The New Adventures of Michael Shayne
Old Time Radio Programs, Detective Series, The New Adventures of Michael Shayne Brains, brawn, and an insatiable attraction to attractive and dangerous females. A cigarette dangling from the corner of the mouth, a slouch hat parked on a coat rack in a seedy downtown office, a willingness to get beaten, punched, sapped, shot, and generally abused for twenty bucks a day. It was everything that radio listeners came to expect from the tough guy noir detectives of the mid-1940s. And all of these traditional elements fit Michael Shayne to a tee. On radio, where postwar audiences could never seem to get enough detective adventure, Michael Shayne first appeared in the guise of Wally Maher, an actor who had already made a name for himself playing character roles on a variety of Hollywood-based dramatic series. Debuting over the Mutual Radio Network in October of 1946, Maher portrayed Shayne as an easygoing PI who preferred verbal sparring with his girl Friday Phyllis (Cathy Lewis) and police lieutenant Farraday (Joe Forte) over gunplay and right hooks. Blending detective plots with light comedy in much the same manner as another Mutual detective series, "Let George Do It", this series was only mildly successful and completed its run in January 1947. But this was not to be the end of Shayne on the air - not by a long shot. In 1948, director William P. Rousseau teamed with producer Don Sharpe to rethink the character for a series to be syndicated through the Broadcasters Guild - and it would be this version for which Shayne would ultimately be remembered by radio enthusiasts. From the beginning, Rousseau envisioned Shayne as a tough, two-fisted he-man, willing to take on any assignment so long as it paid him reasonably well. Previous Shayne adventures had placed him in numerous locales - in the books he was in Miami, while on-screen, he was based in New York - but Rousseau chose to place the character in New Orleans, presumably to take advantage of its unique and often mystical culture. To play the part, Rousseau and Sharpe hired Jeff Chandler, an up-and-coming radio actor who had distinguished himself by being equally adept at comedy as well as drama. Chandler, born Ira Grossel and raised in New York City, was in no way Irish and made no attempt to emulate that aspect of the character - but then this Michael Shayne had next to nothing to do with any earlier Michael Shaynes anyway. Clearly the idea was to make Shayne the New Orleans equivalent of Los Angeles' Philip Marlowe - an underpaid, overworked gumshoe with a regular need for cash and an unfortunate tendency to attract bullets and beatings. (By way of example, in the first two broadcasts of the series, Shayne is sapped, savagely beaten and left for dead, shot at, and takes at least one bullet in the side - and those injuries happen in just TWO cases! No wonder private eyes had a hard time getting insurance...)
This recording is part of the Old Time Radio collection.