The Adventures of Philip Marlowe (1948-51) aired “The Persian Slippers” on October 3, 1948 as the 2nd of its 114 episodes with Gerald Mohr as Marlowe. This is but the 5th episode of the show we have showcased here, the first two coming in May and December of 2020, the third coming in late 2022 and the last in May of 2024. For those coming to the show for the first time I reprise the introductory background material from that initial episode.

The original brief run starring Van Heflin debuted as a summer replacement for The Bob Hope Show from June 17, 1947 – September 19, 1947. For various reasons it didn’t wow audiences, or the creator of the character himself, Raymond Chandler, and so was cancelled, only to be retooled with a new actor as Marlowe (the incomparable Gerald Mohr, 1914-1968, photo top right) and new scripts.

Mohr was a ubiquitous figure in radio and later in television. Just a few of his more than 500 radio appearances as star or supporting character include:  Jungle Jim, Archie Goodwin on The New Adventures of Nero Wolfe, The Whistler, The Shadow of Fu Manchu, Box 13, Escape, and many others. Beginning in the 1950s, Mohr appeared in more than 100 TV series during his life, among them:  Maverick, The Lawman, Cheyenne, Sugarfoot, Bonanza, The Rifleman, and other Westerns. Non-western TV appearances included but were not limited to:  Perry Mason, 77 Sunset Strip, Hawaiian Eye, and of SF interest episodes of Lost in Space and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Of interest to comic books fans, Mohr did the voice of Reed Richards in The Fantastic Four animated cartoon series in 1967, and that of Green Lantern in the animated Aquaman series in 1968.

Conversant in Swedish, Mohr had flown to Stockholm in the Fall of 1968 to star in the pilot of a proposed television series. Shortly after filming he dropped dead of a heart attack on November 9th, 1968 at the age of 54. He was buried on the island of Lidingo, Sweden.

Raymond Chandler (1888-1959, photo at right) wasn’t the first to create what would come to be known as the hard-boiled detective. Dashiell Hammett was first on the scene with his Sam Spade character introduced in his 1930 novel The Maltese Falcon (first serialized beginning in the September 1929 issue of Black Mask magazine). But with Chandler’s first novel, The Big Sleep, published in 1939, he took the gritty, noir detective novel to a new level with his tough as nails private eye, Philip Marlowe. (It should be noted here that the screenplay for the classic 1946 version of the film was co-scripted by William Faulkner, Jules Furthman, and none other than SF’s own Leigh Brackett. It starred Humphrey Bogart as Marlowe and his new real life wife Lauren Bacall as Vivian Rutledge.) Marlowe’s character was not only able to handle himself on the street, he was an intellectual cut above the average gumshoe in that he had attended college, played chess, and had an ear for classical music. This side of his character only masked his off the cuff ability to fling witty descriptions and ready-made similes to pepper his already colorful narratives, and was to become one of his trademarks, emulated by many another writer who wished to show how clever their own detective creations were. It became a widely recognized form of dialogue that later transferred itself well to the silver screen, custom made for audiences eager for the noir crime/detective experience, and was given full voice in the movie adaptation of Chandler’s 1940 novel Farewell, My Lovely. Released in 1944 under the novel’s original title in the UK, for American audiences the title was changed to Murder, My Sweet and starred Dick Powell and Claire Trevor. It was a well-received, seminal film that helped define the noir genre, and was a breakthrough role for Powell as well, who had spent a good decade or more playing the young, handsome, crooning playboy roles but never the serious leading man.

“The Persian Slippers” is pure quill detective noir done Raymond Chandler style. The setting and the simple but direct dialogue all make the straightforward mystery of a woman leaving her husband seem even darker than such a relatively mundane circumstance would admit, but add in a murder and a fortune teller clothed in a Spanish shawl, a Hungarian skirt, and Persian slippers, and you’ve got a half hour of pure enjoyment…if you’re a fan of murder and the detectives who solve them, that is.

(The linked CD at top includes this episode and 19 others, all digitally remastered and restored.)

Play Time: 29:30

{This nasty little episode of Philip Marlowe aired on a Sunday evening in early October of 1948. The neighborhood gang could think of nothing else but getting to the corner newsstand the next afternoon after school to search for more dark tales of murder and mayhem of the kind they had enjoyed the night before. They were in luck. Detective Tales (1935-53) was a very popular detective pulp, giving its large and faithful audience what it wanted for 18 years and just over 200 issues, most of them on a monthly basis. It was a monthly in 1948. New Detective (1941-55) published more or less competent crime stories with an emphasis on police detectives. It ran for a respectable number of issues until it changed format to a men’s adventure pulp in 1955 and ran as such until 1971. It was a bi-monthly in 1948. Ten Detective Aces (1928-49) began as The Dragnet Magazine but after only 16 issues switched its focus a bit from gangster stories which were slowly losing their appeal to that of a detective pulp, and with the change in story emphasis so too did the magazine’s name change to Detective-Dragnet Magazine. In March 1933, the final title change took place to Ten Detective Aces, at which time it ran as a monthly for a solid 10 years, at which time it slowed to a bi-monthly for the last six years of its long run. It was a bi-monthly in 1948.}

[Left: Detective Tales, 10/48 – Center: New Detective, 9/48 – Right: Ten Detective Aces, 9/48]

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