From the current SPRING 2026 Issue

Remembering when a new generation of detectives
found success in print--and on the air

WHEN RADIO GOT HARD-BOILED

By Jordan Elliott

It’s generally acknowledged that the first bona fide fictional detective was C. Auguste Dupin, the French sleuth that Edgar Allan Poe created for his 1849 story The Murders in the Rue Morgue. The character of Dupin — the original “gentleman detective” — set a tone that would dominate the next eight decades of detective fiction: Characters like Sherlock Holmes, Charlie Chan and Hercule Poirot were cultured, well-spoken sorts who emphasized brain over brawns; intellect and scientific deduction over violence. Sometimes these characters proved too supercilious for their own good (credit Ogden Nash for the line “Philo Vance needs a kick in the pants”) but they could always be counted on to ask the right questions and draw the right conclusions.

Then, with the 1920s, things got tougher for fictional detectives — or rather, the detectives got tougher. One might even say “hard boiled.” They weren’t subtle and they weren’t shy, they weren’t above giving lip to criminals or cops, they had no use for romance or sentiment and they weren’t above getting violent when the occasion required it. When it did, these detectives often got back as good as they gave; rare indeed was the detective in this genre who emerged from a mystery without injury.

Perhaps it’s a coincidence that these characters began to appear during Prohibition, when a lot of Americans learned the hard way that organized crime thought nothing of using extreme violence to achieve its goals — and that some chapters of law enforcement were willing to turn a blind eye for the right price. If no one in the real world seemed able to swoop in and bring these malefactors to heel, at least readers could savor someone doing it in the pulp magazines.

One of the very first of the new “tough guy” detectives was Race Williams, who actually took on the Ku Klux Klan in his debut story, 1923’s “The Knights of the Open Palm.” Williams was the creation of Carroll John Daly, a mild-mannered writer who was inspired by stories of the Western vigilantes of the 1800s, trying to impose law in a lawless land. Pulp historian William L. DeAndrea described Williams as “a tough, cocky, nearly mindless investigator who shot his way through his cases.” He was an immediate hit and the hero of eight novels and some 70 short stories.

For whatever reason, Race Williams was one tough-guy detective whose success didn’t translate into other media: You won’t see him in any films and he never had his own radio show. That particular honor was reserved for some of the fictional detectives who sprang up in his wake.

One such character was Sam Spade, the creation of an actual detective named Dashiell Hammett, who worked for a time as an operative for the Pinkerton Detective Agency. He later settled in San Francisco, which is where he created the character of Sam Spade for his 1930 novel The Maltese Falcon, the work many people consider Hammett’s finest.

“[Spade] is what most of the private detectives I worked with would like to have been and in their cockier moments thought they approached,” Hammett explained. “For your private detective does not — or did not ten years ago when he was my colleague — want to be an erudite solver of riddles in the Sherlock Holmes manner; he wants to be a hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of anybody he comes in contact with, whether criminal, innocent by-stander or client.”

Almost immediately, The Maltese Falcon was adapted for the screen, first in a 1931 pre-Code version starring Ricardo Cortez as Spade and a decade later in the version that made Humphrey Bogart a star. (There was a comedic version produced in 1936 called Satan Met a Lady but not even co-star Bette Davis liked that.)

The 1941 version was popular enough to merit two radio adaptations — including a Lux Radio Theatre production with Edward G. Robinson as Spade — so it might have seemed inevitable that the character would get a series of his own. Eventually in 1946, The Adventures of Sam Spade debuted over ABC as a summer series, with west coast radio actor (and future movie star) Howard Duff in the title role and Lurene Tuttle as faithful secretary Effie Perrine.

Duff never felt a need to emulate his predecessors in the role; in fact, when he auditioned, his career was at a standstill. As he recalled later, he was so fed up with his unemployed state that he “delivered the lines in a half-snarling, half-bored manner, like a guy reading a grocery list.”

It actually turned out to be the perfect approach. Duff’s Spade was immersed in a world of murder, thievery and betrayal but there was a humor to his portrayal that allowed the writers to occasionally embrace the absurd. (There were also times when he and Tuttle would get carried away and ad-lib their exchanges, which sometimes got even more absurd.) On one show, a designer is telling Spade about a new foundation garment for women that uses an invisible plastic, but before he can describe it, the telephone rings.

