Adventures of The Thin Man Radio Programs

Background

Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man was first published as a magazine serial in 1933. Knopf published it as a novel in 1934. The film version of The Thin Man was taken from Dashiell Hammett's 1934 detective novel of the same name, and based upon a married couple that was reportedly modeled on Dashiell Hammett's own relationship with playwright Lillian Hellman. The Thin Man was Hammett's fifth--and final novel--following The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key. The 'thin man' referred to in the title is in fact the murder victim, Clyde Wynant, in the magazine serial, novel and film, who only appeared--and disappeared--in the initial film.

One of M-G-M's lower budget films of the era, it was reportedly shot in fourteen days, yet earned over $2 million--the best earnings record of the total of six 'Thin Man' films from M-G-M. The remaining five films were:

• After the Thin Man (1936), a Best Picture nominee
• Another Thin Man (1939)
• Shadow of the Thin Man (1941)
• The Thin Man Goes Home (1944)
• The Song of the Thin Man (1947)

All six of the 'Thin Man' films starred William Powell and Myrna Loy. The Loy/Powell collaboration had already proved a powerful one on screen for the film couple. Indeed, Powell's onscreen coupling with various actresses in films prior to The Thin Man amply demonstrated the appeal of both Powell's droll responses to his usually strong-willed and opinionated female partners, his natural talent as a gentleman detective/comedian, and the already proven appeal of the Powell/Loy chemistry on screen.

Dashiell Hammett wrote some of the screenplays for the six Thin Man films, but the real scenarists for the series were the remarkable married team of Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, close friends and 'protectors' to one degree or another of Dashiell Hammett in real life. Hackett and Goodrich created a revolutionary style of dialogue between Nick and Nora Charles for their day. The style was often mimicked after the Thin Man films became runaway favorites with each new installment. But no one seemed to quite capture that same combination of Hackett/Goodrich dialogue and Powell/Loy delivery and chemistry.

NBC premieres The Thin Man as a Summer replacement

NBC thought the 'Thin Man' concept appealing enough to try it out over Radio for the Summer of 1941, the same period during which The Shadow of the Thin Man (1941) was released. Starring Les Damon and Claudia Morgan, the Summer run of 1941 was also produced and directed by Himan Brown and overseen by its creator, Dashiell Hammett. The music was provided by Fred Fradkin, an NBC staff composer.

We should point out early in our description of this fine, long-running series that precious few examples of the run survive in circulation. The handful of examples of the programs over the years come from the various AFRS electrical transcriptions that have survived. The AFRS transcribed at least fifty of the Thin Man programs as variously, The Thin Man, Mystery Playhouse, Frontline Theatre and Globe Theatre programs for both our American fighting forces overseas and the United Nations fighting forces. Most of the information we'd normally find in the opening or closing credits of the recordings of Thin Man programs are absent in most of the AFRS produced transcriptions. We were therefore forced to rely almost entirely on contemporaneous newspaper articles, spot ads and Radio program listings to prepare our research for this article.

World War II played something of a role in the evolution of this program over the years. Its initial male lead, Les Damon departed from the role for the two years while he performed service overseas in the Burma Theatre of Operations. In his absence, Les Tremayne and David Gothard assumed the role of Nick Charles. Claudia Morgan both inaugurated the role of Nora Charles and continued in the role for all nine seasons of the various Thin Man programs. In addition you will note a characteristic World War II theme in many of the titles for Seasons One and Two of The Adventures of the Thin Man.

Those of us who remain fans of both the Thin Man films and the Radio programs over the years are obviously struck by the contrasts in chemistry between Nick and Nora Charles on Screen and Nick and Nora Charles over the Air. But the suspension of disbelief comes quite quckly when listening to the Radio examples. The snappy patter, while not rising to the level of that between Detective Sam Spade and Effie Perrine, nor to the level of either the on-screen Thin Man or Sam Spade personae, is still well paced and the dialogue is consistently entertaining.

Through its five seasons of the World War II years, The Adventures of the Thin Man remained a universally well received and widely anticipated series. It didnt' hurt that the three remaining Thin Man films were issued throughout this period, either. The public's thirst for more of Nick and Nora Charles and their irrepressible pup Asta seemed satisfied for the most part with the Radio rendition, until the next film release of the 'high-Octane' version of The Thin Man. Indeed there seems to be a direct correlation between the popularity of the Radio programs and the continuing release of new Thin Man films over the period. By the time The Song of the Thin Man (1947) had arrived and departed, interest in the Radio version of the Thin Man waned with Hollywood's waning interest in extending the Film franchise.

