The Welcome back to down these mean streets and more of the wonderful crime fighters and

detectives of the Golden Age of radio. Our super sleuth today calls San Francisco

home and if you need her all you have to do is

dial Yukon 2 a 209. She's Candy Mattson, one of the most popular lady

gumshoes of the radio era.

Natalie Masters starred as Candy, a private eye who worked out of her Telegraph Hill apartment.

Like Sherlock Holmes, she had her own Watson, Rembrandt

Watson, her best friend, art dealer, and occasional sidekick. Most radio

private eyes had a love interest and a contact on the police force.

For Candy Mattson, these characters were combined into Lieutenant Ray Mallard of the San Francisco police, Candies' sometime boyfriend, and frequent crime scene

foile. There is plenty of local color in the show as was not only set in but also produced in San Francisco.

Candy makes reference to rooting for the 49ers,

and she hits local landmarks during her investigations.

In the first of today's two shows, Candy finds a corpse on one of San Francisco's cable cars.

Dragnet, with its adherence to real locations and authenticity, may be the only radio detective series that

relied more heavily on location than Candy Mattson did with San Francisco.

The series was a family affair, created, written, and directed by Monte Masters, Natalie's husband.

He developed the show originally as a private eye vehicle for himself, but his mother-in-law persuaded him to rework the show for a female lead

character. And maybe it's because the show was designed for a man by a man, but Candy Mattson is refreshingly far from a damsel in distress.

She's as quick with a quip as her male counterparts, and she can deliver that standard

gumshoe narration with the best of them. It was the biggest radio

role of Natalie Master's career, though she'd worked on radio before and she would again,

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