Welcome to Down These Mean Streets, bringing you the best of detectives from the Golden Age of radio. Welcome back to down these mean streets and another old-time radio detective.

This week it's Michael Shane, the hard-boiled private eye who came to radio from the pages of

stories by writer Davis Dresser.

Under the pen name of Brett Halliday, Dresser wrote over 50 novels and over 300 short stories featuring Shane. Michael Shane first hit radio in 1944 following a run of film starring Lloyd Nolan and later Hugh Beaumont.

The first radio Shane was character actor Wally Mayer, who would later co-star on the lineup and let George do it.

Alongside Kathy Lewis Night, this Michael Shane was light-hearted and the breezy series lasted

until 1947. But it's the version of Michael

Shane that will hear today that is best remembered among old-time radio fans.

The new Adventures of Michael Shane was a syndicated series directed and narrated by radio veteran Bill Russo and it starred Jeff Chandler in the title role.

Chandler is well known to radio fans as bashful biology teacher

Philip Boynton on Armis Brooks, but his Shane is a tough guy in the Philip Marlow mold

with the hard-boiled delivery dialed up to 11.

Produced in 1948, the show ran for 26 episodes, but they continued to air in

syndication throughout the 1950s. Bill Russo had directed Jack Webb

in Pat Novak for hire, and he knew how to create a character and a style that stood out

from the herd of radio detectives.

So now let's listen to Jeff Chandler as Michael Shane in the case of the model murder

with supporting performances from Larry Dobkin, Hans Conreed, and Jack Webb. The Okay, Shane, get the picture. A guy in front of you with a 38, a guy in back with a rifle,

and you with nothing.

If wishing will make it so, you better start wishing to be somewhere else fast because This is your director Bill Russo inviting you to listen to Michael Shane, that reckless red-headed Irish from back at his old haunts in New Orleans in another transcribed

episode. We call it the chef, the shrimp superb

Look maybe I'm talking out a turn mr. Franklin after all you're hiring me but 20 a day is mighty short wages for some of the things I get involved in and I've learned that the phony cases usually have the biggest hospital bills.

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