Someday I'll find you...

Gatewood sat down and looked at his host. Then he said: “I’m searching for somebody, Mr. Keen, whom you are not likely to find.” “I doubt it,” said Keen pleasantly. (Robert Chambers, The Tracer of Lost Persons) Sherlock Holmes, Sam Spade, and Philip Marlowe may be the more famous names in the crime-solving pantheon, but one wry little old man outpaced them all when it came to radio casework. Mr. Keen was a radio institution, popping up in 1,690 installments between 1937 and 1955. Even Johnny Dollar, with his own 13 year run only turned in 811 expense accounts. The Energizer Bunny of radio detectives, Mr. Keen tirelessly toiled to reunite people with their missing loved ones and to make sure guilty parties met with justice. Churned out like the soap operas that made his producers famous, Mr. Keen’s adventures have been almost entirely lost, save for a small fraction of his hundreds of radio cases still available today. Years before he hit radio, Mr. Keen came out of the pages of The Tracer of Lost Persons, a collection of short stories by Robert W. Chambers. The vignettes penned by Chambers focus more on the clients of Westrel Keen than on the “tracer” himself. Many of his clients were in search of lost loves, adding a romantic melodramatic flavor to the stories. Chambers would gain more fame from The King in Yellow, a collection of supernatural stories that have inspired dozens from H.P. Lovecraft to the first season of HBO’s True Detective. This was not an introduction on par with Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet, and Mr. Keen may have seemed an unlikely candidate for adaptation as a radio detective. Perhaps it was the romantic angle of the stories that drew the attention of the couple that - more than Chambers - would become the true architects of the character. Anne and Frank Hummert, a husband and wife duo who were some of the most influential players in early radio, were responsible for bringing Mr. Keen to the airwaves. The two started in radio with soap operas, and their genre-shaping hits included Just Plain Bill, Ma Perkins, and Young Widder Brown. The two met while working at the same advertising firm, and they married in 1935. The Hummerts formed their own production company after their marriage, and launched several shows including Mr. Keen. At one point, the Hummerts had 90 episodes of various serialized shows airing on radio each week. Radio historian Jim Cox estimated the Hummerts controlled 4.5 hours of national radio each week, and more than half of the advertising revenue generated by daytime radio. Mr. Keen was one of several mystery programs produced by the Hummerts. From the couple’s home, Anne Hummert outlined the plots for all of her shows; she was celebrated for her ability to remember every twist and turn of the labyrinthine plots of her soaps. These outlines were dispatched to the writers – or “dialoguers” – in the Hummert’s employ, who would turn the stories into actual scripts. The program’s earliest run resembled a soap opera in a three night a week, fifteen minute format. It aired in this serialized version from 1937 until 1943. In December 1943, CBS relaunched Mr. Keen as a 30 minute weekly program. It remained on the air until April 19, 1955, generating 1,690 episodes - far and away the leader of the pack of old time radio detectives. For most of the run, Keen was played by actor Bennett Kilpack, a stage and radio veteran who voiced Keen with a kindly charm. Providing the stereotypical lunkheaded sidekick support was Jim Kelly as Mike Clancy. The erstwhile Irishman’s favorite expression was “Saints preserve us!” whenever his boss shed light on a hidden clue. Though Kilpack was in the lead for most of the run, Keen was played later in the series by actors Philip Clarke and Arthur Hughes. Less than sixty of the Mr. Keen episodes survive, but the available episodes generally follow the same trajectory. The effect of churning out so many scripts can be heard in some of the repetitive aspects of the plots. A drinking game could be made for each time a character’s name is uttered in dialogue (“Would you believe it, Mr. Keen?” “Frankly, no, Miss Smith,” etc.), but there’s a good chance the listener would be passed out in a stupor before the first commercial break. The clichéd plots and dialogue inspired parodies, including Mr. Trace, Keener Than Most Persons from radio satirists Bob and Ray. So – in a world where we have Howard Duff as Sam Spade, Gerald Mohr as Philip Marlowe, and Bob Bailey as Johnny Dollar – is Mr. Keen worth a listen to a modern audience? I think so. The world of radio detectives included an array of characters and behind-the-scenes talents, each catering to a different segment of the audience. There is a healthy appetite for cozier puzzle mysteries that’s as strong as the desire for two-fisted private eyes and femmes fatale. And Bennett Kilpack – the Mr. Keen of most of the surviving shows – is very good in the role. His voice has a homespun, old-timer quality, similar in some respects to Titus Moody on The Fred Allen Show, but a steely determination sneak in when he’s facing down a culprit. Another (albeit more cynical) view is that you need the mediocre offerings to underscore what is so good about the top of the heap.