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…