The Welcome to Down these mean streets where this week our roundup of old time

radio detectives takes us to the Lone Star State for mysteries that combine

the worlds of Cowboys and the Crime Lab. Big screen Western star Joel McRae

plays Jace Pearson in Tales of the Texas Rangers. This has been one of my favorite old-time radio detective shows ever since I heard my first episode nearly 20 years ago.

It combines two of my favorite genres, the detective show and the Western. And it's a rare example

from the era that doesn't take place in a major city like New York or Los Angeles.

The change in locale and the taking of stories directly from the files of the Texas Rangers

give the show a very different flavor from the police procedurals that were all over radio in the

early 1950s.

Ranger Jace Pearson relies on the latest techniques in forensics,

but he also brings his trusty horse charcoal along with him wherever he goes. It's that mix of old and new law enforcement in the

west that makes tales of the Texas Rangers unlike any other radio detective drama.

The show premiered on NBC just over a year after the launch of Dragnet, and just as Jack

Webb was driven to present the real life work of the Los Angeles Police Department,

producer and director Stacy Keach saw the dramatic potential in a show about the legendary

lawmen of Texas.

But unlike Jack Webb, Keach didn't star in his own series.

The lead role of upstanding Ranger Jayce Pearson, Keach went to one of the biggest

Western stars in Hollywood, Joel McCray.

Early in his career, McCray appeared in a variety of films.

He had the lead in Hitchcock's foreign correspondent, and he starred in two films directed by Preston Sturgis. But beginning in the

mid-1940s he began to focus almost exclusively on Westerns. He once

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