Welcome to Down These Mean Streets, bringing you the best from one of the biggest names of the world of radio detectives,

Jack Webb. Of course, he's most famous as the developer and star of Dragnet, but this week we're

going to hear one of Webb's earliest radio shows and the

series that helped to put him on the map, the hard-boiled detective drama, Pat Novak, for

higher.

The series was the brainchild of Webb and writer Richard Breen.

They met as staff members at ABC's San Francisco affiliate KGO,

and they were given an opportunity to develop a program to fill a vacant slot on the West Coast

schedule. Breen saw an opportunity to create a detective series that played to Webb's strengths as a naturalistic actor who

underplayed his parts and brought a down-to-earth quality to the lines he read.

The result was a detective who was cynical to the extreme, disillusioned, and frequently in trouble,

with some of the purplist prose this side of a Pulp novel.

Novak was a man after a buck in any way he could find it. He rented boats on the waterfront as a day job and he would take on private eye work to supplement his income.

He didn't operate out of any kind of moral code like Philip Marlow, and he was loyal to his clients insofar as they'd paid him to do the job.

At the first sign of trouble, his attention would turn to self-interest and preservation, particularly when the police became

entangled in one of his cases. He was often on the outs with hard-nosed Inspector

Helman, and his only friend was a drunk named Jocko Madigan, who could sometimes be relied upon to offer

assistance and unsolicited life lessons for Novak when he was in a pinch.

Pat Novak originally aired on ABC's West Coast Network from 1946 until 1947.

Breen and Webb left the show after some disagreements with ABC and they wound up on mutual in a copycat series called Johnny Madero, Pier 23.

Pat Novak continued with actor Ben Morris stepping into the role, but he couldn't replace Webb in the ears and

minds eyes of the listeners and the audience for the series plummeted.

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