Radio: 30 minutes. Blue Network: April 10 – December 29, 1943. Mutual Network: July 3, 1945 – April 30, 1950. NBC: May 7, 1950 – September 14, 1952. Mutual Network: January 5, 1953- November 27, 1954. Cast: Michael Waring was played by Barry Kroeger, James Meighan, Les Tremayne, Les Damon and George Petrie. (Source: On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio by John Dunning, Oxford University Press, 1998.)

Television: 30 minutes. 1954, syndicated by NBC Films Division: A Bernard L. Schubert Production. Produced by Federal Telefilms Inc. Executive Producer: Buster Collier. Cast: Charles McGraw as Mike Waring.

   I have been unable to find an episode of the series with Barry Kroeger or George Petrie as Michael Waring, The Falcon. I have found a site that offers free episodes from the series and at least one example of James Meighan, Les Tremayne and Les Damon. Click on this link to find the episodes I mention here and more.

“Murder Is a Family Affair.” November 27, 1945; Mutual Network. Cast: James Meighan as Mike Waring, The Falcon *** The format of the series will remain the same for most of the series, from the opening phone call from a woman about their date that night to the epilog at the end explaining loose ends.

   The story has Mike and his girlfriend Nancy trying to protect the younger brother of a friend who had just been executed for murder.

   This is the only sample of Meighan I can find, but it shows the film’s influences on the series. Mike is described as a freelance detective but his dialog and actions are not far from Tom Conway’s Falcon. The relationship between Mike and Nancy sounds more than something that lasts one episode and more like The Falcon and Helen Reed (Wendy Barrie) from the films.

“Murder Is a Bad Bluff.” November 1, 1948; Mutual Network. Cast: Les Tremayne as Mike Waring, The Falcon. Produced by Bernard L. Schubert. Written by Jerome Epstein. Directed by Richard Lewis *** A woman hires Mike to check out the man she hopes to marry.

   As with most of the episodes, the mystery is weaken by a lack of suspects and logic. Nancy is gone and Waring is free to continue his alleged comedic womanizing ways, but now he is more likely than in the past to use his fists as well as his detective skills.

“The Case of Everybody’s Gun.” July 4, 1951; NBC. Cast: Les Damon as Mike Waring, The Falcon. Produced by Bernard L. Schubert. Written by Jerome Epstein. Directed by Richard Lewis. *** The Falcon is hired to check out a new charity. Shortly after Mike discovers it’s a con, his client is murdered.

   Damon’s Falcon would never make one think of George Sanders’ version in the films. He played your typical smart-ass radio PI complete with unfunny banter between him and the cops. The mysteries have not gotten any better. Check out spot 11:47 for a good example of 50s radio and TV product placement. Listen to Waring and the cop for the episode verbally spar as both discuss with announcer Ed Herhily the joys of Miracle Whip.

   The character’s continuity is a confused mess. The radio series credits Drexell Drake (Charles H, Huff) as the character’s creator. It also claims kinship to the films, the same films that give the character a different name (Gay Lawrence) and creator (Michael Arlen). Much has been written about this and I recommend you check out Kevin Burton Smith’s Thrilling Detective website for more.

   The radio version of The Falcon under producer Bernard L. Schubert would make one more major change.

“The Case of the Vanishing Visa.” June 19, 1952; NBC. Cast: Les Damon as The Falcon *** Weary of the PI life, Mike Waring retires. Mike had been a top intelligence agent during WWII and the Army decides he is just the man they need, whether Mike wants to volunteer or not. He is sent to Vienna to smuggle out a woman who had been working for our side.

   Becoming a spy didn’t mean there was not a crime or murder nearly every week for Mike to solve . The show, both on radio and TV, seemed determined to convince the audience there was little difference between the cases of a PI and an Army intelligence agent.

   The radio series producer Bernard L. Schubert would continue with the series as it moved over to TV. Schubert would also produce such TV series as The Amazing Mr. Malone and Topper.

   Broadcasting (June 15, 1953) reported Federal Telefilms Inc was finishing a TV pilot for The Falcon. It would be “presented by Bernard Schubert” and star Charles McGraw with script by Gene Wang and directed by George Waggner.

   Obviously the pilot sold, as Broadcasting (April 19.1954) would report about the new series: “Federal Telefilms Inc, Hollywood, this week (April 12) goes before the cameras at Goldwyn Studios with Adventures of the Falcon, a Bernard L. Schubert Production, which NBC Film Division will distribute under a recently signed contract, reportedly in excess of a million dollars. Buster Collier is executive producer on the 39 half-hour films starring Charles McGraw in the title role. Ralph Murphy is signed to direct the first two films and Paul Landres, the second two.”

   According to a full-page ad in Broadcasting (May 10,1954), Harry Joe Brown was another producer involved in the TV series. Brown is best remembered for his partnership with Randolph Scott and director Budd Boetticher in the “Ranown Westerns” films.

   The TV series continued The Falcon as an ex-PI turned Army intelligence agent. The casting of Charles McGraw turned Mike Waring into a more serious tough guy. As Army intelligence agent Mike took on cases all over the world from Western Europe to Macao to behind the Iron Curtain. One episode took place on the Atlantic Ocean. Mike would also take on cases all over the United States from Honolulu to New Jersey, from Chicago to New Orleans.

   Currently there are over 25 episodes of the TV series available to watch on YouTube. Here are three examples.

“Double Identity.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzqJHAFcRto

Teleplay by William Leicester. Directed by Ralph Murphy. Guest Cast: Maralou Gray and Dan Seymour. *** Location: London. When the bad guys try to silence a freedom fighter by kidnapping his daughter, Mike poses as one of the bad guys in effort to rescue her.

   Predictable, but can be forgiven since the episode was filmed sixty years ago. The episode is a good example of TV’s Falcon’s womanizing side.

“Rare Editions.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yp5nX6mKuiM

Teleplay by J. Benton Cheney. Directed by (name missing from video). Guest Cast: Nana Bryant, Charles Halton and Louis Jean Hexdt. *** Location: New York. A self-proclaimed helpless little old lady owns a bookstore that deals with rare books and illegal drugs.

   Entertaining episode with a nice ending.

“A Drug on the Market.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cohk8gwm5lo

Teleplay by Gene Wang. Directed by Paul Landres. Guest Cast: Suzanne TaFel, Kurt Katch and Fred Essler. *** Location: Vienna. Due to several hijackings, the black market is the only source for a drug that could save a little boy’s life and many others. Mike’s job is to find the drug and break the black market ring.

   Some unexpected twists highlight this episode.

   NBC Films promotions for the series compared McGraw and The Falcon to Jack Webb’s Dragnet that NBC Films was syndicating as Badge 714. In Broadcasting (October 4, 1954) NBC Films announced Badge 714 had sold to 172 stations, Dangerous Assignment was sold to 174, and Adventures of the Falcon was sold to only 34 stations.

THE NAKED JUNGLE. Paramount Pictures, 1954. Eleanor Parker, Charlton Heston, Abraham Sofaer, William Conrad. Based on the story “Leiningen versus the Ants,” by Carl Stephenson (Esquire, December 1938); first published in Germany in 1937 as “Leiningens Kampf mit den Ameisen.” Director: Byron Haskin.

   Fans and collectors of Old Time Radio shows will recognize the story this film is based on immediately. “Leiningen versus the Ants” must be among everyone’s all time Top Ten list of favorite episodes. It was produced at least four different times, on Escape 14 Jan 1948, 23 May 1948, 4 Aug 1949, and on Suspense, 29 Nov 1959. You can hear an MP3 version of the first of these here.

   The radio version follows the story itself quite faithfully, that of a stubborn bull-headed plantation owner in South America who refuses to move away from his land in the face of a swarm of deadly ants two miles wide and ten miles long. The only difference is that in the radio version the District Commissioner returns to Leiningen’s compound to see whether (and how) he can make good on his promise to prevail against the deadly horde. He also helps provide half of the necessary narration.

   The story can be read in twenty minutes, and it takes thirty minutes to listen to the radio show. How then is the running time of the movie some 95 minutes long? Easy. Add a preamble about an hour long, one introducing a mail-order bride to the tale, a lady from New Orleans previously unseen by Leiningen.

   Charlton Heston is of course the obvious choice to play Leiningen, a fellow as stubborn and ignorant of the ways of women as he was later on in his portrayal of Captain Colt Saunders in Three Violent People (1956), which I reviewed here not too long ago.

   Of course it could only happen in the movies that the mail-order bride would be as lovely as Eleanor Parker, but leave it to Charlton Heston’s character to reject her almost immediately, once he learns that she has been married once before. (He prides himself on having only new items in his house, including a piano, which of course the new Mrs. Leiningen is able to play, and quite well)

   All in all, it’s sort of dull romance, and you just know that once the danger is over, the two of them will find a way to sort things out between them, if not before. In my opinion, as long as you’re asking me, the time the romantic problems take up could have been shortened considerably, thus giving us more time with the ants. (Some of us, who know full well what is coming in advance, may even be squirming in our seats in anticipation.)

   The special effects are quite good, I hasten to add, and well worth the price of admission. So good, in fact, that I recognized some of the footage as being used again in an episode of the TV series MacGyver, “Trumbo’s World” (Season 1, Episode 6; 10 November 1985).

   And oh yes, one other thing. William Conrad, who played Leiningen in the radio show that I hope you took (or will take) the time to listen to, played the role of the District Commissioner in The Naked Jungle.

  Overall verdict: Medium well but no more.

   While working on the last tedious chores in connection with ELLERY QUEEN: THE ART OF DETECTION, which will come out in January, I expected to devote my final column of the year to someone besides EQ. Almost anyone. But back in October Joseph Goodrich — a name you’re familiar with if you read this column regularly — emailed me a long document consisting of a large number of letters from Manny Lee to Fred Dannay that for space and other reasons he hadn’t included in BLOOD RELATIONS, his collection of the correspondence between the cousins whose byline was Ellery Queen.

   Many of these letters were undated, those that had dates were often out of chronological order, typos abounded, but — Wow! For the next few weeks I alternated between slogging away at the ART OF DETECTION index and working on the Lee document: reorganizing, trying to date the letters that were dateless, adding material in brackets to explain (where I could) who or what Manny was talking about, doing pretty much the same things Joe Goodrich himself had done so well in BLOOD RELATIONS.

   One item I discovered I was able to work into the text of my book at the last minute. The earliest letter in the document dates from very late 1940. Fred Dannay had recently been discharged from the hospital after suffering serious injuries in an auto accident. Manny’s letter mentions that among the people who had called asking about Fred was one Laurence Smith, whom he identifies as the ghost writer behind the then recently published novelization based on the movie ELLERY QUEEN, MASTER DETECTIVE (1940).

   Laurence Dwight Smith (1895-1952) has long been forgotten but a few minutes with Google brings him back to life. Under his own name he wrote four or five whodunits, several mystery/adventure books for young adults, and a few nonfiction books like CRYPTOGRAPHY: THE SCIENCE OF SECRET WRITING (1943) and COUNTERFEITING: CRIME AGAINST THE PEOPLE (1944). His short story “Seesaw” was one of the first originals to be published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (July 1942). What else he may have written under other bylines, or even whether he ghosted the other EQ movie novelizations, THE PENTHOUSE MYSTERY (1941) and THE PERFECT CRIME (1942), remains unknown.

   It’s long been known that Fred Dannay devised the plots for the Ellery Queen novels, stories and radio dramas and Manny Lee did the actual writing — and also that at a certain point in the nine-year life of the radio series Fred, whose wife had been diagnosed with cancer that eventually (on July 4, 1945) killed her, couldn’t perform his function any longer.

   Exactly when that happened would remain unclear today except for the Lee document. In a letter written on June 30, 1948, shortly after the Queen radio program was cancelled, Manny mentions that he had taken over the series “in January of 1944, when you dropped out of active work.” For most of that year, Manny reminds Fred, he made do by recycling 30-minute scripts from earlier seasons and condensing some of the original 60-minute scripts (1939-40) to half-hour length.

   Eventually, Manny says, he “began doing originals from bought material.” When? In October 1944, at the start of the program’s fifth season. Does this mean that every new weekly episode from then on was based on a plot synopsis by someone other than Fred? Not at all! Manny’s correspondence with Anthony Boucher informs us that Fred was several synopses ahead of schedule at the time he dropped out.

   These Manny squirreled away and fleshed out into scripts over the next two years, the last one (“The Doomed Man”) being broadcast late in August 1946. But most if not all of the new scripts for the fifth season were probably based on “bought material.”

   Bought from whom? For the first several months of the new regime, the plots were devised by a long forgotten scribe named Tom Everitt. Even in the age of the Internet almost nothing is known about this man, but we know a great deal about what Manny thought of him because his letters to Boucher are full of snarky remarks about Everitt’s competence and character. On May 24, 1945, he described himself as “hating [Everitt’s] smug, treacherous guts” and Everitt’s recent plot synopses as “sloppier…even than usual….”

   His letters to Fred Dannay in the Lee document offer more of the same. On November 4, 1947, he called Everitt “a son-of-a-bitch” who at the rate of $400 per synopsis got “tremendously overpaid” even though “the bulk of the creative work was done by me, out of sheer necessity….[Y]ou don’t know the things…that bastard has been saying and is still saying in the advertising business about his ‘part’ in the Queen show. There is no protection against his kind of conscienceless and unscrupulously shrewd self-propaganda….”

   Manny would love to have worked exclusively with Boucher but Tony was unable to come up with complex Ellery Queen plots on a one-a-week basis and Manny had no choice but to continue buying from Everitt until late in the program’s radio life.

   At least 33 of the Queen scripts between January 1945 and September 1947 came from Everitt raw material and are identified as such in my book THE SOUND OF DETECTION (2002). Most of the scripts between October 1944 and mid-June 1945, when the first episode based on a Boucher plot was broadcast, were probably derived from Everitt too. “Cleopatra’s Snake” (October 12 and 14, 1944) finds Ellery as backstage observer at a live production of ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA for experimental TV when the genuine poisonous snake being used in the death scene (yeah, right) bites to death the actress playing Cleopatra.

   In “The Glass Sword” (November 30 and December 2, 1944) Ellery tackles the case of the circus sword swallower who died when the sword in his stomach broke while the lights were out. These concepts strike me as way too wacko to have come from the mind of Fred Dannay. Therefore they almost certainly came from Everitt.

   The vast majority of Everitt-based EQ episodes have never been published as scripts and don’t survive on audio. But it now seems quite possible that one of them was mistaken for a Dannay-based episode and published a few years ago — as the title story in the collection THE ADVENTURE OF THE MURDERED MOTHS (Crippen & Landru, 2005). The episode with that title was broadcast on May 9, 1945. The plot is nowhere near as off-the-wall as those of “Cleopatra’s Snake” or “The Glass Sword” and therefore might be one of those Fred completed before he left the series. We just don’t know. Maybe we never will.

   The golden oldie I picked to reread last month was The Bowstring Murders (1933), the only John Dickson Carr novel ever published under the byline Carr Dickson. I wouldn’t rank it among Carr’s top ten or even the top thirty but thought it was on the whole satisfactory, taking place almost entirely in an eerie 15th-century Suffolk castle full of the Poe-like atmosphere that the young Carr loved to generate.

   Is it truly golden? According to Doug Greene’s biography The Man Who Explained Miracles (1995), Carr wrote Bowstring in New York “at white-hot speed” after his English wife Clarice discovered she was pregnant and also in order to finance a long visit to England for the family.

   Greene calls the novel “badly flawed .. John Gaunt [the criminologist who solves the murders] is sharply drawn, but the plot…is unconvincing.” He correctly describes the explanation of the seemingly impossible murder of Lord Rayle as “a creative variation of the solution in [Carr’s first novel] It Walks by Night…”

   He was surprised by “how many mistakes Carr makes about England” but the ones he cites strike me as trivial: the servants “all speak a strange sort of Cockney” and after Lord Rayle’s murder the Bowstring footman fails to address the dead man’s son and successor to the title as “Your Lordship.”

   Greene also mentions “some sloppy lines” in the book but quotes only one, from Chapter 12: “With one gloved hand, he dived behind the body.” Does that sentence rise to the lofty heights of an Avalloneism? Personally, I don’t think so.

   What bothered me most about the plot (am I giving away too much here?) is that, in order for the crucial gimmick to work, a cowled “white-wool monk’s robe” of the sort which the “more than half-cracked” Lord Rayle wore while wandering around Bowstring must be concealed by the murderer in an ordinary briefcase.

   S. T. Joshi in John Dickson Carr: A Critical Study (1990), is no fonder of The Bowstring Murders than Doug Greene. He calls the novel a “confused and shoddily written work” and both the book and its protagonist “spectacular failures.” (Greene, as we’ve seen, disagrees with Joshi about John Gaunt.)

   Joshi’s main complaint is that “the solution depends vitally upon our knowing the exact plan of the house, which is not provided.” Obviously there was no such plan in whatever edition Joshi read, and there’s none in the only edition I have (Berkley pb #G-214, 1959).

   But there are several references to the local inspector making a drawing of Bowstring Castle, and I have a hunch that the sketch does appear in the original hardcover edition. If someone reading this column can tell me whether I’m right or wrong, please speak up.

   If anyone decides to read the novel on the strength of this discussion, they should first go here and download the detailed diagram of the castle that Wyatt James, 1944-2006 (known to Internet mystery fandom as Grobius Shortling) kindly prepared for Carr fans who don’t have a copy of that first edition. And, if my hunch is wrong, even for those who do.

   In my mailbox recently was a book that was sent from Japan but has an English as well as a Japanese title: The Misadventures of Ellery Queen. This 400-page anthology, edited by Yusan Iiki and published by Ronsosha Ltd. Of Tokyo, brings together a huge assortment of parodies and pastiches of the immortal EQ, written by such authors as Jon Breen, Ed Hoch, James Holding, Josh Pachter, Clayton Rawson and, if I may be so immodest as to say it, me. (Anyone remember “Open Letter to Survivors”?)

   The most recent story in the volume, and probably the finest Queen pastiche ever written, is “The Book Case” (EQMM, May 2007) by Dale Andrews and Kurt Sercu, in which Ellery at age 100 proves that his body may be feeble but his mind is sharp as ever.

   Years ago Josh Pachter put together an anthology, also called The Misadventures of Ellery Queen, but could never find a publisher for it. The appearance of this new volume, coupled with the failure of Pachter’s book to find a home, provides an excellent demonstration of how tall Queen still stands in Japan and how deeply he’s sunk into oblivion almost everywhere else.

   Thinking about the role of genetics in mystery fiction, we at once conjure up the DNA testing scenes in countless TV forensic series. But the subject has also figured in the Golden Age of the whodunit. In the 60-minute radio drama “The Missing Child” (The Adventures of Ellery Queen, CBS, November 26, 1939).

   Ellery’s solution hinges on his assertion that it’s impossible for two blue-eyed parents to have a brown-eyed child. That was a common belief at the time, and was also crucial to the solution in an Agatha Christie story of the same decade (“The House at Shiraz,” collected in Mr. Parker Pyne, Detective, 1934).

   But it’s flatly not true, as Fred Dannay and Manny Lee must have discovered sometime in the ten or eleven years following broadcast of the drama. How do I know? Because the fact of its falsity is central to one of the later EQ short stories, “The Witch of Times Square” (This Week, November 5, 1950; collected in QBI: Queen’s Bureau of Investigation, 1955).

   Genetics mistake and all, the original script is included in that indispensable collection of Queen radio plays The Adventure of the Murdered Moths (Crippen & Landru, 2005).

   In a column posted back in 2006 I waxed nostalgic for a paragraph or two about Boston Blackie (1951-53, 58 episodes), starring Kent Taylor in perhaps the earliest and certainly one of the finest action-detective TV series, most episodes featuring one or more elaborate chase-and-fight sequences shot on Los Angeles streets and locations.

   Eighteen of the 26 segments that made up the first season were directed by Paul Landres (1912-2001), whose action scenes, brought to life by master stuntmen Troy Melton and Bill Catching, were of eye-popping visual quality, especially considering that each episode was shot in two or at most three days.

   Until recently it’s been next to impossible to find decent VHS or DVD copies of Blackie segments, all of which have long been in the public domain. Which is why I was delighted to discover recently that at least twenty episodes are now accessible on YouTube — and that many of them were digitally restored last year.

   I especially recommend the earliest segments like “Phone Booth Murder” (#2), “Blind Beggar Murder” (#5), “The Cop Killer” (#6), and “Scar Hand” (#11), all directed by Paul, whom I met when he was in his mid-eighties and who was the subject of a book of mine that came out about a year before he died.

   Paul would have been 100 this month, and to celebrate his centenary I’ve prepared a DVD tribute that will be presented at the Mid Atlantic Nostalgia Convention in Hunt Valley, Maryland on August 11.

   In one of the tapes I made with Paul he vividly described an accident that took place while he was shooting the climax of “Phone Booth Murder.” His description is now preserved on my DVD, accompanied by the climactic sequence itself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJ6voB6ADfE

   If any readers of this column check out this episode and are interested in what went wrong and how Paul responded to the crisis, I’ll include his comments in my September column.

   I spent a goodly chunk of April on the road, driving to the east coast with many stops along the way, then taking Amtrak from New York to Salem, Massachusetts, where I visited Bob Briney’s grave and conferred with the attorney handling his estate.

   He drove me out to Bob’s house, which I hadn’t seen in almost 22 years, and together we went through some of his files. Among them were several manila folders containing letters to Bob from me, hundreds of them, dating as far back as the late Sixties.

   Recently I received a huge package in the mail which turned out to contain those letters, returned to me by the attorney. Since then I’ve spent several hours re-reading them. A strange and sort of spooky experience, almost like going back in time to the decades when I was young and, judging from all the projects I was involved in, bursting with energy.

   After a few years of corresponding with Bob I got into the habit of passing along to him some of the dreadful lines I had encountered in my reading. Care to sample a few? Here’s one from Harry Stephen Keeler’s The Monocled Monster:

   And another from the king of Malapropia, Michael Avallone:

   To commemorate the current celebrations in London I offer this exchange of dialogue from William Ard’s The Sins of Billy Serene:

   From John Ball of In the Heat of the Night fame:

   Finally a gem that would have bedecked my own novel Corrupt and Ensnare (1978) if I hadn’t caught it in time. Loren Mensing reflects that Incident A and Incident B “bore the earmarks of the same hand.” At the bottom of the letter in which I shared this gaffe with Bob I found in his handwriting: “And the handiwork of the same mind, no doubt.”

   More than forty years ago I copied for Bob the following paragraph, which is supposed to be the first-person narration of an educated woman. “Sweet, dear, impossible man. I wonder who he’s making love to now. I wish it were me. I have the education and breeding to appreciate a gentleman like he is.” Anyone want to guess who perpetrated it?

   I don’t usually go back to old columns of mine months later but a few weeks ago for some unfathomable reason I revisited one that was posted in January 2011. Part of it dealt with a radio director named Fred Essex, now in his nineties, who in a memoir talked about having directed an episode of The Adventures of Ellery Queen in which Ellery was played by Carleton Young, the guest armchair detective was comedian Fred Allen, and the murder “was committed in a radio studio that was supposedly rehearsing a crime program.“

   The problem, as I pointed out, is that there’s no known episode during Young’s tenure as EQ where Ellery solved a crime in a radio studio and no episode at any time where Fred Allen was the armchair sleuth.

   Among those who happened to read my column was Fred Essex himself, who insisted that his memory hadn’t played him false. In August of last year, Queen expert Kurt Sercu gave us the answer to this conundrum. What Essex remembered was not an EQ episode with Fred Allen as guest sleuth but an episode of The Fred Allen Show (June 6, 1943) which featured an EQ spoof skit with Carleton Young himself playing Ellery and Allen and a couple of his comedy characters as armchair detectives. Vielen Dank, Herr Sercu!

   When a writer trying to come across as an authority on the mean streets makes a mistake that his most sheltered readers catch, the egg on the guy’s face just won’t rub off.

   In putting together last month’s column I caught a classic howler of this sort in one of the earliest stories of Henry Kane. In “The Shoe Fits” (Esquire, ??? 1947; collected in Report for a Corpse, 1948) private richard Peter Chambers tells us about a gangster who had taken over a top spot “directing traffic from Old Mexico to California, hashish traffic, call it marijuana….”

   No, you did not dream you read that. Kane thinks hash and pot are the same substance! At least he did in 1947 when very few were drug-savvy.

   Among the treasures of my library are two signed mint copies of James Ellroy’s first novel, the paperback original Brown’s Requiem (Avon, 1981), which I first read back in the Eighties.

   Its protagonist and narrator is Fritz Brown, a lover of classical music (German Romantic composers exclusively) who after being kicked out of the LAPD became a repo man and occasional PI. The plot is a Chandleresque labyrinth — a beautiful cellist, a serial arsonist, golf caddies, corrupt cops, a welfare racket — but the style is closer to Bill Pronzini and, with its dysfunctional family and ceaseless journeys into the past, the mood is closer to Ross Macdonald.

   Anyone expecting the telegraphic non-sentences and epic bloodletting of the later Ellroy will be surprised to discover that Requiem is coherently written and minimally violent, although when it comes the violence is pretty gory.

   There are some laughably self-indulgent moments, as when Brown treats us to a farrago of irrelevant anecdotes about caddies (or, as they call themselves, loopers) and later — twice in five pages! — to a loony poem he’s composed in a dream.

   But it’s a powerful read, and offhand I can’t recall any other non-series PI novel that deserves to stand on the same shelf with Stanley Ellin’s 1958 classic The Eighth Circle. Which, thanks to the alphabetical proximity of their names, is just where it stands in my library!

JAMES R. McCAHERY – Grave Undertaking. Knightsbridge Bestseller Mystery #12, paperback original; 1st printing, 1990.

   This book is bound to be a Collector’s Item, simply because it’s going to be so hard to find. Maybe things were different in your part of the country, but in the central part of Connecticut where I live, it never went on sale, and I know, because I was looking for it. Knightsbridge is a small struggling publisher, and they just didn’t have the oomph to push an author whose first book this is.

   The other question is, is the book worth looking for? I think it is, even though it has some problems, but it has some pluses too, the primary one being its lead detective, Mrs. Lavina London, an ex-radio actress in her 70s who finds that even at her age, one can still have her wits about her. Occasional bits of old radio shows are dropped here and there, but — you may be interested to know — they’re nowhere nearly as profuse and possibly underfoot as the mentioning of old mystery writers and their works are in Carolyn Hart’s books.

   The plot as to do with graveyards, ha ha, as you would probably have already gathered from the title. The first victim is a wealthy funeral home director who hasn’t made as many friends in this world as he thought he had.

   Besides the fact that I learned more about funeral directors, cemetery owners, and florists than I really wanted to — there is more backstabbing possible between funeral directors, cemetery owners, and florists than I ever dreamed there could be — I thought the book itself was rather uneven. It starts well, begins to fade in the middle (as many books do), picks up again to what seems will be a grand finale — and collapses in a final confrontation with the killer that seems to go on forever, although it’s gone on for only 18 pages when the killer says to Lavina: “Well, enough of this chit-chat, Mrs. L. … I don’t want to hang around here too long.”

   I also thought for a while that the author Jim McCahery hadn’t played fair with us, but after some consideration I decided that a reasonable amount of clues were there after all. (I probably wasn’t paying attention.) I’d still have trimmed the novel down some, if I’d had any say, but I also say that if you care for “little old lady” fiction at all, you should make a point of picking this one up, if and when you ever find a copy.

[UPDATE] 05-31-12. Offhand, I don’t know how long Knightsbridge, the publisher of Grave Undertaking, was able to stay around, but I’ll look into it. I don’t think it was more than a couple of years. It was Kensington/Zebra who published Jim’s second book, What Evil Lurks, in 1995.

   The latter was also Lavina London’s second appearance, but if there was to be a third, it didn’t happen. Jim McCahery died in 1995, at the far too young age of 61. Although we met only twice, we were friends by mail and through an outfit called DAPA-Em, which until it recently disbanded, published stapled-together compilations of each members’ fanzines every two months for something like 35 years.

   We’ve gone digital instead. Many former members leave comments on this blog and/or have their own. Or contribute here from pages of old mailings, with Walter Albert, Dan Stumpf, Marv Lachman, Geoff Bradley and Stan Burns as prime examples.

   I possibly exaggerated the scarcity of Grave Undertaking, as there are 24 copies offered for sale on ABE, and considerably more of the second. I hadn’t known until looking just now that the second was published in hardcover before it appeared in paperback. I’m happy to know that.

   [When you think of Old-Time Radio, what program is the first that comes to mind? I’ll bet most people, at least those over a certain age, will say one of the following: The Lone Ranger, The Shadow, or even The Jack Benny Program.] To some minds old radio has become nearly synonymous with top-notch horror shows, and Lights Out has a reputation in this regard second to none.

   I happen to think that the series as a whole is largely overrated, but then again there were a few prime examples of creepy crawly midnight chills on that series, real chillers that stay longer in the memory than those of other similar shows, and somehow they seem to make up for all the dull rather uninspired episodes that everyone manages to forget.

   The theme of “Superfeature” the show broadcast on April 6, 1943, is a good one. According to Arch Oboler’s introduction, the most frightening thing in the world is the everyday object suddenly no longer seen or heard in its commonplace form. The familiar unfamiliar. The shutter banging in the wind. The cat at night staring at you with suddenly gleaming eyes.

   Even motion picture projectors. You don’t get to see the show that the two backwoods entrepreneurs put on to bring the spice of life to audiences of country bumpkins, with ulterior motives, but you can certainly imagine it from the reactions of the crowd. The finale of their repertoire is a monster flick, that mysteriously comes to life, later, after the projector has been turned off. And what we learn then is how this pair of crooks finally get what’s coming to them.

   It ends with a scary manhunt through a swamp — scary, that is, if your imagination is capable of believing the huge dose of hokum that’s the whole basis of author Arch Oboler’s story.

   So … why did I leave the lights on? I’d have to admit that listening to a man drown before my ears is something that could keep a more sensitive person awake for a good long while afterward. You could build quite a reputation for a show based on the sound effects alone.

   And only incidentally, I’m also glad to say that I’ve finally discovered what Ironized Yeast was used for.

Editorial Comment:   Follow the link above to listen to this particular episode yourself. A complete log for Lights Out can be found here.

BOLD VENTURE. Syndicated; premiered March 26, 1951. Frederic W. Ziv Radio Production. Cast: Humphrey Bogart as Slate Shannon, Lauren Bacall as Sailor Duval, Jester Hairston as King Moses. Music: David Rose and his orchestra. Other credits (not given on air): Written by David Friedkin and Mort Fine. Directed by Henry Hayward.

   Some interesting production information about the series:

   The transcribed half-hour weekly was on over 400 stations by April 1951. It was first sold to local stations as a 52 weekly episodes package for $13 to $750 a week (depending on station size).

   Bogart and Bacall signed a five-year contract for the show, got royalties earning them $5000 a week in the first year. Writers Fine and Friedkin got $1000 per episode in first year.

   The first thirty-six episodes were done at once in early 1951 then Bogart and Bacall left on a European vacation. By the time the episodes aired Bogart was filming The African Queen. Reportedly there were 78 episodes done, but the number remains debated since most episodes had more than one title leading to some episodes getting counted twice. Today over fifty episodes survive. You can listen to many at Internet Archive here.

   Bold Venture was a mix of the relationship between Bogart’s Harry to Bacall’s Slim in To Have and Have Not, toss in Sam from Casablanca and add “adventure, mystery and intrigue” in the “mysterious” Caribbean islands.

   Slate Shannon was a former adventurer who had decided to settle in Havana Cuba and run a hotel called “Shannon’s Place.” He also rented out his services as Captain of his boat “The Bold Venture.”

   Sailor Duval was a young girl with a wild troubled past. When her father, an old friend of Slate, died he “willed” her to Slate to make sure she stayed safe.

   Shannon was helped at the hotel by long time friend King Moses, who, when the story needed it, would sing a calypso song (by David Rose) recapping the episode’s story.

   A popular source of stories was Slate’s “hobby” (as Sailor called it) of helping people, be it a neighbor who needed Slate to get his daughter away from a gangster or helping an old girlfriend who claimed she was going to be murdered by her stepmother.

   â€œShannon’s Place,” Slate’s hotel was a repeated cause to get Slate involved. Slate took it personally if anything happened at the hotel or to a guest, as when a beautiful female guest has her face ripped to shreds by killer gamecocks. In another episode Slate becomes a suspect when one of the hotel performers is killed. The script is available to read online here.

   The final cause to get Slate involved was his boat “Bold Venture.” Slate and his boat would often be hired by clients who would lie about the real purpose of his trip such as gun running revolutionaries or a college educated treasure hunter turn killer out to retrieve stolen gold.

   The stories were full of touches of crime fiction bordering on noir. Gunfire, fists, knifes, Slate getting beat up, Sailor in danger and countless dead bodies spiced up each week’s tale as our two heroes wisecracked and romanced through it all.

   Strange characters were common, such as two schoolteachers out for excitement and adventure and willing to kill for it.

   And what would this type of adventure mystery be without great dialog such as when Slate asks a man a question and the man replies toughly who’s asking, Sailor says “Him. I talk like this.”

   Then there was the final short scene (often called a “tag” or “epilog”) featuring Slate and Sailor and their relationship, usually ending with romance.

   While the writing and music were enough to make Bold Venture a radio show worth listening to, it was Bogart and Bacall that made Bold Venture special. Their chemistry together translated to radio as well as film and real life. Plus, Bogart and Bacall could do something not many movie stars could, they could act with just their voice.

   It would be the absence of Bogart and Bacall and that chemistry that would doom the Bold Venture TV series, but more about that next time.