Between 1945 and 1948, CBS, NBC, and MBS fiddled the Thin Man format into obscurity. First with a series of guest star exchanges, which saw guest stars appear on the Thin Man programs followed by Nick and Nora Charles appearing on the guest star's own Radio program. Promoted with great fanfare, Boris Karloff, Hildegarde, Shirley Booth, and Victor Moore were among the various reciprocal invitees. Secondly, changing the 1948 format to emphasize Nora's desire to see Nick succeed in life as a businessman--and thus more like a conventional situation comedy, also fell flat. The format change was an attempt to skirt the new National Association of Broadcasters programming code which assigned a 9:30 p.m. EST curfew on mystery dramas, in an effort to keep prime time broadcasts free of criminal violence. Halfway into The New Adventures of the Thin Man NBC realized that the revised format wasn't working, so they scrapped the watered down Thin Man and returned to the detective mystery drama format. But that required them to park it in the only available post-curfew time-slot--10:30 p.m. on Wednesday nights. Of course, rather than salvaging the format, the impromptu revamping virtually assured an exponential drop in its already dwindling audience.

So it was that the Thin Man franchise winnowed down to a mere hint of its former popularity, having been handed down the Network line from NBC, to CBS, back to NBC, back to CBS, down to MBS and finally down to ABC. Button, button, who's got the button . . . or should that be hot potato. By the Summer 1950 season it wasn't even being promoted in Radio listings any longer. ABC was never much of a believer in newspaper spot ads to promote their Radio programming.

But it doesn't end there . . .

The Thin Man franchise wasn't completely dead. Les Damon and Claudia Morgan teamed up four years later in The Adventures of The Abbotts, a format very similar to the later years of The Thin Man. Fast forward seven years more and The Thin Man appeared on TV as an MGM Television production starring Peter Lawford as Nick and Phyllis Kirk as Nora. The program ran for seventy-two more episodes before it folded. Of course that wasn't the end of married sleuths over Radio, on Television, or in Film. We had Mr. and Mrs. North and their twenty-year franchise over various media. CBS tried--and failed--to bring their own Deductions Deluxe flavor of the Thin Man to production in the Summer of 1941 as one of their CBS Forecast preview offerings. 1965's Get Smart, though ostensibly more a parody of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., was very much in the mold of the Thin Man vis a vis the relationship between Agent Smart and Agent 99. Then Television's McMillan and Wife (1971-1977) and Hart to Hart received favorable responses for five seasons each in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Thereafter, followed Remington Steele (1982-1987) then Moonlighting (1985-1989). And then of course we have the various similarly 'married by proxy' detective couples to this very day. Witness Monk, In Plain Sight, and The Closer as current Television examples.

In whatever the guise, couples detectives, by whatever formula gets them to the inevitable dénouement, have been American favorites for almost eighty years and seem to find their way back into mainstream popularity every decade or so. The Thin Man, with every passing year seemingly distancing itself even further from the original Dashiell Hammett formula has nevertheless embedded itself in the fabric of American pop culture at various junctures over the past eighty years. Not exactly the hard-boiled formulae of The Fat Man or Sam Spade or Secret Agent X-9, but still pure Dashiell Hammett no matter how watered down.

And as a personal schadenfreude pleasure, the more succeeding iterations of the original Thin Man formula deteriorate, the better and better the original William Powell/Myrna Loy Films seem to improve like a fine wine or scotch--each year getting a bit mellower, each passing year increasing their worth.

Series Derivatives:

Notes on Provenances:

All above cited provenances are in error in one form or another. The most helpful provenances were the log of the RadioGOLDINdex and The Directory of The Armed Forces Radio Service Series.

Where most researchers have apparently either failed in--or simply inductively intuited--an attempt to log this historic series of programs has been under various faulty assumptions about the chronology of the seven distinct runs of the Thin Man adventures over the years. Further complicating these research efforts is the proliferation of Thin Man movie references throughout most research resources for the period.

The seven distinct runs of Adventures of the Thin Man were:

• The initial 1941-42 NBC Run
• The CBS run of 1943-44
• The 1944 NBC Summer Run
• The second CBS Run of 1944-47
• The 1948 NBC Summer Run
• The short 1948-49 MBS Run
• The final 1950 ABC Summer Run

Given the extraordinary differences in networks and formats over the years, any suggestion that the entire Thin Man series of programs constitutes one long continguous run is pure nonsense. Indeed the only tenuous connection between any of them are Nick and Nora Charles as protagonists and Claudia Morgan as the one actor present in all of the distinct iterations of the Thin Man series over the years. We have therefore numbered the episodes consistent with their distinguishing run(s).

