merely reporting the news and who took an active role in their stories. But it wasn’t just the writers who played detective on the side in the world of radio journalists. One plucky photographer played gumshoe as he worked the police beat for his paper. He was Casey, Crime Photographer, and he enjoyed a long career on radio in the 1940s and early 1950s beginning with his first broadcast on July 7, 1943. Casey was created by George Harmon Coxe and first appeared in Black Mask magazine in 1934. Coxe was inspired by the stories of heroic newspapermen, but he observed that “it was frequently the photographer accompanying such newsmen who frequently had to stick their neck out to get an acceptable picture.” Coxe felt it was time to give the cameraman his due and introduced readers to Jack “Flashgun” Casey, a hard-drinking, two-fisted photographer who wielded a gun as effectively as he used a camera. Coxe featured the character in 24 short stories and six novels. Following two B-movies in 1936 and 1937, Casey came to radio in June 1943 on CBS in Flashgun Casey, Press Photographer. Actor Matt Crowley, who played Batman, Dick Tracy, and Mark Trail on radio during his career, was the first actor heard as Casey. He was quickly succeeded by Jim Backus, later the voice of Mr. Magoo. By October, the role had been recast again, and this new Casey would stick with the character for the rest of his radio career. Actor Staats Cotsworth found his greatest radio success as Casey, but even with over 400 performances as the crime photographer he enjoyed a long career of diverse roles in radio and on television. Like J. Scott Smart of The Fat Man, he was a bit of a renaissance man. Cotsworth acted on the stage and only moved into acting early in his career to support his work as a painter. He continued to work in radio even while he was headlining Crime Photographer; Cotsworth could be heard on The Shadow, Dimension X, The Mysterious Traveler, and Rocky Fortune throughout his tenure on Casey. The supporting cast for Cotsworth’s run was rounded out by actress Jan Miner as reporter Ann Williams, whose stories ran alongside Casey’s photos; Bernard Lenrow as Captain Logan of the police; and John Gibson as Ethelbert, the wry bartender at the Blue Note Cafe, where most Casey episodes wrapped up. Typical episodes (mostly written by Alonzo Dean Cole) involved Casey and Ann launching their own investigations into the crimes they covered, with Captain Logan often accepting their assistance, albeit reluctantly. Though the series is best known today as Casey, Crime Photographer, it ran under several titles including Casey, Press Photographer and Crime Photographer. It aired on CBS in multiple incarnations from 1943 until 1954. For the final years, the radio version ran alongside a TV version. Actor Darren McGavin (perhaps best known as “The Old Man” in A Christmas Story) played Casey, with Jan Miner reprising her role as Ann for the single season TV run. Radio historian John Dunning is less than kind to Casey, calling it “better than Mr. Keen [Tracer of Lost Persons], but lacking the polish and style of Sam Spade.” That’s a high bar to clear; few shows could measure up to Sam Spade when Howard Duff was at the microphone (today it would be akin to dismissing a series because it isn’t as good as Homeland). Casey, Crime Photographer, thanks largely to Cotsworth’s performance, is light and engaging mystery fare, well produced and written, and it presents a different type of character in a sea of hard-boiled private eyes.