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A Close Call For Boston Blackie opens with Blackie and Runt already in Inspector Farraday's police car, but does the normal fakeout rather than actually beginning in media res. They're being dropped off after helping sort out some woman's problems, and Farraday warns, every time Blackie looks at a woman it gets him into trouble. Sure enough, as soon as Farraday drives off, Blackie sees a woman getting mugged and brings her to his apartment. Gerry's a woman from his past, someone he'd encouraged not to get married, and oh did we mention she somehow left her baby in Blackie's bedroom before she was mugged? Her husband was paroled, and she never visited him, and he doesn't even know about the baby and there's inheritances involved and so on. Blackie tries calling Farraday, but her husband breaks in, there's a scuffle, and someone from outside the apartment shoots him, and of course, the police are racing in.

Trivia: On 1 October 1890 Benjamin Harrison signed the bill making the Weather Bureau a civilian service. Source: A History of the United States Weather Bureau, Donald R Whitnah.

Currently Reading: The Edifice Complex: How The Rich And Powerful --- And Their Architects --- Shape The World, Deyan Sudjic.

Boston Blackie Booked On Suspicion has Blackie impersonate seriously ill rare-book-dealer Mister Kittredge in order to run an auction of a rare Pickwick Papers publication, and before he can even start that Farraday's prowling around the bookshop as he and Sargeant Matthews have read the script and know what to expect. Wouldn't you know it but someone's gone and forged a copy, which the printer claims couldn't ever possibly be detected, so yeah, the scene right after the auction an incorrect comma is noticed. And Farraday suspects Blackie because he knows that's why he's in this movie.

So, alas, a story with a lot of involved and really interesting double-crosses ends up not quite able to unwind all the plots in the last scene so they fit together. That's a shame, but it stays reliably interesting, and pretty well-paced, throughout. I can forgive the resolution not really being there.

Trivia: An Associated Press report dated 7 October 1943 claimed the Dvorak keyboard allowed typists to ``zip along at 180 words per minute''. A Business Week report of 16 October 1943 gave the Dvorak keyboard test speed at 108 words per minute. Source: The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting, Darren Wershler-Henry.

Currently Reading: All The Best Rubbish: Being An Antiquary's Account of the Pleasures and Perils of Studying and Collecting Everyday Objects from the Past, Ivor Noël Hume.

After Midnight With Boston Blackie wastes no time introducing Barnaby, who looks like Ray Walston three years after he died, being released finally from prison so he can violently cough into a handkerchief. Meanwhile Inspector Farraday intercepts a train porter's message for Blackie, and to show that Blackie somehow handcuffed the inspector's ankle to the train seat regardless of how impossible that would be. Farraday stops in to deliver generic warnings to Blackie. This all ought to set up needed exposition but it more kind of fills time while stuff gets going. It doesn't get going until the train ride is over and Blackie learns from Barnaby's daughter that Barnaby's gone missing.

Some folks are fickle.

Trivia: To defuse the tension in the White House while waiting for the returns from the state elections of 11 October 1864, Abraham Lincoln read aloud from a pamphlet with the latest writings of humorist Petroleum V Nasby. Source: Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin. (And apparently he drove Stanton crazy by doing so.)

Currently Reading: The First Space Race: Launching The World's First Satellites, Matt Bille, Erika Lishock.

Somebody must have written the alternate history where Lincoln goes into the humor business, instead of politics, possibly as a Nasby-like writer, possibly as a Dan Rice-like superclown. Mustn't they?

Boston Blackie Goes Hollywood opens with a thief breaking into Boston Blackie's dark apartment. The thief is wearing a hat. Of course he is; it's the 40's. Blackie and Runt are in the other room, getting ready for a trip to Florida. The police show up swiftly, with officer Matthews arresting Blackie, unaware that Blackie's the legitimate tenant and not at all the burglar, who turns out to be Inspector Farraday after all.

There's the usual sort of amusing little incidents, including a bit where they run up the fire escapes (people always run up fire escapes in these pictures) and through the apartment of an elderly couple, which Blackie excuses with a little small talk. They remark on having no idea what just happened, but ``he seemed nice''. From such comic elements are this kind of movie made.

Trivia: IBM's Type 405 Alphabetic Accounting Machine, introduced in the early 1930s, allowed IBM systems to process 150 cards per minute and to print out tabulated information in both numbers and words. Source: The Maverick And His Machine: Thomas Watson Sr and the Making of IBM, Kevin Maney.

Currently Reading: The Best Of Fredric Brown, Fredric Brown. Curiously all the internal pages credit the book to editor Robert Bloch.

Confessions of Boston Blackie is the second entry in a series of B-movies starring Chester Morris as Boston Blackie, reformed safecracker who keeps getting suspected of every crime Inspector Farraday (Richard Lane) hears about who somehow isn't legally The Lone Wolf. This story starts with a statue of Augustus Caesar being auctioned, and also being copied for the sort of counterfeit scam that's always going on in rare art auctions in B-movie detective-story universes. Inspector Farraday asks Blackie right away what he's doing at the auction, and it's a good question, but mostly, he's invited there and went because otherwise how would the movie get Boston Blackie into it?

It's an all right movie. It never quite convinces this viewer that anything is not taking place in a studio set --- even the street intersection doesn't look like they went to the backlot --- and it hasn't got even the scope of the previous movie's spy schemes, or any particularly strong dialogue or even just loopy fun scenes. Several threaten to really catch hold --- the fire particularly --- but it hasn't quite got the life needed for it.

Trivia: The premiere episode of ABC's Saturday Night Live With Howard Cosell featured cameos by Frank Sinatra and Ted Kennedy, a performance by John Denver, a duet featuring Jimmy Connors and Paul Anka, and the American debut of the Bay City Rollers (hyped by Cosell as ``the next Beatles''). Source: The House That Roone Built: The Inside Story Of ABC News, Marc Gunther.

Currently Reading: Undersea Fleet, Frederik Pohl, Jack Williamson. Oh, good, Polynesian offshoots who mutated into deep-sea creatures who, what do you know, get to experience the colonial enslavement side of Western Civilization. Also there's stampedes of Loch Ness Monsters. And the more that the magic 'edenite' used to maintain pressures against deep ocean pressure is on-screen the flimsier it looks. It's a blessing when Pohl and Williamson look more at neat discoveries of exotic lifeforms instead.