“Probably the NBC censor,” Sam suggests.

The result made the show a hit and Duff a star. The Adventures of Sam Spade moved to CBS in the fall of 1946 and then to NBC in October 1949. That said, the Sam Spade series had always lived an uneasy existence. Dashiell Hammett’s name was removed from the show’s credits when Washington began investigating his ties to the Communist Party; then, in the fall of 1950, Duff’s name appeared in the notorious publication Red Channels (a volume that tarred a lot of innocent people with the Communist brush) and the actor was more or less pushed off the air. (As Duff later explained to radio historian Chuck Schaden, he wasn’t really guilty of anything, but “Anybody who had kind of a vaguely liberal tinge was verboten.”)

The radio show continued with actor Steven Dunne taking over the title role, which only served to remind a lot of people that he wasn’t Howard Duff. By April 1951, the show was gone.

Sam Spade covered the streets of San Francisco, while Jack “Flashgun” Casey was plying his trade on the other side of the continent. The creation of former newspaperman George Harmon Coxe, Casey was actually a World War I veteran and newspaper photographer with, in Coxe’s words, “two big fists he knew how to use.”

As a reporter, he was always on hand to get pictures of the latest crime scene and often found himself investigating (and solving) the crimes he covered. In the process, he often tangled with his city editor Blaine and Capt. Logan of the police. Like Race Williams, Casey debuted in the pages of Black Mask magazine (starting in 1934) and went on to appear in 21 short stories and half-a-dozen novels.

Although Casey might not be as well remembered among detective fans today, he actually enjoyed a healthy run on CBS radio, beginning in July 1943, when Matt Crowley starred in Flashgun Casey, the story of a photographer for the Morning Express. This series set the template for the radio shows that followed, with Jone Allison as fellow reporter/girlfriend Anne Williams and John Gibson as Ethelbert, the bartender at the Blue Note, where Casey and Ann were known to hang out while discussing their latest assignment.

Over the next dozen years, the show came and went, with different titles (most of them variations on Casey, Crime Photographer) and different actors in the lead roles. At one point, the cast actually featured Jim Backus as Casey, although Staats Cotsworth enjoyed the longest run in that role. During Cotsworth’s run, Jan Miner (who later became a television fixture as Palmolive spokeswoman Madge the Beautician) played Anne Williams. For two years, the show was sponsored by Anchor Hocking Glass and was one of the rare weekly dramatic shows performed before a live studio audience.

Raymond Chandler had started writing detective stories as a way of making money during the Great Depression and was actually 51 when he wrote The Big Sleep, the first novel to feature the character of detective Philip Marlowe. Chandler wrote Marlowe’s adventures in the first person, which gave the stories both a sense of immediacy and a colorful descriptive style that made them stand out.

A handful of Marlowe novels followed in short order, including Farewell, My Lovely; The High Window; and The Lady in The Lake. All of them were adapted for the screen with varying levels of success; Farewell was filmed as Murder, My Sweet (reinventing the career of screen singer Dick Powell in the process), while Lady in the Lake was told in the first person — in that the camera showed all of the action from the perspective of Marlowe (played by Robert Montgomery).

Given the success of the novels, the films, and —just as important — the Sam Spade radio show, it made sense that Marlowe would make his way to the airwaves as well. The New Adventures of Philip Marlowe debuted over NBC in 1947 as a summer replacement series for Bob Hope, with screen star Van Heflin in the title role. (Chandler apparently described it as “flat.”) A year later, The Adventures of Philip Marlowe moved to CBS for a three-year run. This new series Gerald Mohr, a radio veteran who had actually played another popular detective — Michael Lanyard, aka The Lone Wolf — on screen.

The CBS series went heavy on style and mood; each episode began with Mohr’s Marlowe declaring “Get this and get it straight! Crime is a sucker’s road, and those who travel it wind up in the gutter, the prison or the grave!” followed by a blast of music from the orchestra. As in the novels, the stories were told from Marlowe’s point of view — and as in the novels, Marlowe could count on getting knocked around (or out) on his way to solving that week’s crime.

As it happens, Marlowe and Spade also took part in a very brief, very rare radio crossover. The occasion was the January 10, 1948 broadcast of Suspense, which saw Duff play Spade in a sequel of sorts to The Maltese Falcon. At one point, he places a call to fellow detective Marlowe, played by the show’s then-host... Robert Montgomery.

