Down Those Mean Streets Trivia Quiz

Answer: The Saint

"The Saint" is my favourite Old Time Radio show of all time, ever. The main character, Simon Templar, otherwise known as The Saint, was played for most of its run by the fabulous Vincent Price. The show had a three-month season at the beginning of 1945, a second three-month run at the end of that year, but finally came into its own in 1947 when Price took over as the main character. "The Saint" follows the adventures of a louche and dissolute man-about-town. He lives in an apartment in New York and solves crimes which are brought to him, but usually which he sort of accidentally falls into. "The Saint" radio show was based on the book series by Leslie Charteris and after radio it became a massively popular TV show that ran for seven years in the 1960s starring the future James Bond, Roger Moore. There was even a "Saint" movie in the 1990s starring Val Kilmer.

I HIGHLY recommend that you give this a listen if you are at all interested in Old Time Radio!

Answer: The Shadow

One of the earliest of the Radio Detective shows, "The Shadow" debuted in 1930 and ran on radio in various forms until 1954 with a total of eighteen seasons. The book series that came out of the radio show eventually ran to 325 full length novels.

The Shadow, Lamont Cranston, is a practitioner of "arts" that he learned in the Orient giving him the ability to cloud men's minds and so effectively turn himself invisible. While he is a crime fighter, he arguably has more in common with the superhero than the detective. The Shadow has secret identity, superpowers, and fights larger-then-life super criminals. He is a cooler Batman.

There were several attempts to turn "The Shadow" into a TV show in the 1950s, but both failed. Of the seven movies made about The Shadow, none were successful including the 1994 Alec Baldwin vehicle.

Answer: The Whistler

Running from 1942-55, "The Whistler" was one of the most commercially successful radio shows and unlike all of the others on this list, it never had a break in programming.

The format of the show is different from the rest, as The Whistler himself does not play an obvious active role in the action. The Whistler is a narrator of the action on the show and leads the audience and the characters to the inevitable and horrible conclusion of their misdeeds. We watch the action unfold before us with a sickening feeling at the pit of our stomachs that all will turn out for the worst. However, unlike most narrated programs, one gets the feeling that The Whistler is himself a character in the story, a harpy, acting as the instrument of divine retribution. One of the more interesting aspects of "The Whistler" as a show is that sometimes a villain gets away with his crime (as long as that villain is not the main focus of the story). This contravened the Hays Code, in force at that time, which basically stated that criminals must never ultimately succeed. A bit of subversion in mid-century Hollywood.

The radio show was adapted into a series of eight films and a short run TV show.

Answer: Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar

Really? A swashbuckling and cool INSURANCE INVESTIGATOR (?!?!) with an "action packed expense account"(??!!??), but yep, that is really what it was and boy was it great. I was super skeptical when I first heard the premise for this program, but it actually worked. Each episode, we follow the adventures of a sometimes freelance, sometimes staff insurance investigator as he travels the country and the world hunting down insurance fraud. The connecting tissue is the "expense report" that he files along the way. From high dollar amounts (charter of a steamboat) to tiny (toothpaste) we get a taste for what happened or will happen in these expense snippets. Bob Bailey's voice is so clean on the recordings that the action really comes through in ways that other shows with scratchier recordings don't give.

The show had 809 episodes of which we still have 710, a remarkable ratio of preservation given that most OTR shows have less than half of their episodes left and many with much less than that. The show lasted up until 1962 which was just about the end point of the golden age of radio. Three pilots were filmed for TV but no show was ever optioned.

Answer: Nightbeat

"Nightbeat" was yet another outlier in the world of detective/mystery radio. Randy Stone, a night reporter for the Chicago Star, would wander the city looking for a story for the next day's paper. He would almost always encounter a mystery to solve, but he himself was not a heroic type. Randy was down-to-earth, quite often frightened of the trouble he was getting into, and likely as not to be a victim of those he was fighting against. The soundscapes created a real feeling of you being out there in the middle of the night, alone and fighting for the little guy. Quite a few of the original 112 episodes were preserved, mostly thanks to it having been picked up by an Australian broadcaster after its initial run in the USA.

A pilot was shot, but never aired as such, instead it was run as part of the "Four Star Playhouse" series and never made into a full show.

Answer: Boston Blackie

Boston Blackie, hunh? Bet you've never heard of him, but at one time he was as well known and as popular as Sherlock Holmes. Blackie was a jewel thief and robber who gave up that life and turned his talents to the good. He would often help those who were victims of crime or simply help the police solve a crime when they were stumped. His main adversary was Inspector Faraday, a cop who respected Blackie's talents but always suspected him of not having given up crime and gone back to the (pardon the pun) dark side.

