Detective OTR

Detective OTR is a feed of vintage radio crime drama, with the original announcers still making the introductions. Several recent episodes come from Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, the CBS series about what its announcer calls America's fabulous freelance insurance investigator. Johnny pays rent in Hartford, Connecticut. His work, he says, has him living anywhere except at home. The series runs on one conceit, and it is a good one: each case is filed as an expense account. The announcer calls Johnny an expert at investigation and an absolute genius at making out his expenses, and the Robert Perry case bears that out, opening its report with a $3.80 night-train fare from Hartford to New York on an assignment to guard a policyholder the paperwork already calls late. Elsewhere, the narration picks up again at expense account item five, straight after a network promo. The voice is where the fun lives. Johnny's lines are dry and self-deflating: his graduation annual predicted he would be a bookkeeper, he feels like a bloodhound that flunked his sniffing exam, and during a losing fight in the snow his head becomes a ping-pong ball in a four-handed game until a boot switches off the pretty lights. The danger under the jokes is real. In one tense scene a man who announces he is six foot four breaks into an argument over a woman's alibi, and Johnny sizes him up as one of the corporate assets of Murder Incorporated. In another, soft lights, cushions and a woman named Chandra do not stop him noticing that she seems to know more than she should about a missing man named Harrison. He decides he has been 'spidered' into a parlor for purposes other than social, shortly before somebody kicks the door. Two leading men are heard in the role. Dick Powell stars in a broadcast billed as the first adventure of a new CBS series, where Johnny introduces himself by suit size, collar size and a hat size that swells when he wraps up a successful case. Charles Russell plays Johnny in the Robert Perry case, whose closing credits name writers Paul Dudley and Gil Dowd. The recordings keep their period trimmings too, including a plug for Sing It Again, a CBS Saturday night show built on riddle songs and a prize fortune. Away from Johnny Dollar, a dramatization taken from the pages of True Detective Mysteries Magazine begins on a farm near Highland, Illinois, where talk of alfalfa and new fencing is cut short by a runaway horse team. The team belongs to a farmer named John Nungess, and the men who stop it are left wondering what happened to him. It is plainer and more rural than Johnny's world of alibis and expense items, and the change of pace is welcome. A good first stop is the Dick Powell broadcast, where Johnny lays out who he is down to his shirt collar.