On This Day in 1937: “Saints preserve us,” Here Comes Mr. Keen

“So shall my theme as far contrasted be, / As saints by fiends, or hymns by calumny.” Well, pardon me, but I just attended a touring production of Sheridan’s comedy The School for Scandal (1777), notes on which will have to wait until tomorrow—because tonight, I feel compelled to acknowledge, however half-heartedly, the anniversary of a radio program preposterous enough to be deemed food for foolery by noted on-air lampoonists Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding (pictured).

I am referring, of course, to Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons, whose melodramatic excesses—with its strongly contrasted “saints” and “fiends”—were first endured on this day, 12 October, in 1937.

Sure, radio drama chronicler Jim Cox has devoted an entire volume to the story of the “kindly old investigator”; and considering that the series managed to stay on the air for eighteen years, from 1937 to 1955, it must have had its unfair share of followers.

Each week, Mr. Keen was grandiloquently and misleadingly announced as “one of the most famous characters of American fiction” in “one of radio’s most thrilling dramas.” Take that fiction and debunk it, Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, and Nero Wolfe!

The series’ musical theme—the incongruously sentimental strains of “Some Day I’ll Find You,” appropriated from Noel Coward’s Private Lives (1930)—always struck me as a hollow promise at best. Find happiness already, old tracer, and settle down with a woman past the age of … 35! Call it Helen Trent’s last case.

Not that making his last find resulted in Mr. Keen’s retirement. “When Mr. Keen first came on the air as a fifteen-minute evening mystery ‘thriller,” Ohio State University graduate student Charlene Betty Hext observed in a 1949 MA thesis devoted to “Thriller Drama on American Radio Networks,” “he was a tracer of lost persons.

In fact,” Hext pointed out, Mr. Keen remained a tracer of lost persons when the program became a once-a-week half-hour show in the fall season of 1945.” It was a few years after the Second World War, a period when the missing persons theme reverberated particularly, that the plots began to deviate from the premise and Mr. Keen began to solve any case not already handled by the sleuths of the networks’ growing number of competing radio mysteries.  “The present program still uses the old theme music,” Hext noted, and the “announcer regularly refers to Mr. Keen as ‘the kindly old tracer’; but the plots of the radio program bear no witness to that effect.”

Whether retrieving the missing or apprehending miscreants, Mr. Keen’s methods of deduction rarely changed, and they were not of the most sophisticated sort. As Cox points out in his Radio Crime Fighters, Keen’s cases were poorly constructed, their solution relying on “minimal logic,” on coincidence and slip-of-the-tongue-shodness.

None of this bothered me as much as the condescension with which the sanctimonious hero with the soothingly avuncular voice interfered in the lives of those who sought his help or came under his scrutiny. He was an officious, moralizing hound who went about what was often none of his business at all.

I am not usually one to embrace camp, which, to me, is a cavalier act of willful misreading; but I was tickled all the same when a recreation of a Mr. Keen episode—”The Case of the Inherited Fear”—was performed and greeted with refreshing irreverence at the 25th Friends of Old Time Radio Convention in Newark, New Jersey.

The case involved a young naval officer who, as the narrator puts it, “disappeared after he’d been discharged from the navy for medical causes. He was obsessed with a fear of being in confined places.” I could identify with the runaway right away, for what could be more stifling than being clap-trapped by old Mr. Keen?

The unfailing tracer manages to get hold of the claustrophobe in a mining town in Pennsylvania, engaged in an attempt to overcome his anxieties by toiling underground. Just when he is about to make his first descent, an alarm is sounded and his efforts are temporarily thwarted: a cave-in has occurred, endangering the lives of 140 miners.

Keen “seized the occasion” to lecture the fearful man, insisting that he go below to rescue the workers. The old fellow single-handedly (or, make that, single-mindedly) unlocks the mystery of the ex-officer’s phobia by unearthing its true cause: “Your fear is nothing more than a symbol in your subconscious mind, a symbol of what happened the day you were locked in the closet with your mother.”

Such a mother lode of pop-psychological drivel could only trickle from the busy pen of radio melodramatists Anne and Frank Hummert, who decreed that, thanks to Mr. Keen, sanity be restored and social ties mended as the thoroughly rehabilitated young man rushes to the aid of the miners with the “same calm, untroubled expression” his mother has when she turns to her bible.

“Saints preserve us,” indeed, as Mr. Keen’s stereotypical Irish-American sidekick Mike Clancy would put it. The aged tracer had done it again, dispensing another dose of sentiment to which suspense would have been a welcome antidote, or at least a measure of temporary relief.

If only the tracer had gotten stuck in a closet that even the most tenacious grip of nostalgia could not help to unlock and that few friends of Fibber McGee would ever bother to reopen.