Get this and get it straight.

Crime is a sucker's road,

and those who travel it'd wind up in the gut of the prison of the grave.

The story you're about to hear is true. The

The story you were about to hear is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.

The Adventures of Sam Spade Detective.

The Adventures of the Saints starring Vincent Prize.

Bob Bailey in the exciting adventures of the man with the action-packed expense account.

America's fabulous freelance insurance investigator

yours truly Johnny Deller The Hello and welcome to down these mean streets with more old-time radio crimes and crime solvers. This week we're once again matching wits with

Ellery Queen, the brilliant amateur sleuth who pauses just before the deumant to give us listeners a chance to solve the crime

before he announces the solution. The radio gimmick was a holdover from the novels by Frederick Dene and Manfred Lee that introduced the character.

Some may associate this challenge to the reader more with the Encyclopedia Brown books, but it was a chance

for the audience to assess the clues and test their powers of deduction against those of

Ellery Queen.

And it was those novels that introduced the character, a mystery writer who helped his father,

an inspector of the New York Police Department solve baffling crimes.

After his success in print, Ellery came to the big screen, to radio, and then to television in a few different series including the

1975 show starring Jim Hutton and David Wayne which if you can track it down, I cannot recommend it enough.

The series was developed by Richard Levinson and William Link, who also created Colombo.

It's said in the 1940s, each episode boasts an all-star cast,

and radio drama plays a key role in several of the episodes.

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