Old Time Radio Shows

We know that the airwaves after WWII were littered with corpses, but the collection of bodies were nowhere near as interesting as the collection of hard-boiled gum shoes who seemed to keep tripping over them. There are as many theories as to why hard-boiled detectives became so popular as there were producers and sponsors willing to cash in on the trend. They were as cheap to produce as they were popular, and since they were an outgrowth of the pulp detective fiction of the 1920's and 30's, there was plenty of material to use. As uniform as the hard-boiled detectives seem, each was played with their own quirks and idiosyncrasies. One of the most successful and long lasting hard-boiled dicks was Brett Halliday's Michael Shayne . Halliday was actually one of the pen names used by Davis Dresser, but Halliday was not the only writer to use the name. Shayne appeared in 77 novels, 300 short stories, a dozen films, a TV series and a number of radio iterations. Dresser apparent...

It seems as though every other radio program in the 1940's was a hard-boiled detective story. The genre was actually a very good fit for commercial radio. At first glance, all the hard-boiled detectives would seem to be "trying to be different the same way", however, there was more variety within the genre than would be expected. The detective format was as informally formalized as the matinee Western. Nonetheless, the genre allowed for a good deal of variety. In the case of Casey, Crime Photographer , the hard-boiled detective wasn't even a detective, he was a newspaperman in the best tradition of Walter Winchell with an appetite for presenting his readers with enough juicy tidbits to bring them back for the next edition. The real-life Winchell was as well known for his reporting style as he was for the actual stories he reported, and Casey would follow this example. One aspect of the Crime Photographer situation that was confusing was Casey's status as a ph...