I’ve mentioned before that while I drive I’ve been listening to old radio programs. It’s less soporofic than listening to classical music (or even jazz) and a lot less stressful than listening to the news. I’ll probably maintain the practice at least through the election. Maybe longer.
I went through every extant episode of I Love a Mystery and its sibling, I Love Adventure (not nearly as good), Have Gun Will Travel (the only example of a TV program that was adapted for radio in the U. S.), Frontier Gentleman, and a good chunk of Gunsmoke. There’s no doubt in my mind that Gunsmoke is the greatest of all episodic radio dramas (as opposed to anthologies like Suspense or serials like I Love a Mystery).
Your Truly, Johnny Dollar was the longest-lived radio detective program. It ran from 1949 right to the end of radio drama in the 1960s.
It’s a member of the subgenre created by Carroll John Daly, developed by Dashiell Hammett (creator of Sam Spade and the Continental Op), and perfected by Raymond Chandler—hardboiled detective. There were other hardboiled detective programs on the radio, e.g. The Adventures of Sam Spade, The Adventures of Philip Marlowe, but none were as durable.
Dick Powell cut the original audition tape for the program back in 1949 and over the years Johnny Dollar was voiced by a number of actors including Edmond O’Brien and John Lund. In 1955 the program went on hiatus, retooled and recast with Bob Baily voicing Johnny Dollar, and returned in October of that year as a fifteen minute daily program (it had been a half hour weekly program, each program a self-contained story) with the five daily programs making up a single story.
And it was terrific.
Most of the stories were set in the United States but some were set in other countries including Mexico and Morocco. The show was produced in Hollywood and they hired some of the best voice talent available at the time including Virginia Gregg and John Dehner. Here’s a representative program:
The entire archive of YTJD programs can be found at the Internet Archive. The “Chesapeake Fraud Matter” was broadcast in October 1955. You can freely download them and write them to your own CD for use in the car.
Seriously, thank you, I was unaware of any of these programs. BTW,(smile) How old are you, anyway/
I’m old enough that I remember listening to radio dramas as a kid but not so old that I remember a time before we had a television. I remember when Jack Paar was the host of the Tonight Show and Julius La Rosa got fired on the air.
Those are great and I didn’t realize the internet archives were so extensive.
I recall in ’91-93 my mom taking me to the library and encouraging me to check out everything I could get my hands on back when these were on cassette tapes.
I literally spent three summers biking up and down my town’s 12 mile bike path listening to some of these on my Walkman, especially Dragnet, Gunsmoke and Escape.
Dragnet and Escape are both good. I don’t think that most people realize how much better the radio dramas were than their TV successors. Radio drama is pure story telling.
Which version of the Dragnet tv series? I’ve seen the ’60s era series, which came off very square (which didn’t stop me from enjoying it), but I’ve not see any of the ’50s era Dragnet, which I understand to be a bit more hard boiled. I’ve also read Jack Webb’s book of tales too harsh for the series. It’s easy to see the influence that book had on James Ellroy!