The We've heard from a lot of detectives on the podcast, many with impressive runs on the air,

but none could match one of radio's most unlikely gum shoes,

a kindly old man with a knack for finding missing people.

He was Mr. Keene, and for nearly two decades and almost 1,700 episodes, he tirelessly closed cases on radio.

The character first appeared in the 1906 short story collection, The Tracer of Lost Persons by Robert W. Chambers. The stories were told from the point of view of the clients who hired Westrel Keene, a detective consulted in search of lost loves and other missing people.

Chambers is perhaps best known for his supernatural classic The King in Yellow,

but this was the only work he penned featuring Mr. Keene.

The real architects of the character on radio were the powerhouse producing duo of Anne and

Frank Hummert.

The Hummert started in radio with soap operas and their genre shaping hits included

Just Plain Bill, Ma Perkins, and Young Winter Brown. The two met while working at the same advertising firm and they were married in

1935. The Hummerts formed their own production company after their marriage and

launched several shows including Mr. Keene. At one point the

Hummerts had 90 episodes of various serialized shows airing on radio each week.

Radio historian Jim Cox estimates the Hummerts

controlled four and a half hours of national radio every week and more than half of

the advertising revenue generated by daytime radio.

The Hummerts concocted the storylines for all of their shows and then farmed out the assignments

to writers known in the Hummert Empire as dialoggers, who would put the scripts together.

It's a testament to Anne and Frank that they could keep the twisting-turning plots of their soaps

and detective programs in their heads while they rattled

off new installments each week.

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