I probably picked up the interest in old time radio (OTR) from my father. He was never a huge collector of programs, but he occasionally bought albums available of various radio shows, or borrowed them from the library. I recall he was mostly into old radio comedy and Westerns, and pulp-style heroes such as The Shadow. My own tastes in OTR run mostly in the direction of detective series, and one of my current favorites is Richard Diamond, Private Detective. Part of the reason is star Dick Powell (1904-1963) the first, and my favorite, cinematic interpreter of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe character in Edward Dmytryk's Murder My Sweet (1944).Powell's initial stock-in-trade was as a singer. Signed to Warner Bros. in 1932, he debuted in Blessed Event as a singing bandleader, and for twelve years he sang and hoofed in musicals such as 42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933, Flirtation Walk, and On The Avenue, often appearing opposite Ruby Keeler. But he couldn't do the boyish roles he was known for forever, and in 1944 he landed a completely different role in Murder My Sweet, and entered on a new phase in his career as a tough-guy lead in crime and detective features. He also parlayed the new persona into radio, starring in a number of detective series in the forties and fifties.
Richard Diamond, Private Detective debuted on NBC in 1949, and ran until 1953. Sponsored at first by the Rexall drug chain and then by Camel cigarettes, the series' principal producer and writer by Blake Edwards, who was later to create the television series Peter Gunn and the Pink Panther film series. Beginning with a dramatic sting, segueing into a happy-go-lucky whistled rendition of "Leave It To Love" by Henry Russell, the series combined hard-boiled action and intrigue with a light touch of humor. Richard Diamond was a wisecracking shamus who, in typical private-eye fashion, was catnip to the women, handy with a gun, got knocked over the head and roughed up a lot, and narrated the episodes Philip Marlowe-style. He also had a knack for discovering dead bodies and had an adversarial but affectionate relationship with homicide detective Lt. Walt Levinson (Ed Begley), whose stomach always cried out for a bicarb of soda when Diamond was around, and his dim sidekick Sgt. Otis (Wilms Herbert) with whom Diamond frequently traded insults. Diamond's romantic interest was socialite Helen Asher (Virginia Gregg), whose cushy Park Avenue digs were a frequent destination after a tough case, and to whom he frequently sang a song at the conclusion of the show.
Parenthetical comments: other voice talents heard on the show included Alan Reed, who also played Lt. Levinson in some episodes and who is best known to people of my age as the voice of Fred Flintstone. Also heard on Richard Diamond was Jim Backus, best known as the voice of cartoon character Mr. Magoo and as Thurston Howell III on television's Gilligan's Island, as well as a frequent comic actor in films. Also, an interesting announcement heard on some of the episodes sponsored by Camel cigarettes informs listeners that smokers pay an over fifty percent tax on the cigarettes they buy -- a whopping eight cents a pack in Federal taxes and three or four cents more in state or local taxes. More interesting than how the price of a pack of smokes has changed over the years is the tone of the announcement, implying that smokers are performing a civic duty when paying taxes on a pack of cigarettes, an attitude that has certainly changed in the decades since this announcement aired.
Dick Powell went on to a third career in movie and television production with his Four Stars production company, and from 1957 to 1960 brought Richard Diamond to television starring David Janssen. Powell passed away in 1963, his stomach cancer rumored to be the result of his work on the Howard Hughes film The Conqueror, which was filmed on Nevada land where nuclear weapons had been tested; many members of the cast and crew of this film (most notably among them John Wayne) contracted cancer later in life.
The internet-based Old Time Radio Researchers group is a collection of volunteers dedicated to documenting and preserving old radio programs, and they occasionally put together "certified" collections of programs, along with any further information available about the programs. The OTRR certified collection of Richard Diamond, Private Detective hosted permanently at the Internet Archive contains, with the exception of a few missing or repeat episodes, the complete run of the series in five .zip files each of which is roughly the size of a CD-ROM, or together will fit on a data DVD. Along with the programs, most of which are high quality 128kb MP3s apparently taken from original transcription recordings, comes a great deal of documentation, including photos, bios, scripts and other information about the series. The collection also has specially-created artwork suitable for burning discs of the programs. Single episodes from the series are also available if you don't have a fast connection or you only wish to sample a few episodes from the series.
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