BONUS - Five Favorites: Crime Classics

Down These Mean Streets (Old Time Radio Detectives)

Jack Mooney

Arts, Performing Arts, Mystery, Detectives, Old, Radio, Time, Tv & Film, Oldtimeradio

4.6 • 982 Ratings

🗓️ 3 July 2024

⏱️ 157 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this bonus episode, I'm sharing my five favorite installments of Crime Classics - the anthology of true crime stories taken from the pages of history. "Connaisseur of crime" Thomas Hyland (played by Lou Merrill) narrated the tales that ranged from BC until recent history. A dismembered corpse stuns Boston society in "The Terrible Deed of John White Webster" (originally aired on CBS on July 13, 1953), and a woman's murder of her philandering boyfriend is only the beginning of the story in "The Incredible Trial of Laura D. Fair" (AFRS rebroadcast from August 17, 1953). A pair of enterprising young men enter the corpse procurement business in "If a Body Need a Body, Just Call Burke and Hare" (originally aired on CBS on December 2, 1953). Plus, two of history's most notorious murders are dramatized - "The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln" (originally aired on CBS on December 9, 1953) and "Twenty-Three Knives Against Caesar" (originally aired on CBS on February 10, 1954).

Transcript

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0:00.0	Get this and get it straight.
0:02.0	Crime is a sucker's road,
0:04.0	and those who travel it'd wind up in the gut of the prison of the grave.
0:07.0	The story you're about to hear is true. The
0:12.5	The story you were about to hear is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.
0:18.5	The Adventures of Sam Spade Detective.
0:21.5	The Adventures of the Saints starring Vincent Prize.
0:25.0	Bob Bailey in the exciting adventures of the man with the action-packed expense account.
0:30.0	America's fabulous freelance insurance investigator
0:33.2	yours truly Johnny Deller the Hello and welcome to another bonus episode of Down These Means Streets, an installment where I take a classic old-time radio mystery show and share my five
1:07.4	favorite episodes. This time around the series is Crime Classics, one of my all-time favorites, even if it doesn't
1:17.3	slot so neatly into the mold of a radio detective show. Crime classics was an anthology
1:24.0	a series that pulled true crime stories from the pages of history
1:29.0	and reenacted them in scripts written by Morton Fine and David Friedkin, two of the best writers of the radio era, and directed by Elliot Lewis, one of the best directors of that time.
1:43.0	The trio had collaborated on other shows,
1:46.0	like Broadway is My Beat, Pursuit,
1:48.0	and in several episodes of suspense
1:51.0	during the years where Elliot Lewis was the director of that program.
1:55.0	Crime Classics, which premiered on CBS in 1953, grew out of the Trio's interest in historical murders.
2:05.0	Each episode was meticulously researched, looking at records and newspaper accounts from the time,
2:12.0	though writers did take some dramatic license as they always will.
2:17.0	The effort was made to present the stories as they happened, with some period detail that other shows may have overlooked.
	...

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