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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 9, No. 22 |
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How many do you recall
after 50 or 60 years?
of TheColumnists.com
This is not a column for young folks. It will be Greek to anybody under age 50-plus. Unless, of course, they happen to be fans of Old Time Radio or "OTR" as today's collectors call it.
Radio mystery shows pretty well faded away in America by the late 1950s, though they still are played across the U.S. on specialized FM and low-power radio stations that devote airtime to repeat broadcasts of ancient radio programs. There's a small, but devoted clique of youthful fans for OTR today--and mystery shows like "The Whistler," "The Shadow" and "Inner Sanctum" are still among the most popular, as they were in the 1930s, 1940s and early 1950s.
You can buy cassettes and CDs containing classic radio mystery programs in lots of retail outlets and certainly through the various online OTR marketplaces. I've collected some, but not many, preferring instead to collect DVD, VHS or VCD copies of old movies based on the classic radio shows. My collecting is done for the American Museum of Radio and Electricity in Bellingham, WA, which now has close to 200 movies I've rounded up that are either based on radio programs or are set in the world of radio.
However, only a few of my personal favorite radio detective shows made it to the movie screen, so I'm relying pretty much on memory anytime I turn to the subject of this column: The Great Radio Detectives. What's more, the memory I'm relying upon is that of someone who was a little kid at the time we're mostly talking about--the mid to late 1940s.
Though I recall listening to Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes on the radio, I'm afraid my memory will be too colored by the many Rathbone-Holmes movies I saw at the same time, so I'm going to set Sherlock aside from this discussion for that reason alone. The same goes for the Charlie Chan radio shows.
Probably my all-time favorite radio detective was Brad Runyon aka "The Fat Man," which ran on ABC from 1946-51. Universal-International made a movie called "The Fat Man" in the final year of the series and J. Scott Smart, who played the character on the radio, reprised his role on the big screen. Smart was a great radio actor, but he also looked the part of Brad Runyon and I would have loved to have seen it become a movie series, if not a TV series.
The best thing about "The Fat Man" was its theme music, properly ponderous in tone with lots ot tuba signatures to symbolize the heavy-footed, but nimble-minded Runyon. The show always began with Runyon going into a neighborhood drug store and stepping on the scales.
"Weight: 237 pounds," the announcer told us. "Fortune: Danger."
Runyon was a character credited to America's pioneer hard-boiled fiction writer, the immortal Dashiell Hammett, but I never could figure out which story they borrowed him from. I've always assumed they might have meant the erudite, but villainous "fat man" villain from Hammett's "The Maltese Falcon" known as Caspar Gutman. But William DeAndrea's "Encyclopedia Mysteriosa" claims Runyon was taken from Hammett's nameless deteetive character known as The Continental Op, who was also supposed to be overweight. Maybe Hammett just made him up for the radio series--he would have been hard up for money about then--and borrowed from several characters he'd used before.
Though there was never a "Fat Man" TV series, I've always considered William Conrad's "Cannon" character as a knockoff of Brad Runyon as "The Fat Man."
Before he started playing radio's singing detective "Richard Diamond, Private Eye," movie star Dick Powell starred on radio's "Rogue's Gallery," playing a private eye named Richard Rogue who was frequently waking up with a terrible hangover. This show began on NBC in 1945 and took advantage of Powell's new persona as a tough-talking gumshoe, which began the year before when he played Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe in the movie "Murder, My Sweet."
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radio's "Richard Diamond, Private Eye" with Virginia Gregg. |
Today, it seems incredible that Powell ever convinced anybody to let him play a tough private eye. Before that, he was best known as a "singing sissy" in 1930s musicals and movigoers must have been shocked at the change in their favorite musical performer. But I hadn't been that exposed to Powell's lighter side before seeing "Murder, My Sweet" in my childhood and listening to him very effectively play tough on "Rogue's Gallery."
"Rogue's Gallery" began as a summer replacement series on NBC, then moved to the Mutual network as a regular fall series for 1945-46. It returned as a summer series on NBC in 1946 and 1947, then ended as a regular fall season series on ABC from 1950-51. Movie actors Barry Sullivan and Paul Stewart played the Richard Rogue role after Powell,
Still another memorable detective was Johnny Dollar, who was featured in the series "Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar." Charles Russell originated the role on CBS in 1949, but several other actors took his place, including John Lund, Bob Bailey, Bob Readick, Mandel Kramer and my favorite for the part, movie star Edmond O'Brien, who later won an Academy Award in "The Barefoot Contessa" in 1954.
Johnny Dollar was an insurance investigator and accounting for missing money always seemed to be a major part of his duties. I think he always ended each episode by totalling his expenses and sending in his bill.
One of the most beloved radio mystery series was Carlton E. Morse's "I Love A Mystery," which featured San Francisco private eyes Jack Packard, Doc Long and Reggie Yorke. This was serial-like and for most of its run was only 15 minutes long, Its theme music also was memorable becasuse it was the classic "Valse Triste."
