Episode 222 - Ford Theater (Christopher London)

Down These Mean Streets (Old Time Radio Detectives)

Jack Mooney

Arts, Performing Arts, Mystery, Detectives, Old, Radio, Time, Tv & Film, Oldtimeradio

4.6 • 982 Ratings

🗓️ 7 May 2017

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Glenn Ford travels the world as freelance private eye Christopher London, a radio detective with the international beat of a secret agent. The character was created by Erle Stanley Gardner, the author who gave the world Perry Mason, and had it not been for Ford's success on the silver screen, we might have had a long run of globetrotting adventures to enjoy. We'll hear Ford as London in “The Terrible Price of Sugar" (originally aired on NBC on February 26, 1950) and “The System – A Code for Murder” (originally aired on NBC on May 29, 1950).

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Welcome to Down these mean streets where today we're traveling around the world with
0:27.0	Christopher London, the private detective created for radio by Earl Stanley
0:32.0	Gardner and brought to life by big screen leading man
0:35.2	Glenn Ford. Gardner was best known for another of his creations, Defense Attorney Perry
0:41.2	Mason, and Ford was the star of films like Gilda, The Big Heat, and
0:45.8	310 to Yuma.
0:47.8	Their talents combined in the adventures of a globetroting gum shoe on radio for six months in 1950.
0:55.1	A private eye with the beat of a secret agent,
0:57.7	Christopher London's cases took him from New York to San Francisco
1:01.6	to France and the Philippines.
1:04.0	Sometimes he was hired to find a missing person or investigate mysterious circumstances,
1:09.0	and other times he took on a case for personal reasons.
1:13.0	Like Lamont Cranston and Jethro Dumont,
1:16.0	aka the Shadow and the Green Lama,
1:19.0	London had spent some time in the East
1:21.0	studying ancient secrets. But unlike those detectives, the experience
1:26.2	didn't give him any supernatural powers. Instead, they gave him an insightful perspective
1:32.2	he employed when solving crimes.
1:35.2	The series had a pedigree that seemed to predict great success, a character created by one of
1:41.0	America's master mystery writers,
1:43.4	scripts by great radio writers like Mindred Lord,
1:46.8	and direction from William N Robeson,
	...

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