Candy Matson lived on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco.
Carter Brown never existed.
Yet put their mysteries side by side, and they seem to walk the same rain-slicked midnight streets.
In this Chesterton Radio Deep Dive, we enter two remarkable corners of postwar detective radio. Candy Matson, YUkon 2-8209 gave American listeners something unusual for 1949: a smart, independent female private detective working the very real streets of San Francisco. Cable cars, Telegraph Hill, Fort Ord and California’s Valley of the Moon weren’t generic noir scenery. They were Candy’s world.
Then there was Carter Brown—the supposedly American master of wisecracking, dangerous dames and hard-boiled crime who wasn’t American at all. Carter Brown was the pen name of Alan Geoffrey Yates, an English-born Australian writer whose enormously popular American-style mysteries made their way onto Australian radio.
Together, they tell a much bigger story.
How did the American detective become an international character? Why could Australians thousands of miles away create an America that sounded so convincing? And what happens when we put the imaginary America of Carter Brown beside Candy Matson’s real California?
Featuring The Cable Car Case, The Fort Ord Story, Jack Frost, Valley of the Moon, Devil in the Deep Freeze, Candy’s Last Case, The Widow Is Willing, The Lady Was Lethal, Nightmare for Knight, Bella Donna Was Poison, Crime for a King, Kudos for Kahn and more.
And beneath all the wisecracks, murders and beautiful suspects lies something surprisingly Chestertonian.
The detective story may look cynical, but it begins with a radical assumption: there is a truth beneath appearances.
The clues mean something.
The world can be understood.
And somewhere in the darkness, the truth is waiting to be found.
Listen to the original Carter Brown & Candy Matson collection:
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ChestertonRadio.com
Classic radio • Mystery • Literature • History • Faith • Culture
The Cable Car Case - Candy Matson
The Widow is Willing - Carter Brown
The Fort Ord Story - Candy Matson
The Lady was Lethal - Carter Brown
Jack Frost - Candy Matson
Nightmare for Knight - Carter Brown
The Donna Dunham Case - Candy Matson
Bella Donna was Poison - Carter Brown
Valley of the Moon - Candy Matson
Crime for a King - Carter Brown
Devil in the Deep Freeze - Candy Matson
Kudos for Kahn - Carter Brown
Candy’s Last Case - Candy Matson
