Radio Recap: Calling All Cars

Calling All Cars is a historically important radio series, one of the first attempts to recreate stories about true-life crimes. It was a half-hour show and presented over CBS from November 29, 1933 to February 10, 1940. It was sponsored by Rio Grande gasoline and written and directed by William N. Robson; it was the series that built Robson's reputation. Rio Grande promoted the series heavily, even handing out a free "Calling All Cars News" at their stations.

William N. Robson went on to write, produce and direct for many of radio's greatest programs, including Escape, Romance and Suspense, the Columbia Workshop and the CBS Radio Workshop; other programs of his include: the Adventures of Christopher London, Beyond Tomorrow, Have Gun, Will Travel, Luke Slaughter of Tombstone, The Man Behind the Gun, Request Performance and T-Man.

The show's cast largely went uncredited but you can recognize voices like Joseph Kearns, Lou Merrill and Gale Gordon. John Gibson was in a lot of episodes, sometimes as a cop, sometimes as a criminal. The show made use of real police officials to narrate their "crime doesn't pay" message at the start of each show. Their performances weren't exactly good, but it added credibility to the series; one certainly sees the influence on Phillips H. Lord's Gang Busters, which mimicked Calling All Cars structure, although it's never struck me as being as authentic as its predecessor.

Calling All Cars was the first police program to strive for authenticity, the sort of details that would later be expanded on by Dragnet. Robson prided himself on reacting swiftly to crime news; they adapted the death of John Dillinger to the radio just 72 hours after he was killed. Probably Robson's finest hour was "The San Quentin Prison Break" (January 22, 1935) which he dramatized just after the escapees had been captured. Robson later appeared on the Columbia Workshop on September 5, 1936 and explained how that episode came to be, a real rarity in radio!

But I think the death of Dillinger showed up a weakness in Calling All Cars' format; the kind of infamous public enemies like Dillinger were dying out; there were always crimes to adapt (even with the show's restriction on covering crimes in California) but fewer and fewer sensations. Which is a good thing! But when you consider that at the time Calling All Cars began it was trying to promote the goodness of police officers as an antidote to the Depression-era worship of criminals like Dillinger, you can see in this series the start of the trend towards what's derisively called "copaganda" programming.

The bad news about Calling All Cars is that although there are almost 300 episodes still circulating - including the earliest episodes - the first few years have often terrible audio quality, with surface noise, skips and muddy dialogue. But the quality generally improves as the series goes along. There are definitely a few episodes I can recommend, such as "The Corpse in the Shack" (June 23, 1936), which has an interesting dramatization of the killer's trial where accounts of the murder are given by the defense and the prosecution, with different details in each version, and "Three Faces West" (December 30, 1938) with a teenager who falls in with two other boys who are killers. I also truly enjoyed "The History of Dallas Egan" (February 1, 1938), in which Gerald Mohr portrayed a criminal who kept digging himself deeper and deeper; "The Shanghai Jester" (December 21, 1937) about a conman with a mania for sugar; and the very unusual "The Case of the Black Cat," (September 22, 1938), with a suspect named Markheim who invokes the famous Robert Louis Stevenson story!

You can hear the Old Time Radio Researchers' collection of Calling All Cars through the playlist below: