The This episode opens with an apology.

Today's series was requested several months ago by listener Hugo Clark.

I'm sorry it took me so long to get around to this program,

but I found it to be a lot of fun, and hopefully the

rest of you will too.

It's the Damon Runyon Theater, a syndicated series presenting the Prohibition-era

stories of New York as only Damon Runyon could tell them.

Though not a detective show exactly, the episodes frequently featured crimes, cops, and robbers,

like the story we'll hear today, involving a murder mystery

and an investigation that could only be described by Damon Runyon.

Before he became a storyteller of New York, Runyon was born in another Manhattan, Kansas, to be precise, and into a family of newspaper men. After serving in the Spanish-American War, Runyon wrote for several Colorado newspapers before he moved

to the Big Apple in 1910.

He covered baseball's New York Giants, and he wrote extensively about boxing.

Runyon earned his reputation first as a sports writer and

today he belongs to both the baseball and boxing halls of fame. His short stories

were marked by their colorful characters in their melodic style of speaking.

It was a blend of formal speech and slang, which has come to be known as Runyon-esque.

For example, here's an excerpt from the original Runyon story adapted on today's

episode. Then we stand there together, speaking of the beautiful sunrise and one thing

and another, and of how we wish we have jobs that will let us enjoy the daylight more,

although personally I do not have any job to begin with,

and if there is one thing I hate and despise it is the daylight,

...