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 are 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. I'm going to do. Hello and welcome to Down These Means Streets, a weekly roundup of old-time radio

detectives and crime fighters.

This week we're on the San Francisco waterfront with Jack Webb starring as Pat Novak for

hire.

Webb is of course synonymous with Sergeant Joe Friday the character he played for over a decade

on radio TV and the big screen in Dragnet but if I had to choose a favorite web

character I think it would be Novak, the cynical hard-boiled

loner who rented boats out of Pier 19 and who took odd investigative jobs to make ends meet, and he commented on his surroundings and supporting

characters with some of the best narration this side of Raymond Chandler.

My personal favorite example.

She had blonde hair.

She was kind of pretty, except you could see somebody had used her badly, like a dictionary in a stupid family.

Quips like that came from Richard Breen, a regular collaborator of Webb

who wrote the screenplays for the film versions of Dragnet

and Pete Kelly's Blues.

A few years after these Pat Novak shows aired,

...