Thu 24 May 2018
Reviewed by Michael Shonk: FOUR ODD & FORGOTTEN RADIO CRIME FIGHTERS.
Posted by Steve under Old Time Radio , Reviews[19] Comments
by Michael Shonk
I have a fondness for the unusual in fiction. Mainstream popular fiction bores me. Take me somewhere I didn’t expect to be or have never been, and I will forgive the creative talent for a lot. Below are four crime-fighters that may not be the greatest radio detectives but are worth listening for their attempt to be different.
JOHNNY FLETCHER MYSTERY – “Navy Colt.†NBC, March 28, 1946. Written by Frank Gruber, based on the Frank Gruber novel of the same title. Cast: Albert Dekker as Johnny Fletcher, Mike Mazurki as Sam Cragg. *** Johnny and Sam are working a book scam when a beautiful young woman hires them to punch a man in the nose. Soon Johnny and Sam find themselves wanted by the police for murder.
The script in this complex mystery is filled with wisecracks and an occasional clue, making for a fun listen.
Pulp, mystery and western fans most likely recognize the name Frank Gruber, and maybe have read one or more of the fourteen comedy-crime books in the Johnny Fletcher and Sam Cragg series.
The books not only led to this radio audition episode but also a Republic studio film in 1946 with the same cast. While this episode mentions a second episode for this proposed NBC radio series there is no evidence it was ever made.
There was a radio series with Johnny and Sam on ABC (1948) with Bill Goodman as Johnny and Sheldon Leonard as Sam.
TALES OF FATIMA. – “A Time to Kill.†CBS, May 28, 1949. Written by Gail Ingram. Cast: Basil Rathbone as himself, Francis DeSales as Police Lieutenant Farrell. Basil’s plans for a weekend break from his role in a Broadway play are spoiled when someone tries to kill him.
The story is full of twists including Basil hearing a murder over the phone as well as a radio announcement that Basil was dead. It makes the plot confusing, but the series’ appeal is its humor.
It is also one of two radio detectives to have a voice from beyond help solve the mystery. Here the ancient spirit of Fatima gives Basil and the audience a clue (the other was Rogues Gallery where Eugor talks to Rogue as the PI recovers from being knocked out).
Basil Rathbone shows his sense of humor in this series that smashes the fourth wall to tiny tiny little bits. Not only is Fatima an ancient Spirit who helps the audience and Basil solve the case, but Fatima is also the name of a cigarette and the series sponsor.
This recording is from the podcast Great Detectives of Old Time Radio and worth a visit for any radio fans.
THE WHISPERER -“Policeman In Danger†NBC, July 29. 1951) Written by Jonathan Price. Cast: Carleton G. Young as Philip “The Whisperer†Gault, Betty Moran as Ellen Norris, and Paul Frees as Lt. Denvers. *** The Whisperer relays “The Syndicate†orders to local gang member to kill the bothersome Police Lt. Denvers. Gault and Ellen know and like the detective rush to save him.
The Whisperer was a summer replacement series based on the characters and stories by Dr. Stetson Humphrey and his wife Irene.
While playing college football Philip Gault was injured, leaving his voice a gruesome whisper. Gault decided to go undercover in the local Central City syndicate and destroy it. Then Doctor Lee with his nurse Ellen was able to restore Gault’s original voice. Gault decided to stay The Whisperer and use the information he learns to continue his fight against organized crime.
Each week The Whisperer would relay “The Syndicate†orders to the local Central City gang then Gault with Ellen at his side would prevent the Mob’s plans from succeeding.
The show played its strange premise straight with dialog that could be witty or awkwardly out of date. Uneven but fun, The Whisperer remains an odd crime-fighter worth a listen.
A VOICE IN THE NIGHT – “Case of the Worried Detective†Mutual, August 8, 1946. Written by Bob Arthur and David Kogan. Cast: Carl Brisson as himself. *** Carl’s weakness for beautiful women and a need to find a place to stay lands him in the hands of a Mob boss who demands Carl solve the murder of one of the Boss’s gang members.
Only two episodes are known to exist and both are terrible. Little is known about A Voice in the Night beyond that it is one of radio’s strangest PI’s.
International star Carl Brisson plays himself as the Golden Oriole nightclub owner and singer. The series’ focus is on Carl singing for the nightclub audience. Eventually Carl takes a break to share one of his crime-solving cases.
Nothing really works in this series that mashes together the music series and the mystery. The acting and writing is awful and seems unsure whether to take Brisson tales of crime solving seriously.
One of the appeals of mystery and crime fiction is the range of the protagonist, from brilliant to lucky, from serious to comedic. I will always have a weakness for the odd and different.
May 24th, 2018 at 9:33 pm
When my collection of OTR shows on reel-to-reel tape was at it peak, I owned copies of 3 out of 4 of these — and I actually isted to the Johnny Fletcher.
A Voice in the Night is the only one that’s totally new to me. From your description, Michael, no great loss there.
I’m like you, though. I’m a lot more interested in finding the hard-to-find and the obscure. The goal of most collectors was to accumulate a complete set of Suspense or Escape, for example, but for me, a copy of a single episode of a Johnny Fletcher was a lot more fun.
May 24th, 2018 at 10:02 pm
I have not read the Johnny Fletcher books, nor have I heard the ABC radio version. Reviews of the ABC version claim Bill Goodman played Johnny as a drunk. In the NBC audition episode Johnny was an adventure junkie with a weakness for women. Since Gruber wrote the NBC episode I suspect its version of Johnny is closer to the books. I hope so as I liked Albert Dekker as Johnny.
May 24th, 2018 at 10:10 pm
You might like the Johnny fletcher books. They are as I recall lighthearted and fun. I don’t know how easily available they might be now.
May 25th, 2018 at 2:25 am
The name Carl Brisson rang a bell, so I went to your archives.
Carl Brisson was the leading man in Murder At The Vanities, reviewed here some while back.
At that time, I had some difficulties in finding a properly working DVD of this one, which I bemoaned at some length in the comments of that post.
Ultimately, I was able to obtain a working DVD of … Vanities, which I fully intend to watch one of these days (honest).
Meanwhile, I can pass on the info that Carl Brisson was the father of Freddie Brisson, the long-time husband of Rosalind Russell.
Miss Russell was much beloved in Hollywood, while her husband was somewhat less so (people referred to him as “the Lizard Of Roz”).
Just so you know …
May 25th, 2018 at 10:32 am
I seem to remember “The Whisperer”, though I would have been awfully young at the time. Maybe I just heard of it, not heard the show itself.
May 25th, 2018 at 12:09 pm
I know I didn’t listen to THE WHISPERER when I was a kid. The local station (northern lower Michigan peninsula) was part of the Mutual network, and I could listen to CBS shows by listening to KMOX in, believe it or not, St Louis.
I don’t remember ever listening to a show on NBC until I started collecting them on reel-to-reel tape in the 1970s.
May 25th, 2018 at 12:40 pm
4. Mike, MURDER AT THE VANITIES is a fun forgotten movie. Here is a clip. In 1934 marijuana was legal.
“Sweet Marijuana”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjdETBXwDo8
Here is a YouTube “trailer” for the movie.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaH1FzD3RtE
May 25th, 2018 at 12:56 pm
5. Rick, I wasn’t born yet so it is a good bet I didn’t hear it when it originally aired. Its title is two letters from the still remembered THE WHISTLER so the titles can get confused.
OTR still can be heard in various places. Los Angeles KNX aired (do they still air) old radio programs.
More likely THE WHISPERER disappeared and was forgotten until us OTR fans started collecting and listening to the old shows.
I enjoyed this episode but the series had some really bad ones too.
May 25th, 2018 at 1:01 pm
8a. Ok, there is more than two letters difference from THE WHISTLER and THE WHISPERER, but I still find their titles too similar.
May 25th, 2018 at 5:16 pm
I definitely remember The Whistler, I listened to it, in the dark, only the luminous dial of the radio casting a glow. Good stuff, though not as spooky as Inner Sanctum.
May 25th, 2018 at 7:05 pm
Anyone who ever heard THE WHISTLER on the radio back when it was originally broadcast will probably never forget how it opens:
But yes, INNER SANCTUM was spookier. With the squeaky door? Also an opening never to forget:
May 25th, 2018 at 9:18 pm
During the first season The Whistler got involved with the characters and story but would later become a character that just introduced the story and mocked the character at the end.
I did a review of the TV version of THE WHISTLER here:
https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=28742
The links to the videos are out of date here is a new one.
“Letter From Aaron Burr†with Howard Duff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mt77o2jsnt8
South Africa had its own version of INNER SANTUM, called the CREAKING DOOR.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dk3yHqilwOM
May 26th, 2018 at 1:26 am
The real gem here is the Rathbone TALES OF FATIMA, which is much as described, with Rathbone allowed to indulge in both dry wit and a bit of self parody.
And since no one has brought him up, the Whisperer of the pulps, “Wildcat” Gordon, is a crusading D.A. who battles crime at night as the Whisperer, no relation to the radio version.
May 26th, 2018 at 12:18 pm
David, I agree about TALES OF FATIMA. I believe there is only two episodes in existence. Most of those who has examined the series have not been kind. Many had problem with the religious figure calling from the beyond to solve mysteries and sell cigarettes. Other felt Rathbone was slumming.
Rathbone had left the radio Sherlock Holmes because he felt trapped and tired of the part. He was trying to shake the image but the World liked him as Holmes. This did not free him from Holmes, but it was a fun attempt.
Here is the only other TALES OF FATIMA episode known to still exist…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZo5ZPEG9-4
May 26th, 2018 at 7:08 pm
A digression – to the point:
A long time ago – I’m thinking the mid-to-late ’50s – there appeared in LIFE magazine a series of full-page ads for Skippy Peanut Butter.
These ads featured well-known celebrities who were approached to try Skippy, and if possible to endorse its use.
The ad copy ran along these lines (approximately):
We get asked a lot about how we get well-known people to do our Skippy Peanut Butter ads.
It’s really simple – we pay them MONEY.
One of the celebs so approached was Basil Rathbone; the picture on the left side of the ad showed him reacting to the Skippy offer, somewhat negatively, while being quoted in the same manner.
The ad copy continues (approximately):
So we dragged in another trunkful of money, and Mr. Rathbone agreed to try Skippy.
Mr. Rathbone’s response was somewhat more positive this time.
(The whole ad – indeed, the whole campaign – was way funnier than my feeble memory is allowing.)
As to Mr. Holmes:
In 1965, WGN-channel 9 here in Chicago got the rights to the Universal Holmes movies, and somebody had the bright idea to start a weekly prime time showcase called The Sherlock Holmes Theater.
The kicker: Basil Rathbone was engaged to be the on-camera host.
There was a slight complication: there were only ten movies in the Universal series, plus the two Fox pictures from before that.
WGN filled out the schedule with their other whodunit asset, Charlie Chan.
And so it came to pass that in the summer of ’65, Basil Rathbone came to Chicago to videotape intros, outtros, and inbetweenos, for a whole season of Sherlock Holmes Theater – Chans included (and the ones they used were mostly Monograms – and I have the TV Guides to prove that).
Since I was still a teenager in ’65, I didn’t get to see most of these (only one TV in the house, under the unfortunate control of Andy Williams-loving parents).
After that one season, The Sherlock Holmes Theater was no more.
Basil Rathbone passed on in 1967; later that year, channel 9 reran a few of his Holmes Theater segments as a summer fill-in – and that was the end of it.
(They only used Holmes movies; I never got to see Rathbone’s Charlie Chan intros, which means that I’ll never know what he had to say about Mantan Moreland …)
Anyway, anecdotes end here.
May 26th, 2018 at 9:50 pm
Mike, Rathbone never escaped Holmes. He may have tired of the character but the public never did. There is a good but format typo-riddled website focused on his work. https://www.basilrathbone.net
Wikipedia claims there is a third surviving episode but I have not found it on youtube.
By the late 50s Rathbone would host radio series such as EUROPEAN CONFIDENTIAL where his intro and host duties seem mailed in and unnecessary. The series would be forgotten if not for collectors and youtube. It was about a newspaper reporter adventures.
And then there was BASIL RATHBONE, WORD DETECTIVE, a five-minute program where Basil explains the history of a word. In honor of Steve’s favorite musical instrument, here is Basil talking about the saxophone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_mVbfdZ-to
May 27th, 2018 at 1:10 am
Another radio detective series starring Rathbone was SCOTLAND YARD’S INSPECTOR BURKE (a.k.a. SCOTLAND YARD), which ran for just about a year in 1947 on the Mutual Network. No episodes are known to exist, unfortunately.
May 27th, 2018 at 1:55 pm
Gary R., Rathbone discusses briefly SCOTLAND YARD in article below.
From the May 9th 1949 edition of the Oakland Tribune:
Rathbone
Gets Weary
Of Sherlock
By JOHN CROSBY
Basil Rathbone, an actor in flight from a character, remarked with deep feeling: “I had to get away or Sherlock Holmes would have absorbed me completely. William Gillette (who played Holmes for roughly a generation on the stage) finally built himself a big house full of trap doors and things and went around in a cap and cape like Holmes. Holmes is too big for anybody.”
Rathbone is still a couple of decades behind Gillette as a portrayer of Sherlock Holmes, but he’s had more than enough. Gregory Ratoff first suggested him in the role of Holmes to Darryl Zanuck about ten years ago. Zanuck thought it was a fine idea. In the next seven years Rathbone played Sherlock in sixteen, pictures. The radio series started shortly after the release of the first picture, and it, too, went on for just seven years. Then in 1946 Rathbone threw up his hands.
“They thought I was bluffing,” he declared grimly. “They thought I’d be back like a bad little boy. I told them I’d be willing to play Holmes on the radio but I’d be in the East. They thought I couldn’t leave all those oranges. If they knew how I loathed oranges.”
VOICE IMITATED
When Rathbone couldn’t be budged out of New York, the Sherlock Holmes program had to go on without him. Tom Conway, an actor who sounds almost exactly like Rathbone, went into the part. Rathbone doesn’t take kindly to this imitation of him. “I resent intensely the way they imitate what we did as well as give the impression I am still on the program. It’s too bad there isn’t a law against plagiarizing man’s voice.” Rathbone claims he still gets hundreds of letters from people congratulating him on his performance “last night” as Sherlock Holmes, which he hasn’t played for three years.
The Holmes character, while it has provided Rathbone a nice living for years, was not an unmixed blessing. It dogged his tracks long after he’d quit. Rathbone lost out on one part in a play because the author told him he was too closely identified with the great detective.
“Holmes .vas the most difficult character I’ve ever had to play. From the American point of view he’s completely un-understandable. He’s the most detached person I can think of in literature or history. He lived for his cases. There was no woman in his life. He was bored with vacations, with people. But when that knock came at the door, he came alive.”
TOO SMART FOR ‘YARD’
Rathbone had a terrible time getting people’s minds off Holmes. In 1946 he was asked to play a Scotland Yard detective in a radio series. He was flabbergasted. “I asked those people if they didn’t realize I’d spent seven years making everyone at Scotland Yard look ridiculous. I told them I can never play another detective. I’ve played the greatest of them all.”
But he did. The radio series, “Scotland Yard,” in which Rathbone played the part of Inspector Burke, lasted a year and was never very successful. Its failure, Rathbone says, was foreordained. Inspector Burke was much too smart to be in Scotland Yard, which everyone knows is staffed by blithering idiots.
Rathbone then gave up the detecting business for a bit to play in the stage version of Henry James’ “Washington Square” re-titled “The Heiress,” where the crime was committed in a human spirit leaving no noticeable outer bruises. Early this year, though, Rathbone got back in the detective racket, this time strictly as an amateur, in a dubious program called “Tales of Fatima.”
The original idea was that this be based on Rathbone’s own life. It didn’t work out well. While Sherlock Holmes’ personality is susceptible of almost infinite variation, Rathhone’s personality isn’t. The Rathbone experiences ran dry in about ten weeks; since then the series has been run along more orthodox lines, which is to say the plots are downright fantastic. However, Basil Rathbone (known on this program as Basil Rathbone) is no Holmes, no Inspector Burke, no expert at all. He just blunders through each case, exhibiting only ordinary intelligence, something the average Holmes fan may find difficult to believe.
In one episode his pal, Detective Farrell, remarked crisply to him: “Get up off the floor, Rathbone, and stop acting like Sherlock Holmes.”
Copyright, 1949, for The Tribune
source: http://www.digitaldeliftp.com/DigitalDeliToo/dd2-jukebox-main.html
Perhaps an odd coincidence but lost silent film LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT (1927) featured Lon Chaney Sr. as Inspector Burke of Scotland Yard. The movie was mystery with horror overtones. Tod Browning directed it based on his short story THE HYPNOTIST. The killer is finally caught through his own actions after being hypnotized.
According to John Dunning’s On the Air – the Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio, “It (SCOTLAND YARD) differed from HOLMES in its most vital aspect – the criminal was most often caught through his own psychological weakness rather than by the deductive genius of the hero.â€
Since both the film and the radio series are lost there is no way to be sure if they were connected or just two characters with the same name.
May 27th, 2018 at 2:34 pm
Interesting article. And I love that Sherlock Holmes’ disdain of Scotland Yard detectives was apparently shared by Rathbone, himself!