The year of The Big Sleep also saw the publication of Dividend on Death, a novel by Dresser Davis (using the pen name Brett Halliday) that introduced the world to Michael Shayne, a muscular, redheaded detective who operated out of Miami. Shayne was different from most of these hard-boiled detectives in one important respect: He had a wife named Phyllis, who brought an element of comedy to the otherwise hard-boiled detective. She was killed off in the 1943 novel Blood on the Black Market and the humorous elements went with her as Shayne was forced to deal with his spouse’s death.

Still, even without the broader comedy provided by a beautiful wife, Shayne was probably the most hapless detective in all of popular fiction. Shayne was routinely broke and often on the verge of eviction; just as frequently, he was beaten up or simply outmaneuvered. The one thing he had in his favor was a strict code of honesty and integrity which kept people hiring him.

During the 1940s, Shayne became a movie star, thanks to a series of films that starred Lloyd Nolan as the detective. In the fall of 1944, a Michael Shayne radio show had made its way to the Mutual network for a three-year run, with radio veteran Wally Maher in the title role. Around 1948, Shayne returned to radio in a syndicated series, starring young Jeff Chandler (whose radio credits included that of the shy Mr. Boynton on radio’s Our Miss Brooks and lawyer Chad Remington on the Western drama Frontier Town).

This syndicated series saw Shayne located in New Orleans, solving crimes through a combination of hard work and dumb luck, occasionally helped out by Inspector LeFevre (played by a pre-Dragnet Jack Webb). Each episode typically began with an orchestral flourish and Shayne describing the moment when it appeared he’d reached the end of the line, and usually declaring “Then everything went black.” The series was produced until 1950, when Chandler found himself becoming a movie star. A third attempt to bring Shayne to radio aired on ABC during the 1952-53 season.

One thing most of these hard-boiled characters had in common was that they debuted in the 1930s, before the United States entered World War II. It makes sense that others would come along in the years after the War, as film noir became a viable method of expression and a lot of people became more cynical as a shield against the horrors of the war that had just ended.

Mickey Spillane had been a writer for Timely (now Marvel) Comics when he had the idea for a detective named Mike Danger, a World War II veteran turned private detective. When selling the idea proved difficult, Spillane turned the comic-book idea into his 1947 novel I, the Jury. In the process the detective became known as Mike Hammer, who in turn became one of the most famous fictional characters of the century.

Earlier we mentioned that Race Williams had never enjoyed success outside of the world of print, but even Spillane acknowledged that Mike Hammer owed his existence to Williams. It’s easy to see the parallels between the two in terms of temperament; celebrated novelist Max Allan Collins — whom Spillane entrusted to complete his unfinished works after his death — calls Mike Hammer “the quintessential hard-boiled detective. Hammer was a man of contradictions — brutal yet compassionate, cynical yet idealistic. He wasn’t afraid to bend the rules (or break them) to achieve justice, and his relentless pursuit of the truth made him a compelling character.”

Eventually, Mike Hammer would become the most popular fictional detective of the 20th century and find himself represented in movies, television shows, even a newspaper comic-strip… but before any of them, there was That Hammer Guy, a radio series that debuted over Mutual in December 1952. The show lasted for two years, during which three New York radio veterans played the title role: Larry Haines, George Petrie and Ted DeCorsia. (Haines and DeCorsia had voices that lent themselves to playing violent characters, which made them especially good choices to play Mike Hammer.) Jan Miner took time away from Casey, Crime Photographer to play Hammer’s secretary/love interest Velda.

When That Hammer Guy left the air in 1954, the Golden Age of Radio was drawing to a close, and the famous detectives of the print world were off to new challenges and new media. Some went into television, with middling success at best (and some, like the Casey, Crime Photographer series, were considered particularly dire.)

By then, of course, radio had created a few two-fisted detectives of its own — including Barry Craig, Confidential Investigator (starring William Gargan); Martin Kane, Private Eye (starring Lloyd Nolan); Richard Diamond, Private Detective (starring screen Marlowe Dick Powell) and Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar (actually an insurance investigator). Hearing them on the radio decades later, these characters remind us that there are still some people who aren’t afraid to get tough in the name of justice — even if it means sometimes getting roughed up along the way.

Tune in to Those Were the Days on April 11 to hear an afternoon of detectives on radio.

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