Radio Recap: The Avenger

The radio series the Avenger is a bit of an odd bird. I've looked at a few attempts to examine the program online and they don't quite agree with each other. The confusion seems to stem from a radio serial in 1941-42 called the Avenger, followed by a 1945-46 syndicated program with the same name. I'm looking at the syndicated program.

First, it should be noted that the Avenger was a pulp hero published by Street & Smith, the same people who published the Shadow, who had a very successful radio program. It seems the Avenger was never a top Street & Smith hero the way the Shadow, Nick Carter or Doc Savage were (and are) but he's enjoyed a decent following over the decades and has never been entirely forgotten. You may recall that a few years ago I looked at two issues of the 1970s DC Comic version of the Avenger (Justice Inc.) by Jack Kirby, here and here.

As presented in the 26 episodes of the syndicated radio show, the Avenger - Jim Brandon - is a police chemist who goes beyond the obligations of his career to solve crimes in his spare time. He aided by his female companion Fern Collier and has to prove himself each week to his skeptical superior Inspector White. His chief tools in his investigations are the telepathic indicator which allows him to pick up people's thoughts and the diffusion capsule which covers him in the "black light of invisibility."

If you know much about the pulp hero you'll be taken aback by that description because it doesn't sound like the Avenger at all. Telepathic powers? Invisibility? A female companion who knows his secrets? An incompetant police official? It all sounds like the Shadow, doesn't it? And the comparisons keep coming such as when he opens each broadcast by saying, "The road of crime ends in a trap that justice sets; crime does not pay!"

I think the pulp hero would have made a pretty good radio hero as he was. His schtick involved his ability to change his appearance and adopt other guises. Give that role to a hungry radio actor and I'm sure they'd love putting on a different voice every week! Instead the Avenger was made so much like the Shadow that you would assume he was a rip-off. Or perhaps there were a lot of Shadow scripts which had been rejected and with a few modifications were turned into Avenger stories.

But the Shadow went big - the Shadow's distinctive laugh, the over-the-top theatrical villains with mad ambitions. Even if you think the show is camp, you have to admit, the Shadow is great camp. But the plots on the Avenger are pretty modest. The only attempt at giving the hero a distinctive sound is the noise made when (once per episode) he takes his diffusion capsule to become invisible. However, the noise sounds like a champagne cork popping and that's unintentionally funny.

I have doubts as to whether the makers of the program were really that invested in what they'd made. Much is made in the first episode of how Brandon's telepathic indicator gives him an insight into crimes that the rest of the police force don't have. But that same episode shows the limitations: he picks up the impresions of a murder but doesn't know who was killed or where. It's only after going to examine a body with Inspector White that he gets the idea it's the victim of the murder he sensed earlier.

The problem with the above set-up is that it requires Brandon to have two inciting incidents. First he gets a vague sense of a crime, then he's part of a police investigation into the crime. It should be enough that as a police chemist he'd get brought in to examine crime scenes! One episode even indicates that Inspector White knows about the telepathic indicator so one wonders why he doesn't simplify his life and tell him he's the Avenger too. Pretty soon the show stopped using the telepathic indicator and instead Brandon and Fern would stumble into crimes the same way as Lamont and Margo on the Shadow - they'd be on vacation when a murder is committed, for instance.

The Avenger is a failure; a bit of an interesting failure, but if you haven't heard every episode of the Shadow, you should listen to all of those first - the standard of quality is much higher on the Shadow. If you do decide to give the Avenger a spin, be advised that the series was packaged for syndication with several 90-second organ interludes where the commercials would be added. Be ready to speed through those breaks, they do become tiresome.