Chick Carter, Detective is a 1946 Columbiafilm serial. Columbia could not afford the rights to produce a Nick Carter serial so they made Chick Carter, Detective about his son instead. This was based on the radio series Chick Carter, Boy Detective.[1] A Nick Carter series was being made by MGM.[2]
In a "rather strange precedent" for a serial, the title character is rarely involved in the cliffhangers. For example, the first cliffhanger revolves around the reporter Rusty rather than Carter.[1] The film starred Lyle Talbot as Chick Carter, Douglas Fowley as Rusty Farrell, Julie Gibson as Sherry Marvin, Pamela Blake as Ellen Dale, Eddie Acuff as Spud Warner, and Robert Elliott as Dan Rankin.
Plot
Detective Chick Carter (Lyle Talbot) finds himself in a complex case when Sherry Martin (Julie Gibson), a singer at the Century Club, reports the robbery of the famous Blue Diamond, owned by Joe Carney (Charles King), the owner of the nightclub. Joe planned the theft in order to pay a debt to Nick Pollo (George Meeker) with the $100,000 insurance money he would collect. Sherry double-crossed Joe by wearing an imitation one, while she threw the real one, hidden in a cotton snowball, to Nick during the floor show. But Spud Warner (Eddie Acuff), a newspaper photographer, there with newspaper reporter Rusty Farrell (Douglas Fowley), takes a snowball from her basket and Nick receives an empty one. The Blue Diamond disappears. Aided by a private investigator, Ellen Dale (Pamela Blake), Chick finds himself pitted against the criminals searching for the missing Blue Diamond...
