The Day of the Spunky Detective

These are the kinds of days that I got TCM for. A whole slate of Torchy Blane mystery comedies to play on the iPad while I work from my home office. Fortunately I can pick up the West Coast TCM feed that lets me view three hours behind the broadcast times in schedule, so I don't even have to miss the early morning ones before I get up. As I write this, this one is playing:

Newspaper reporter Torchy Blane is handed a telegram, which she reads before realizing it actually was sent to Theresa Gray, the woman sitting next to her on the train. Torchy's telegram, when she gets it, is from policeman Steve McBride, announcing that he will have a minister waiting to marry them when her train arrives. Worried that her marriage to Steve will put Torchy ahead in covering the police beat, several reporters decide to play a practical joke on her and postpone her wedding at the same time. The reporters hire an actor to play dead and phone Steve with the news. They hope that Torchy will report the death and that a second paper owned by publisher Mortimer Gray will embarrass her by printing the truth. Then, Harvey Hammond, the actor, is actually murdered, and Torchy beats the other reporters to the story as usual.

Note the dates of the movies in the schedule. All of the above features were made over a three year span, with all but one featuring the Glenda Farrell in the Torchy role. That seems amazing, but not really, when you think that the running time was typically 70-75 minutes, a series like this was the equivalent of a television show of later era.