Welcome to the great

detectives of old time radio from Boise, Idaho. This is your host, Adam Graham. If

you have a comment, email it to me, box thirteen at greatdetectives.net. Follow us

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great detectives. Today's program is brought to you in part by the financial

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detectives.net. And you can also become one of our ongoing Patreon supporters for as

little as $2 per month. Just go to patreon.greatdetectives.net. In a moment, we're going to get

into today's episode of Sam Spade, which is actually an episode of suspense. This was

during the period where suspense was being aired for an hour in the first half of 1948.

Now it's a reasonable question to ask why I'm not playing the 1947 episodes of Sam Spade

first. And that is a good question. The reason is that this episode of suspense is based on two

episodes from 1946 that were repurposed into a one hour radio play. So for following development

of the character in series, it seemed to make sense to play this next. It's important to note

that Sam Spade made the jump from ABC to CBS after the summer series, which finished its run

after 13 weeks. Sam Spade became a huge cultural phenomenon. And of all the radio detective shows

that we played, I think the only one that had a bigger impact was Dragnet. Robert Montgomery had

taken over as the producer of suspense and had this whole hour long format in mind. And really,

this is the second of those hour long shows. And it was a bit of a coup for him to be able to

bring Sam Spade to suspense. This again is a situation where lack of reruns helped. The original

play had been played 13 months before and gone out into the ether. So for those who had heard the

episode originally, it was a chance for an encore and for the millions listening to suspense who

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