The Nimble Fingers of Boston Blackie
By Jeff Baker
He is a man of honor, in his own way. He acts to protect the innocent, he repairs a broken marriage, he saves a man from death at the gallows. He is a loyal and loving husband to his wife and partner Mary. He is what was once quaintly called “a good provider.”
And yes, he’s a crook. A professional safecracker, one who has captured the imagination of lovers of crime and mystery for a century. He is the legendary Boston Blackie. And while his name is still known and he has been portrayed in movies, television and radio for nearly as long as he has been in print, his other appearances are in a version that makes him more of a detective interested in justice than a daring rogue interested only in the diamonds in the darkened study behind a combination lock. The story behind Blackie’s origins is just as dramatic as the fiction itself.
Boston Blackie first appeared in a series of magazine stories by a writer named Jack Boyle, beginning in 1914. In the introduction to the only book of the stories (“Boston Blackie,” done up as a novel in 1919) Boyle claims to have met the real-life model for the character in a San Francisco park in
the aftermath of the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906. How much of that is true we can only guess, but San Francisco reporter Boyle had gotten himself addicted to drugs, leading to committing robbery and burglary which landed Boyle in San Quentin where he met plenty of small and big-time criminals who probably could have provided inspiration. Indeed, the first few Boston Blackie stories were published as by “No. 6066.” (Boyle later proudly claimed authorship.) Following the book’s publication, Boyle published a handful of other stories about Blackie which have not been collected together.
Boston Blackie is among the literary immortals, but Jack Boyle was not as lucky. He was not even fifty years old when he died in 1928. What happened, we do not know: there is more information available about the Loch Ness Monster than there is about Blackie’s creator. The stories he wrote remain
thrilling and quirky with the feel that they are being told under the flicker of early electric lights.
Boston Blackie was not the first nor the last of the fictional crooks who sometimes dispense justice; the likes of Nick Velvet, Bernie Rhodenbarr and Simon Templar are his fictional kin. But Blackie has not been forgotten; a recent pair of graphic novels featured new adventures of the unforgettable master safecracker and detective.