"Boston Blackie" started as a collection of short stories published starting in 1914 and the character had already hit the Silver Screen by 1918!! There are a whopping 25 "Boston Blackie" movies that run from 1918 to 1949 and the radio show, which lasted only a year, was sandwiched in there in 1944. The revival of the show came a year later and ran from 1945-1950. "Boston Blackie" made a successful transition to television in 1951 and ran for 58 episodes, subsequently shown on repeats until at least the early 1980s.

Answer: Box 13

"Box 13" had an interesting premise, where the reporter, Dan Holiday, advertised that he was open to any adventure or investigation that you had for him. This gave the show a truly broad scope and we get everything from Dan trying to chase down murder suspects, to finding out who keeps adding things to an artist's paintings overnight, to him being contacted by a psycho killer who wants to murder him. While the writing is not the greatest in the OTR universe, the freshness and originality of the scripts keep the listener transfixed.

However, the broad scope of the show may have been what made it unadaptable to the small or big screen. There were at least six attempts to even get it to the pilot stage, but the only thing that was ever shown was a shortened version of one of the radio shows on "CBS's General Electric Theater". Alan Ladd, the original radio actor, was working on a TV adaptation when he was found dead in his home at the age of 50. No attempt has been made since.

Answer: The Fat Man

"The Fat Man", a bit of a "Nero Wolfe" knock off, was amusingly created by Dashell Hammet, who also created "The Thin Man". The Fat Man is detective Brad Runyon who is a private detective who usually works on commission, but will occasionally do work on the side to help the police or a poor unfortunate. Unlike Nero Wolfe, however, Brad Runyon is no monk-like character only concerned with thinking and eating. He has a girlfriend, Cathy Evans, and does a good deal of footwork and investigating for himself. The show is sort of halfway serious and halfway a comedy (like "The Thin Man") but it is completely enjoyable.

Most of the original American episodes have not survived, there may be as few as eleven of them extant; however, there are at least 31 of the Australian ones still around. "The Fat Man" had at least one move in 1951 with the fabulous J. Scott Smart retaining his role from the radio show in the movie.

Answer: Philip Marlowe

Perhaps the best known, but one opening to a radio show, the tough punchy, "Get this, and get it straight..." is guaranteed to kick one right into the world of hardboiled crime. Philip Marlowe is the detective most associated with the Noir genre alongside Sam Spade and the Continental Op. Marlowe is a hard-drinking and tough PI who is nonetheless not a slave to them. He likes a trim figure, but is never fooled by the women who show interest in him. He plays chess, reads literature, and drinks heavily, both coffee and liquor.

Marlowe's radio carrer was long, but uneven. His first appearance was in 1944 on the "Lux Radio Theater", getting his own radio show three years later which lasted only for the summer fill-in season. Bouncing back and forth between "Suspense!", "Lux", and "Hollywood Star Time", Marlowe landed a longer run of three years from 1948-51 in the "Adventures of Phillip Marlowe". Off radio for years, the BBC picked him back up in 1977 to 1988(!) and then did another one year run of Marlowe in 2011.

Marlowe had two short-run TV shows and numerous other appearances on the small screen. He appeared in 12 movies, including "The Big Sleep" starring Humphrey Bogart. He was even the subject of a 1996 video game.

Answer: Dragnet

Finally, we get to probably the most recognized opening sting in all of detective radio, possibly all of radio itself, and perhaps of all media of all time (disagree with me in the comments please). "Dragnet" opened all of its nine seasons and 314 episodes with the same four-note hit and deadpan delivery by Jack Webb.

"Dragnet" followed ostensibly real cases reported exactly as they occurred, the cases were at best based on items that were in the news at the time and at worst made up from whole cloth - a bit like the original Law and Order series.

For its day, "Dragnet" was very forward thinking and dealt with subjects rarely talked about in any medium of the day. Girls tricked into prostitution, accidental shooting of young people by their friends, and even anti-war protests were covered as themes. Jack Webb himself firmly believed in both realism and bringing the average life of a policeman to the general public. The sparse, nearly Spartan feel to most of the shows created a "you are there" experience that no other show came close to.

"Dragnet" ran from 1949-1957 on the radio and was one of the very last of the Golden Age shows to be cancelled. "Dragnet" relaunched as a TV series in 1967 and lasted for four seasons before Webb cancelled it. There was a 1954 movie which was an attempt at a straight version of the stories and then in 1987, we got the both execrable and fun comedy version staring Dan Ackroyd and Tom Hanks.