      ADDITIONAL SOURCES:

Billboard magazine, 1/31/51

Broadcasting, 4/16/51

OTRR Wiki page.   (L. A. Times article by Walter Ames)

1. INQUIRY: From Bill Pronzini: Just for the heck of it, here’s a quiz question for you and M*F readers: Can you name at least one mystery novel narrated by a chauffeur, or in which a chauffeur is the investigating detective? I can supply the title and author of one and am wondering if there are others.

2. A New OTR Website. It might not be correct to call the CBS RADIO MYSTERY THEATER “Old Time Radio,” but given that the program ran for eight years beginning in 1974, it means that it’s been nearly 30 years since its last broadcast. There is a website that not only lists all 1399 episodes, but it also includes cross-listings for all of the performers and writers. And not only that, you can download or listen to each and every one. How many months would that take, if you did it non-stop? Pull out your calculators! Check it out at http://www.cbsrmt.com/

3. Pulp fiction writer Charles Boeckman is 91 and no longer writing, but his jazz band is still going strong. Check out a photo gallery of his latest gig here.

4. Headline in a local paper: Police were called to a day care center where a three-year-old was resisting a rest.

UPDATE. 01-06-12. My description of Charles Boeckman as a pulp fiction writer was challenged on a Yahoo group where I also posted the link to the photo gallery above. I was advised that Boeckman was a writer of hard-boiled fiction but not published in pulp magazines.

   I shouldn’t have been so short and brief in my post there, nor in the one above. I should (and could) have supplied more of a résumé for Boeckman, and I’m sorry I didn’t.

   It was Walker Martin who came to my rescue on that Yahoo list, and I hope he doesn’t mind my repeating some of the credentials for Boeckman I should have provided:

    “Charles Boeckman under the name Charles A. Beckman started writing for the Popular Publication line of pulps in the late 1940’s and continued until the pulps bit the dust. Such titles as Fifteen Western Tales and Detective Tales carried much of his short fiction. He also made the switch to the digests. I recently noticed his name in Manhunt.”

   Boeckman is one of the very few authors who wrote for the pulps still living — a survivor — and he should be recognized as such. I’m wondering whether he might be a suitable guest for one of the two annual pulp conventions sometime soon. Playing in a jazz band at the age of 91 seems to suggest that his health may be good enough to attend.

   As a long time fan of radio’s Adventures of Sam Spade, I have wanted to sample an episode of Charlie Wild for over forty years. While there are no known surviving copies of the NBC or CBS radio show I have found an available DuMont TV episode online at tv4u.com. [Scroll down to the Charlie Wild photo and link.]

   But before we get to my review let’s examine the history of Charlie Wild, Private Detective (aka Charlie Wild, Private Eye).

   In radio and early television, the networks sold time slots to advertisers. Wildroot Hair Tonic paid through Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn ad agency to NBC for the Sunday 5:30pm half hour slot to air Adventures of Sam Spade. The series was popular with radio listeners and critics, but there were growing problems. Wildroot decided to drop the series.

   Broadcasting (September 25, 1950) reported over 6,000 letters requesting Sam Spade remain on the air. Wildroot and BBD&O denied the listing of star Howard Duff in “Red Channels” as a possible communist was the cause. They claimed it was due to the need for a lower budget so Wildroot could increase its spending in television.

   When Wildroot dropped Spade, it had also reduced the time slots they owned from two to one. Producer-director William Spier, who owned a piece of Sam Spade radio series, confirmed there had been an attempt to budget radio and TV versions of Sam Spade, but no agreement could be reached.

    “WILDROOT DROPS ONE DICK, PICKS ANOTHER PRIVATE EYE. Wildroot, which recently dropped Sam Spade, last week bought Charlie Wild, Private Eye, for its Sunday afternoon time on NBC.” (Billboard, September 9, 1950)

NBC RADIO. September 24, 1950 through December 17, 1950. Sunday 5:30-6pm (E). 13 episodes. George Petrie as Charlie Wild. Written by Peter Barry. Directed by Carlo D’Angelo. Produced by Lawrence White.

   Broadcasting (August 28, 1950): “Wildroot Co, Buffalo will sponsor agency-created program titled Charlie Wild, Private Eye…”

   In Billboard (October 7, 1950), reviewing the first radio episode of Charlie Wild, Leon Morse wrote, “Cut from the Sam Spade pattern with all the familiar ingredients, this detective series should also establish itself with the aid of some sharper scripting.” Morse found “George Petrie’s acting of the private eye was slick and smooth…”

   While Charlie was a rip-off of Spade, Charlie was not Sam. It was Sam Spade (Howard Duff) who introduce Charlie Wild (George Petrie) to the radio audience, according to Spade historian John Scheinfeld. Also Sam and Charlie were both on NBC radio (Spade on Friday and Wild on Sunday) November 17th through December 17th.

   Wildroot wanted Charlie Wild on TV as well as radio.

   December 2, 1950 Billboard reported, “NBC’s loss of the $500,000 Wildroot radio billings for Charlie Wild, and half again as much for the projected TV version, was the direct result of the web’s being in such healthy shape in TV. Because NBC-TV could not provide the sponsor with a time slot for the new video version, Wildroot approached CBS-TV. That net agreed to take the business- if the radio version switched from NBC too. Total gain for CBS – about $750,000.”

CBS RADIO. January 7, 1951 through July 1, 1951. Sunday 6-6:30pm (E). Weekly. 26 episodes.

CBS TELEVISION. December 22, 1950 through April 6 (or 13), 1951. Friday 9-9:30pm (E). Alternate weeks.
    — April 18, 1951 through June 27, 1951. Wednesday 9-9:30pm (E). Weekly.

   Charlie Wild played by Kevin O’Morrison (December through March), John McQuade (March 1951 through rest of series). Sponsored by Wildroot Company Inc through BBDO via CBS. Produced by Lawrence White and Walter Tibbals for Regis Radio. Written by Peter Barry. Directed by Paul Nickell.

