That's Boston Blackie, safecracker turned crime fighter and a long-running favorite with fans of straight-ahead detective fiction in a wide range of media. Beginning inauspiciously in a 1919 short story by author Jack Boyle, Blackie progressed from the printed page into silent films, then into talkies—and finally, in the 1940s, into radio. The first radio Blackie was Chester Morris, who played the role in a long series of B movies during the 1940s. Beginning in 1944 as a summer replacement series for 'Amos 'n' Andy', Morris brought a certain wrong-side-of-the-tracks charm to his portrayal and gave the character a well-crafted introduction to the broadcast medium. But the longest-running radio Blackie was an odd casting choice: Broadway and sometime soap opera actor Richard Kollmar, best known to radio fans along the Eastern seaboard as the urbane Dick of WOR's 'Breakfast with Dorothy and Dick', a morning show which also featured his wife, newspaper columnist Dorothy Kilgallen.