It’s Christmas time and this week’s podcast is a special one! Eleven years ago, I featured this on the Radio Detective Story Hour. Staying in the vein of our detective theme, I present a variation on Dicken’s “A Christmas Carol” with the puckish Dick Powell in his Richard Diamond hat. Enjoy and Merry Christmas!

Writer and critic Anthony Boucher was assembling short stories from current mystery writers in 1945 for a collection he was calling Great American Detective Stories and wanted to include one from mystery and noir writer Cornell Woolrich. Boucher chose for his collection, the Woolrich story called “Finger of Doom” which first appeared in Argosy magazine in 1940; one of only three the author provided to them that year. Woolrich biographer, Francis Nevins, referred to the story as one of the...

Raymond Chandler’s early writing career was mainly as a poet and essayist for several publications while living in the United Kingdom. But Chandler was not happy with it and returned to the U.S. to become an accountant. After being wounded in the trenches of France, he returned to the U.S. hoping to take up writing. Instead he hired on with an oil company where he worked until 1932 after being fired for his drinking, womanizing and depression. He began to write again and published his first...

Every so often while listening to various crime radio episodes, I come across one that just really holds my attention and surprises me with a fuller, denser episode that makes listening to it a real pleasure. Such was the case when I listened to an episode of Escape called “Crossing Paris” from 1950. It is a strongly character driven story that wasn’t apparently originally intended as a crime-oriented piece, but more fanciful somewhat comedic work of fiction. The episode was adapted from a...

Antony Ellis, a remarkable writer as well as producer his work is found all over Suspense and Escape especially. Being an ex-pat Englishman, he also produced and wrote the John Dehner vehicle Frontier Gentleman, which chronicled the adventures of one J.B. Kendall, writer for the London Times, as he moved around the old west. Ellis seemed often taken imaginatively into studies of the human psyche and produced some pretty fabulous suspense thrillers as a result. One in particular is featured...

One of the best radio mystery series in the 1940s was the Crime Club which based its plays upon stories written by actual crime writers of the times. These were writers whose works were part of the Doubleday Crime Club imprints in the forties and were usually cracker crime stories. The Mutual Broadcasting System snapped up a radio package offered by Doubleday and began airing adaptations from the imprint in December 1946. Most of radio plays were adapted by scripter Stedman Coles with...

Eleazar Lipsky was a lawyer and prosecutor in the Bronx and Manhattan until his death in 1993. In the 1940s he turned to writing novels and plays while maintaining his legal work. It was natural that most of his stories revolved around the courtroom and investigative attorneys. Probably his most famous novel was originally based upon a 100 page manuscript which became a film noir called Kiss of Death starring Victor Mature. Lipsky wrote a number of other stories including a detective story...

This podcast offering is only tangentially a detective story of sorts. It does involve investigations by individuals, potential suspects, potential crimes, and a resolution of sorts. And like many of my features, it comes based upon a short story. The story is from the sometimes strange mind of writer Robert Bloch. Bloch is probably best known among the public at large as the writer of the story upon which the classic Hitchcock film, Psycho, is based. In 1943 Bloch published “Yours Truly,...

In the introduction to Jerome and Harold Prince’s first detective short story, editors Ellery Queen called the piece a “strange, strange story.” The story was called “The Man in the Velvet Hat” and it became the best known of the writing duo who continued to publish occasionally in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. In the introduction, the authors wrote to the editor: “…we think we owe a good deal to the motion picture. For the motion picture is able to create a mood of unreal reality by...

Prior to and after the commercialization of radio, many people found entertainment in the many magazines and pulps which were ubiquitous at that time. By the time radio drama began to develop there were many short stories and serials from these magazines that were beginning to be picked up by radio. those with an interest in crime oriented subjects were enamored by lighter detective stories of S.S. Van Dine’s Philo Vance, Dorothy Sayer’s Lord Peter Wimsey and Agatha Christie’s Poirot. One...