For Nick and Nora Charles, the famed imbibing couple created by Dashiell Hammett in the 1934 novel The Thin Man, sleuthing was a walk in the park; Nick was a retired gumshoe, and knew a little bit about the in-and-outs of detecting. But Jerry and Pam North—the other well-known twosome who investigated murder and mysteries—were […]

During his stint at San Francisco’s KGO in the mid-1940s, John Randolph “Jack” Webb earned his initial radio bona fides as the star of Pat Novak for Hire, a West Coast crime drama whose adherence to the hard-boiled detective tradition often bordered on delirious parody—much to the delight of listeners and fans. Webb played Novak […]

By the beginning of the 1950s, radio crime drama began to develop a new breed of program that, in the words of old-time radio historian Jim Cox, “witnessed a forbidding side of law enforcement in the harsh realities of an urban backdrop.”  Jack Webb’s seminal police procedural Dragnet is considered by many to have been […]

Who would have guessed that sixty-five years ago today, the premiere of a half-hour program about an independent investigator who specialized in following up on insurance claims would wind up as one of the two last network dramatic shows to leave the airwaves…and bring Radio’s Golden Age to an end?  Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar originally […]

Fifty-six years ago on this date, a western — that old-time radio historian John Dunning once described (in Tune in Yesterday) as “the only serious rival to Gunsmoke in the radio Hall of Fame” — premiered over the Columbia Broadcasting System.  Frontier Gentleman, created by Antony Ellis, was a Western adventure drama featuring rich and […]

Comedian Fred Allen had worked himself up through the vaudeville ranks (he started out as “The World’s Worst Juggler” before realizing his talents lie in comedy) to Broadway productions like The Little Show and Three’s a Crowd.   Having wet his finger, raised it to the winds, and realized that vaudeville was not long for this […]

Sixty-nine years ago on this date, Mutual-Don Lee West Coast listeners got their first taste of Brett Halliday’s sleuthing creation in a half-hour detective series appropriately titled Michael Shayne, Private Detective.  The program was durable enough to last until 1953, though it would go by a variety of names (The New Adventures of Michael Shayne, […]

For a show that had a relatively short life on radio and television, The Bickersons has maintained a dominating presence in American pop culture.  We use the term “Ozzie & Harriet” to describe a wholesome, too-good-to-be-true husband-and-wife coupling; and, a constantly quarreling twosome receives the designation “Bickersons.”  The famed husband-and-wife battlers, who made their radio […]