Jack, Doc and Reggie frequently veered sharply away from conventional mysteries into investigations of occult goings-on, which may be why I enjoyed it so much. The guys were more adventurers than gumshoes, too.
"I Love A Mystery" premiered on NBC's Red network in 1939 and moved to NBC's Blue network the following year. It was off the air from 1941-43 and from 1944-49. In between, it played on CBS from 1943-44. In 1949, the Mutual network brought it back with a new cast (including future movie comedy star Tony Randall as Reggie) and it remained on the network until 1953.
Three "I Love A Mystery" movies were made by Columbia Pictures in the 1940s. The Reggie Yorke character appears in none of the films and the only actor who reprised his radio role was Barton Yarborough, who played Doc Long. Many years later, a TV "I Love A Mystery" movie was made as a possible pilot for a TV series, but nothing ever developed out of it.
I also remember listening regularly to "The Adventures of Dick Tracy," based on the famous Chester Gould comic strip. It began on Mutual in 1935, moved to the NBC Red network from 1937-39, went off the air from 1939-43, then returned as an ABC program in 1943 and stayed on the air until 1948. My listening years were probably 1945-48 when the show played around 5 p,m,, following the afternoon kid shows.
Three "Dick Tracy" serials and four feature films were made between 1937-47.
"Adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Norrh" also
got lots of airtime at our house.
The show obviously was inspired by husband-wife detective team
Nick and Nora Charles, created by Dashiell Hammett in his novel
"The Thin Man." This crime series was played largely
for laughs and the humorous scenes played by radio actors Joe
Curtin and Alice Frost were lots of fun. The show ran from 1942-46
on NBC, then went off the air until 1947 when CBS revived it.
It ran until 1955. In the final year of the radio series, Richard
Denning and Barbara Britton, who played Pam and Jerry North in
a TV series at the same time, also took over the radio roles
in an effort to keep the radio series going. It didn't work and
the show folded in 1955.
Still another favorite in our house was "The Adventures of Sam Spade," featuring the gumshoe character from "The Maltese Falcon." A truly great radio actor, Howard Duff, played the character once played on the screen by Humphrey Bogart. Years later, when I was working as a TV columnist, is finally met Duff, who then was quite fat and playing the role in TV's "Flamingo Road" series that Sydney Greenstreet had played in the 1947 movie version. But Duff's voice was still one of the great ones.
One of the most durable of all detectives was Boston Blackie, who originated in a book by Jack Boyle, first appeared in numerous silent movies, then was portrayed on the screen from 1941 in a popular series of 14 "B" films starring Chester Morris as Blackie. Morris played the part in the first radio series, which started on NBC in 1944. Orignally a thief like Raffles, Blackie was working with the police by the time Chester Morris got ahold of him.
The original radio show had a great intro with the lines, "Boston Blackie! Enemy of those who make him an enemy, friend of those who have no friends!" The show moved to ABC in 1946, then became a syndicated series in 1947 with Richard Kollmar taking over the role. It ran until 1950.
Many people aren't aware that TV's "Dragnet," the first great police detective series on the tube, actually began on radio with Jack Webb originating the role of Sgt. Joe Friday. "Dragnet" ran from 1949-56 on NBC radio, then began its long TV run on NBC in 1952.
Here's a bit of trivia about "Dragnet": Sgt. Friday's original partner on radio was Sgt. Ben Moreno, played by Barton Yarborough, the original Doc Long from radio's "I Love A Mystery." In the pilot for the TV series, Yarborough and Webb reprised their roles, but Yarborough died suddenly and was replaced on both radio and TV by Ben Alexander as Detective Frank Smith. Alexander was a veteran character actor who played one of the young German soldiers in the Oscar-winning movie of 1930, "All Quiet on the Western Front."
Finally, there was "Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons," who came on to the eternally appropriate theme song: "Somewhere I'll Find You." I have such vague memories of this show that I don't even know who was playing the lead role in this "missing persons" series during the years I was most likely to have been listening. It was on NBC Blue from 1937-42, then moved to CBS, where it stayed from 1943-51, returned to NBC for 1951-53, then finished its run on CBS from 1953-55. Most likely I was listening to Bennett Kilpack, who played the role longest.
Though my memories, as I say, are vague, I remember it as a dialogue-heavy show whose modern day counterpart probably would be TV's "Without A Trace." I still think "Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons" is one of the all-time great show titles.
Radio deetective shows still have a lot more life today than I ever thought they would 60 years after most of them first were heard, but that's because technology has provided ways to reproduce them at a reasonable price and radio nostalgia programs continue to tease the contemporary listener with the occasional episode from the past.
Collecting some of your old favorites--or just ones that sound intriguing to younger people today--is not unduly expensive. There are some OTR websites where you can order a whole run of a radio show for no more than $10, so why not check it out if any of this sounds remotely interesting?
©2008 by Ron Miller. This column first posted May 26, 2008.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
writes about television mysteries for MYSTERY SCENE magazine.
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