Get this and get it straight.

Crime is a sucker's 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 Saint,

starring Vincent Price.

Bob Bailey, in the exciting adventures

of the man with the action-packed expense account.

America's fabulous freelance insurance investigator...

Yours truly, Johnny Dollar.

... Yours truly, Johnny Dollar. Hello. Hello and welcome to Down These Mean Streets and more Old Time Radio detectives and crime solvers.

Every Sunday in May, we're spotlighting a mystery writer whose works inspired old-time radio detective dramas. And today's author had characters headlining some of the most popular mystery shows

on the air. He's Dashel Hammett, another founder of the hard-boiled crime genre and whose works include definitive classics,

The Thin Man, Red Harvest, The Glass Key, and perhaps most famously the Maltese Falcon.

Hammett's popular characters, private-eye Sam Spade and husband-and and wife detective duo Nick and Nora Charles,

were first adapted for the big screen in enormously popular films.

Later they came to radio and weekly shows that won critical and audience acclaim.

Unlike a lot of his contemporaries, Hammett even created a character expressly for the airwaves with Brad Runyon,

a private eye known to friend and foe alike as the Fat Man. He too was a radio hit, so much so that he made the jump to movies in a film of his own.

...