Welcome to Down These Mean Streets, bringing you the best of detectives from the Golden Age of radio. Today on down these mean streets were off to London for an episode of the CBS Scotland Yard procedural pursuit.

London was an attractive setting for radio writers looking to distinguish their shows

from the sea of cops and robbers dramas on the air.

Several networks offered series set across the pond, including the Mutual Networks Inspector Burke, which starred a post-Shirlock Holmes Basil Rathbone.

Pursuit lacked star power, but made up for it with great scripts and direction from some of the biggest

talents in radio.

Pursuit grew out of a 1948 audition recording for a series called The Hunters,

which starred Victor Jory as Scotland Yards and Inspector Harvey,

in an adaptation of Cornell Woolrich's short story

You Take Ballistics. Developed by radio director Anton M. Leader,

the hunters would have presented the Inspector Harvey character in other adaptations of famous works.

The Hunter's never took off, but the concept was reworked and launched as pursuit the following year.

Producer and Director William N Robeson shepherded the series and solicited scripts from great radio writers like Morton Fine, David Friedkin, and Gil Dowd.

Succeeding Victor Jory as the newly renamed Inspector Peter Black

was character actor Ted D'Corsia. A radio veteran, D'Corsia could be heard

as Commissioner Weston on the Shadow, Lieutenant Levinson on Richard Diamond, private detective, and in supporting roles on dozens of other shows.

He was particularly good with dialects and he nailed the clipped British tones of the determined Scotland Yard man.

The series premiered on CBS on October 27, 1949.

In early 1950,

50, both William and Robeson and Ted Corsia left pursuit.

Elliot Lewis took over as producer and director,

we've heard his work before on Broadway is My Beat.

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