   The Billboard (January 6, 1951) review of the Charlie Wild, Private Detective TV premiere found that “O’Morrison was sufficiently engaging tele-wise as redoubtable Wild.” Reviewer Bob Francis also wrote, “What Wild needs is more original story approach and less hokum.”

   Dates get confusing for the television series (perhaps some strong brave TV Guide collector could save the day). While the TV series aired on alternate Fridays, the radio series was weekly and on Sunday. It appears there were more radio episodes produced than television.

   In the June 9, 1951 issue of Billboard, “…the cancellation this week of the simulcast version of Charlie Wild, Private Eye on Columbia Broadcasting System’s radio & TV networks by Wildroot… Wildroot brought Charlie Wild over from NBC, but the program failed to catch on sufficiently to make for renewal.”

   That was the end of Wildroot’s involvement with Charlie, as well as the end of Charlie on radio, but it was not the end of Charlie Wild. Billboard (August 11, 1951) reported Mogen David Wine Corporation of America through agency Weiss & Geller decided to sponsor Charlie Wild and moved him to ABC-TV.

ABC TELEVISION. September 11, 1951 through March 4, 1952. Tuesday 8-8:30pm (E). Larry White Productions. Executive produced by Herbert Brodkin. Produced by Larry White. John McQuade as Charlie Wild.

   In a Billboard (September 22, 1951) review of episode “The Case of the Sad Eyed Clam” written by Stanley Niss and directed by Leonard Valenta, critic Haps Kemper wrote, “Clam’s plot was routine, the script hardly scintillating, and the performances unenthusiastic…”

   ABC was having major financial problems and was trying to convince the FCC to approve ABC’s desire to merge with United Paramount Theatres. (DuMont was the chief opposition. For more about that story read Billboard March 1, 1952, page 6.) Many of the advertisers panicked and removed their programs from ABC. Mogen David took Charlie Wild to DuMont.

DUMONT TELEVISION. March 13, 1952 through June 19, 1952. (*) Thursday 10-10:30pm. DuMont Presentation in association with L. White and E. Rosenberg Production. Sponsor was Mogen David Wine

    (*) According to Broadcasting (July 7, 1952), Charlie was still on the DuMont schedule in July. The Los Angeles Times had Charlie airing on KTTV-TV Los Angeles at Thursday 8:30-9pm (P) as late as July 31, 1952.

“The Case of Double Trouble.” Cast: John McQuade as Charlie Wild, John Shellie as Captain O’Connell, Philip Truex as Tillinghost, Philippa Bevans as Amanda. Produced by Herbert Broadkin. Directed by Charles Adams. Written by Palmer Thompson. Television director was Barry Shear.

   This was DuMont so it is no surprise the production values were cheap. Shooting live and in small sets limited the possibilities for action, forcing the story to rely too heavily on the weak dialog and disappointing cast. John McQuade performance as Charlie was lackluster.

   We open as Charlie is talking into a Dictaphone to “Sweetheart.” He tells her about “The Case of Double Trouble.” It began when Charlie’s pal Police Captain O’Connell found an envelope outside Charlie’s door. The Captain and Charlie plan to have dinner together. The envelope contains half of a five hundred dollar bill and a promise for the other half when Charlie takes a unknown client’s case.

   It is late Friday and despite a hungry Captain tagging along, Charlie meets the client. The client wants Charlie to protect a priceless parchment in a sealed envelope for the weekend. Charlie takes the envelope back to his office where he is knocked out by a huge ruthless woman and her pipsqueak husband.

   Charlie wakes up and calls O’Connell who is still waiting for his dinner. Charlie tells his pal to go up to the client’s hotel room and keep him there until Charlie can get there.

   Soon, all the characters gather in the room, there is a required fight, and all is revealed. We end back with Charlie on the Dictaphone telling “Sweetheart” there is money in the safe minus what he and the Captain spent on dinner.

    “Get Wildroot Cream Oil, Charlie/It keeps your hair in trim/You see it’s non-alcoholic, Charlie/It’s made with soothing lanolin…”

   One of my goals, with these research heavy reviews, is to focus on the source materials of the time the series was made in an effort to confirm or disprove the current historical views which too often is riddled with misinformation. There remains questions about Charlie Wild I was unable to confirm or disprove.

   Did the series title come from the Wildroot commercial jingle that advised Charlie to get the hair product? Probably. Oddly, each of the Billboard’s reviews discussed the commercial but made no mention of any connection between the series title and the commercial jingle.

   What role did Dashiell Hammett’s character, Sam Spade’s secretary Effie Perrin play in Charlie Wild? I find it hard to believe Wild’s secretary and Spade’s secretary was the same character. I found no mention of Wild’s secretary by any name, not even in the reviews. Try reviewing radio’s Sam Spade without mentioning his secretary.

   Currently, it is unknown who played Charlie Wild’s secretary in the NBC radio series. It is commonly accepted today that Cloris Leachman played TV’s Charlie Wild’s secretary Effie Perrin.

   Hopefully, someday a copy of the NBC radio Charlie Wild with George Petrie (who would have been a better replacement for Howard Duff as Sam Spade than Steve Dunne) will be found. I wonder what reaction the audience (to say nothing about the lawyers) had if Effie Perrin was Wild’s secretary in New York on NBC, Sunday at 5:30pm and Sam Spade’s secretary in San Francisco on NBC, Friday at 8:30pm.

   There remain fifteen Charlie Wild TV episodes at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, as well as some at the Paley Center. These could hold the answer about Effie, if she did not spend all of her time off stage as she did in “The Case of Double Trouble.” Was Charlie Wild’s secretary Effie Perrin or, as I suspect, another character called Effie?

       ADDITIONAL SOURCES:

On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio by John Denning.
JJ Radio logs: http://www. jjonz.us/RadioLogs
Mystery*File: https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=8425