Friday Night Noir - Suspense ('Twas the Night Before Christmas) & Escape (Back for Christmas)

This week on Tuesday Night Detectives, two very different private investigators, back to back. We open with Richard Diamond, Private Detective and "The Private Eye Test," broadcast 19 March 1950. Dick Powell stars as the wisecracking former cop turned private eye, this time sitting a formal licensing exam alongside every other private investigator in the city. It should be routine, until the staged corpse in the training exercise turns out to be a real one, and Diamond has to solve a murder from inside the exam room itself. Then we visit The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and "The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez," broadcast 12 February 1940, starring Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Watson. Professor Coram's secretary is found stabbed to death in a locked study at Yoxley Old Place, his dying words pointing only to "the professor." The single clue left behind is a pair of golden pince-nez, and from that alone, Holmes builds one of his most purely deductive solutions in the entire canon. Two very different detectives, working two very different continents. Visit us at vintageclassicradiopodcast.com. Please share and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SiriusXM, Pandora, and anywhere else you get your podcasts.

Orson Welles and Margaret Sullavan bring Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca to the air for the very first time — a year and a half before Hitchcock ever filmed it — in the debut broadcast of Campbell Playhouse.

Jack Benny hits the racetrack, Lou Costello tries to enlist in the Merchant Marines, and Miss Brooks battles a stifling classroom heat wave — three of the most beloved half-hours in golden-age American comedy, back to back.

A killer stalks England alphabetically and a bedridden woman overhears her own murder being planned on a crossed telephone line, in two landmark broadcasts from Suspense’s extraordinary May of 1943 — The A.B.C. Murders and Sorry, Wrong Number, starring Agnes Moorehead.

Gerald Mohr stars as Philip Marlowe in “The Panama Hat,” followed by Bob Bailey as Johnny Dollar in “The Royal Street Matter,” with an original period Mayfield Cigarettes radio commercial between the two mysteries.