Radio Detective Story Hour Episode 34 – Bulldog Drummond

Out of fog and into American homes comes Bulldog Drummond. This originally hardboiled detective becomes something else when radio gets a hold of him. This run starred Ned Wever (right).

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Radio Detective Story Hour Episode 33 – Broadway Is My Beat

Morton Fine and David Friedkin were scriptwriters who were all over the radio spectrum in the forties and fifties before they moved to television. A look at how writers worked and seemed to carry common themes and style no matter the genre ending in an episode of the Fine/Friedkin scriptwork: Broadway Is My Beat starring Larry Thor (right).

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Radio Detective Story Hour Episode 32 – Nick Carter, Master Detective

From out of the pulps comes Nick Carter, Master Detective! This week “another case for that most famous of all man hunters – the detective whose ability at solving crime is unequal in the history of detective fiction – Nick Carter, Master Detective.” The character of Nick Carter goes back to 19th century detective stories as one of the staples… (more…)

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Radio Detective Story Hour Episode 31 – Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons

This week a look at one of the longest running detective series on radio. Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons was in some ways not much more than a light drama produced by the soap drama factory of Frank and Anne Hummert. Yet, it had its share of crime and death. It was also extremely popular in its day and… (more…)

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Radio Detective Story Hour Episode 30 – Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar

This week I am returning to Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar. It was a different series during the Edmond O’Brien (right) years – a radio noir! I’ll look at O’Brien’s role in the series.

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Radio Detective Story Hour Episode 29 – Jeff Regan, Investigator

Jeff Regan, Investigator saw its birth in July 1948 on CBS. The aural gimmick in the opening was that Regan worked for an international investigation firm run by Anthony J. Lyon. The series proclaimed him “The Lion’s Eye.” The owner, Anthony J. Lyon, played by Wilms Herbert with a voice sounding like a rather large man, would send his prime… (more…)

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Radio Detective Story Hour Episode 28 – Boston Blackie

The original characters were created by Jack Boyle, who first published a short story in “The American Magazine” in 1914 called “The Price of Principle.” Boyle went on to write several more Blackie stories that were collected into a book of short stories in 1919. The character as created by Boyle was a bit more hardened than the radio version.… (more…)

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Radio Detective Story Hour Episode 27 – Casebook of Gregory Hood

Petri Wines, which at the time sponsored the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes over the Mutual Network, wanted a similar program to replace the show in the summer of 1946. The current writers of the Sherlock Holmes adventures, Denis Green and Anthony Boucher, were asked to come up with another detective drama which would fit into the framework created for their… (more…)

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Radio Detective Story Hour Episode 26 – The Falcon

When fiction writer Michael Arlen began writing it was the time of the “Roaring Twenties” and “the Jazz Age.” In 1940, he wrote a short story for Town and Country Magazine called “Gay Falcon” about a freelance adventurer and troubleshooter whose fullname was Gay Stanhope Falcon. The story was immediately purchased by RKO for a film starring George Sanders as… (more…)

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Radio Detective Story Hour Episode 25 – Defense Attorney

This week’s podcast will present a character from radio whose primary job was not an investigator, but rather an attorney who helped put criminals away. But radio audiences were already listening to Perry Mason. Yet even in that series, the element of investigation was paramount. This week I will present a woman, Martha Ellis Bryant, who was by vocation an… (more…)

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  • Jim Widner

  • Jim Widner

  • A former educator and current radio historian, writer and big fan of detective, suspense, and mystery fiction.