Also, given the overwhelming popularity of the series for at least the first six seasons of its various runs, it's a foregone conclusion that there are at least as few as 200 or as many as 300 example programs in some collectors' holdings. The few examples in circulation come to us from the various AFRS programs through which the various Thin Man adventures were transcribed and syndicated through the AFRS network.

In response to this regrettable situation we can only--yet again--remind those collectors sitting on the bulk of the surviving examples that time is running out. We've identified some thirty or so uncirculated examples of Thin Man adventures in our own collection of 23,000 reels, cassette tapes and electrical transcriptions from the era, so we can safely assume that there are more that will surface in the next few years--or quite frankly they risk being lost forever. We point this out simply to remind our fellow collectors and archivists that one can only hedge one's bets on the popularity (e.g., perceived market value) of examples of the Thin Man adventures for so long. We'll have our own additional 30+ transcriptions digitized before long and as other collectors do the same, whoever's sitting on the remaining surviving programs will only see a commensurate decline in their market value. These are not a finite resource. Despite everyone's best efforts, those examples that remain undigitized simply continue to disintegrate or corrode beyond satisfactory recovery.

OTRisms:

We haven't posted a line by line correction to the wholly inaccurate, otrsite.com-derived OTRR Thin Man log in wide circulation. It would be both redundant and more akin to piling on than helpful. We first embarked on this project as an extensive reexamination of program misinformation currently in circulation throughout the 'otr' community. It's become obvious with each new undertaking that the vast expanse between historical fact and anecdote throughout the hobby grows larger with each program we reexamine. Even more shamefully, those 'otr' pundits that have taken it upon themselves to profit even more from the anecdotal misinformation in circulation--vanity-publishing hardcover misinformation as fact--are even more to blame than ever before for perpetuating the often grossly inaccurate misinformation about most of these programs.

More alarmingly, in researching this log we turned up an entire half-season that had been previously described as non-existent. It's one thing to post inaccurate details about a program's history. But it's far more disingenuous to go out of one's way to intentionally mis-direct the efforts of other serious Golden Age Radio archivists by either flatly stating a run exists when it doesn't, or conversely, that it doesn't when in fact it does.

You're welcome to compare our fully provenanced research with the '1,500 expert researchers' at the OTRR and their own Thin Man log, which they claim to be correct according to their 'OTTER log'. We've also provided a screen shot of their current log for comparison, HERE to protect our own ongoing due diligence.

What you see here, is what you get. Complete transparency. We have no 'credentials' whatsoever--in any way, shape, or form--in the 'otr community'--none. But here's how we did it--for better or worse. Here's how you can build on it yourselves--hopefully for the better. Here's the breadcrumbs--just follow the trail a bit further if you wish. No hobbled downloads. No misdirection. No posturing about our 'credentials.' No misrepresentations. No strings attached. We point you in the right direction and you're free to expand on it, extend it, use it however it best advances your efforts.

We ask one thing and one thing only--if you employ what we publish, attribute it, before we cite you on it.

We continue to provide honest research into these wonderful Golden Age Radio programs simply because we love to do it. If you feel that we've provided you with useful information or saved you some valuable time regarding this log--and you'd like to help us even further--you can help us keep going. Please consider a small donation here:

We don't pronounce our Golden Age Radio research as 'certified' anything. By the very definition, research is imperfect. We simply tell the truth. As is our continuing practice, we provide our fully provenanced research results--to the extent possible--right here on the page, for any of our peers to review--or refute--as the case may be. If you take issue with any of our findings, you're welcome to cite any better verifiable source(s) and we'll immediately review them and update our findings accordingly. As more verifiable provenances surface, we'll continue to update the following series log, as appropriate.

All rights reserved by their respective sources. Article and log copyright 2009 The Digital Deli Online--all rights reserved. Any failure to attribute the results of this copywritten work will be rigorously pursued.

Adventures of The Thin Man Radio Programs Log

Adventures of The Thin Man Radio [NBC] Program Log

The Adventures of The Thin Man [CBS] Program Log

The Adventures of The Thin Man [NBC Summer Run] Program Log

The Adventures of The Thin Man [CBS] Program Log

The Billboard review of Season 7 of The Thin Man was lukewarm at best from August 9 1947

The New Adventures of The Thin Man [NBC] Program Log

The Billboard review of July 7 1948 panned the season opener of The New Adventures of The Thin Man

