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. the Hello and welcome to down these mean streets and more old-time radio detectives

and crime fighters.

75 years ago this month, Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlow,

one of fiction's all-time great private eyes,

came to radio in his own weekly series. The Adventures of Philip Marlow premiered on NBC as a summer replacement for the Bob Hope show and for 13 weeks big screen actor Van Heflin starred as the detective.

Now normally when we listen to Philip Marlow on this podcast the episodes come from the second and longer running Marlow series

starring Gerald Moore.

That show went on the air in 1948 and it was a big hit for CBS. It also led Director Norman McDonnell to

create gun smoke after CBS President William Paley asked McDonnell for a

Philip Marlow in the Old West.

The Gerald Moore Philip Marlow is one of my favorite old-time radio shows, but when I think of

the Marlow from Raymond Chandler's novels and short stories,

including some that were adapted for the Van Heflin series, I think the Heflin shows get closer to the source material.

Milton Geiger wrote the scripts for the series,

and he knew exactly what passages to lift in full for his adaptations and how to capture Chandler's style in his original stories.

The shows move at a slower pace compared to the Ratitat-tat-tat-rush of the Gerald Moore shows, but it's a pace that's

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