The Welcome to Down These Mean Streets and more of the Golden Age of Radios Best

Sleuths and Gumshues. Today our detectives fall into the amateur category.

They're Mr and Mrs North, the husband and wife duo who can't help but find trouble

wherever they go.

Springing from the pages of novels, the North solved crimes on radio from 1942 until

1955.

Unlike, say, Nick and Nora Charles of The Thin Man, neither North was formally trained in the

art of deduction. Jerry North was a book publisher, and Pam was a housewife. But that didn't prevent the two of them from spotting clues and

solving cases that baffled the police.

The married detectives were created by a pair of married writers, Francis and Richard Lockridge.

Richard Lockridge first used the North's as characters and miniettes for the New Yorker, but

they became sloths when he partnered with his wife Francis on the first of 26

mystery novels written between 1940 and 1963. The first attempt to bring

Mr and Mrs North to radio came in 1941 in a failed audition

recording that played up the romantic comedy rather than the mystery.

The series as we know it today really began on December 30th

1942 on NBC.

Pam and Jerry were played by Alice Frost and Joseph Curtin.

Also along was Lieutenant Bill Wigand of the New York Police Department, the North's friend on the force, who was wise enough to bring the couple in for help on his cases.

The North's adventures aired on NBC until

until 1946 and in 1947 they moved across the dial to CBS

to CBS in October of 1952 and Mrs. North came to television in a series starring Barbara

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