The Adventures of The Thin Man [MBS] Program Log

The Adventures of The Thin Man [ABC] Program Log

AFRS The Frontline Theatre: Adventures of The Thin Man Program Log

AFRS The Globe Theatre: Adventures of The Thin Man Program Log

AFRS [U.N.]: Adventures of The Thin Man Program Log

AFRS Mystery Playhouse: Adventures of The Thin Man Program Log

Lux Radio Theatre: The Thin Man Movies Program Log

The Thin Man Movies [Sound Tracks] Program Log

Adventures of The Thin Man Biographies

Hammett returned to the Northwest, eventually entering the veterans hospital near Tacoma, Washington, in 1920 with further complications from his tuberculosis. Upon his release, he worked at the nearby Pinkerton's Spokane branch. Hospitalized on and off with with tuberculosis, he met and courted a local nurse, Josephine Dolan. In February 1921, the Veteran's Department moved Hammett to an Army hospital near San Diego, California. Upon that release, Hammett married the now pregnant Josephine, "Jose", in San Francisco.

Hammett began working for the San Francisco branch of Pinkerton's, but left Pinkerton's in 1922, again due to ill health. Hammett remained in the area, took a writing course and sold commercial vignettes to The Smart Set during 1922, and some short stories to a few other other magazines. He began to sell detective stories to The Black Mask beginning in 1923.

When their second daughter arrived in 1926, Hammett gave up freelance writing for the greater security of a job writing advertising copy for San Francisco jeweler, Albert Samuels. Hammett was yet again forced to resign after only six months due a recurring outbreak of Tuberculosis. The illness ultimately forced Hammett to live apart from Jose and his daughters and their marriage began to crumble.

But it was during this period that Hammett began to introduce his 'Continental Op' or Continental Operative, fashioned rather baldly on his own career as a Pinkerton operative. The Continental Op was a short, pudgy, but brilliantly deductive--and inductive-- investigator. His Continental Op soon proved to be the most convincingly believable American detective that pulp fiction had seen in years. And of course one can see the outline of Dashiell Hammett's The Fat Man taking shape as well.

After Hammett's Red Harvest and The Dain Curse (1929), Hammett set his sights on his new fictitious detective, Sam Spade of the detective firm Spade and Archer. Hammett's Sam Spade evolved into The Maltese Falcon, Hammett's first great, widely acclaimed detective novel which was republished in novel form by Alfred Knopf. In 1929, Hammett moved to New York.

After the success of The Maltese Falcon novel , Hammett was engaged as a writer by Paramount and moved to Hollywood, where he met Lillian Hellman. The Maltese Falcon was soon after translated into the 1931 Film, Dangerous Female starring Ricardo Cortez in the role of Sam Spade, Bebe Daniels as 'Ruth Wonderly', Dudley Digges as Casper Gutman and Una Merkel as Effie Perrine. He returned to New York in 1931, where he wrote The Glass Key. The Thin Man was published as a magazine serial in 1933.

Hammett was encouraged by William Randoph Hearst to write the Secret Agent X9 comic strip, 1934-35, his last original work.

The Maltese Falcon was remade as a rollicking farce in 1936's Satan Met A Lady, starring Warren William and Bette Davis, but by then The Thin Man (1934) had been released and that franchise took off like a home run from The Natural. Making $2 Million from a movie that took only fourteen days to film, made every penny they'd invested in The Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett, and his retinue well worth every penny.

During the next five years Dashiell Hammett collaborated on two more of the Thin Man screenplays: After the Thin Man(1936) and Another Thin Man (1939). By 1940, interest was heating up in yet more sequels to the Thin Man franchise, NBC began talking about a Radio version of The Thin Man, and 1941's The Maltese Falcon was being filmed with Humphrey Bogart, Sydney Greenstreet, Mary Astor, Peter Lorre and Elisha Cook, Jr.

With the salad days now pretty much underway, Dashiell Hammett, ever the adventurer, determined to enlist in the Army and get into World War II before it was over, over there. So in 1942, Hammett re-enlisted in the army, was posted to Aleutians where he edited The Adakian. When discharged in 1945, he returned to New York and became President of the New York Civil Rights Congress. Hammett's salad days came to an end with the end of World War II and the last Thin Man movies. From that point forward Dash's life would move inexorably downhill. Hammett had collaborated over his last screenplay with Lillian Hellman--Watch On the Rhine (1943)--and nothing else was on the horizon. Lillian Hellman's star continued to accelerate, Hammett's continued to decelerate.

In July 1951, Hammett was called to testify on Civil Rights Congress bail fund, and was subsequently jailed for refusing to answer questions. Upon his release, the IRS demanded $111,000 in back-taxes. His health then failing precipitously, he lived on and off with Lillian Hellman. Admitted to Lenox Hill Hospital, New York, Dashiell Hammett died, ultimately penniless, 10 January 1961.