Get this and get it straight. Crime is a suckers road and those who travel it wind up in the gut of the prison of the grave.

The story you were about to hear is true, only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.

The Adventures of Sam Spade Detective.

The Adventures of the Saints starring Vincent Prize.

Bob Bailey in the exciting adventures of the man with the action-packed expense account.

America's fabulous freelance insurance investigator.

Yours truly, Johnny Deller. the Hello and welcome to Down These Mean Streets. This week our old-time

radio detective is a super sleuth who made his debut in print a year before Sherlock Holmes, and he solved

crimes on the air for 12 years.

He's Nick Carter, Master Detective, and he sprang from magazine stories to pulp novels, to the big screen, and then to radio in 1943, kicking off over a decade of on-air crime fighting.

For the entire run of the series, Carter was played by Lahn Clark

in one of the longest tenures any actor spent in a radio detective role.

Though he may be most identified with the role of Carter,

Lahn Clark peered all over the dial and everything from the March of Time and the

Cavalcade of America to Quiet Please and the Comic

Weekly Man where he voiced several characters from the funnies as he read them

aloud to listeners. In his cases Nick Carter was supported by his girl Friday, Patsy Bowen, and Sergeant Matheson of the police, affectionately known to Nick as Maddie.

His friends were always on the scene but Carter rarely needed help.

He was a crack pistol shot, a master of disguise, a genius in the crime lab.

Basically there wasn't a problem you could throw at him that he couldn't solve.

It may have earned him the title of the most famous of all manhunters,

but it also meant that in my opinion at least, Nick Carter's adventures were never as engaging as those of Philip Marlow, Sam Spade, and Johnny Dollar.

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