Academy Award Theater (March 30, 1946–December 18, 1946) aired “The Maltese Falcon” on July 3, 1946 as the 15th of its 39 episodes. The format of the program is best summed up from its wiki page: “Hollywood’s finest, the great picture plays, the great actors and actresses, techniques and skills, [are[ chosen from the honor roll of those who have won or been nominated for the famous golden Oscar of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.”

Within this broad mandate the only other requirement was that at least one of the radio cast be an Oscar nominated actor or actress for any film. The film did not have to be an Oscar nominated or winning film, but at least one member of any radio play had to have been a nominated (if not a winning) actor or actress. Thus, in this all too short series we had many of the A-list actors of the time featured in these expensively produced radio plays, a few of them being Bette Davis, Ginger Rogers, Walt Disney, Randolph Scott, Charles Laughton, John Garfield, Claire Trevor, Lana Turner, Gregory Peck, Henry Fonda, James Stewart, Kirk Douglas, and the list goes on and on. But with “The Maltese Falcon” they hit the jackpot with three of the major stars of the film on board, with none other than Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, and Sidney Greenstreet.

[Humphrey Bogart (1899-1957) — Mary Astor (1906-1987) — Sydney Greenstreet (1879-1954)]

As to the character Bogart plays, that of private detective Sam Spade, the iconic gumshoe was the creation of Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961, photo at left). Based on Hammett’s time as a Pinkerton detective from people he knew or had heard about, Spade first appeared in the third of Hammett’s five novels, The Maltese Falcon, in 1930, after being serialized in Black Mask magazine from its September 1929 to January 1930 issues. Only three other stories, all short works, would feature Spade in magazines and all appeared in 1932. One final Spade story was published in 2013, over 50 years after his death in 1961. The Maltese Falcon was brought to film three times: 1931, 1936, and the now film noir classic of 1941 starring Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade, Peter Lorre as Joel Cairo, criminal and partner of Kasper Gutman, Mary Astor as the deceitful femme fatale Brigid O’Shaughnessy, and Sydney Greenstreet as Kasper Gutman the “Fat Man,” the wealthy, ruthless crime lord who will stop at nothing to get his hands on the priceless bejeweled statuette, including betraying his lackey Joel Cairo.

The story behind the Maltese Falcon statuette is fascinating and goes back centuries. Gutman offers Spade a brief history of the Falcon and why it is so important to him when he explains that it was made of gold and jewels by the 16th-century Knights of Malta as a gift to the King of Spain but was captured by pirates. After passing from owner to owner, at some time it was coated with black enamel to conceal its value. Gutman traced the falcon to General Kemidov, a Russian exile in Constantinople and hired O’Shaughnessy to get it. O’Shaughnessy and a man named Thursby fled with the falcon to Hong Kong and from there to San Francisco. This brings O’Shaughnessy to Spade’s office where she makes up a story about her missing sister which gets Spade involved and sets the stage for the rest of the story when he finds out her story is a lie, and the police inform him that his partner, Miles Archer, has been murdered while following O’Shaunessy (by Thursby?). It’s a convoluted top shelf noir detective murder mystery with the Maltese Falcon as the McGuffin. I obviously highly recommend seeing the 1941 film version with Bogart, Astor, Lorre, and Greenstreet. It is a well deserved classic of film and the noir genre in particular, and though this much shortened radio adaptation obviously doesn’t pretend to do the book or film proper justice, for what it attempts to do within its time constraints I think it does pretty well. I have been fortunate to have read the complete Black Mask serialized version in Vintage Books’ The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories, edited by Otto Penzler (2010). It weighs in at a perfect bug crusher weight of just over 1,100 pages and I cannot recommend it highly enough to any lover of the classic crime or detective story as published in the acknowledged gold standard of detective pulp magazines.

Play Time: 29:50

{Airing on a Wednesday evening at 10 PM. and with no school the next day it being the middle of summer vacation, the neighborhood gang could hardly wait for the nearby newsstand to open so they could begin leafing through some of their favorite detective magazines for more hardcore stories of the sort like “The Maltese Falcon” they had heard the night before. Black Mask (1920-1951) was the undisputed king of the detective pulps and the issue below was quickly relieved of its place on the long wall shelf next to the other detective and mystery pulps. It was in the process of switching from a monthly to a bi-monthly and saw 7 issues in 1946. New Detective (1941-1955) promoted itself by letting its readers know that it ran the newest in crime fiction by many of the most popular writers of the day, with an emphasis on police detectives. Like Black Mask, it was a bi-monthly in 1946, though it did manage, for some reason, to squeeze in a February issue between is January and March offerings. Super-Detective (1934-35, 1940-50) ran for only 15 issues in its first iteration, but came back in fine fashion in 1940 to publish another 65 issues, despite the fact that at least one source commented that it ran the usual gamut of detective fiction. Even though its schedule the second time around jumped back and forth between monthly and bi-monthly every six months or so for a few years, it must have been doing something right to have hung around for so long. It was a bi-monthly in 1946.}

[Left: Black Mask, 7/46 – Center: New Detective, 7/46 – Right: Super-Detective, 7/46]

To view the entire list of Old Time Radio episodes at Tangent Online, click here.