Mike Malloy

Created by Tom Hubbard & Fred Eggers

“Sometimes the music of the city comes to you happy, like the sound of kids playing in the streets. Other times, the music’s sad and low and lonely, like a ship’s bell in a fog, or a siren in the rain. And it mingles with the discord notes of a woman’s sob in the night, or a man’s scream from out of the mist. That’s life’s symphony, brother, and if you feel it creeping too close around you, like a shroud, give me a call.”
— “Homicide Details” (1953 radio episode)

“Ever hear them feed oxygen to a victim? It sounds just like Death laughing at you.”
— “Roses for Joni” (1956, radio episode)

As a hard-boiled detective character on the radio starting out in the 1950s, MIKE MALLOY was already a  man out of time. Nonetheless, the creators had high hopes for him, featuring the LA-based shamus in two different runs on ABC Radio (1953-54 and 1956-57), as well as a spec TV pilot (1953), and tinkering with the idea of a feature-film version.

But Malloy (an ex-cop sometimes billed as “the toughest private eye of them all”) had to contend with changing tastes. The 1950s were a booming jet-set age. Did anyone want to see (or hear about) a hard-luck detective who stayed broke between clients and solved his cases with two-fisted brawn? No, the public at the time was leaning towards more sophisticated (if less colorful) police procedurals like Dragnet and  The Lineup.

Malloy, as played by Steve Brodie,  was your typical, if slightly dated, gumshoe, tough-talking and more than ready to do what had to be done for his client. Being an ex-cop (in fact, often calling himself a “private cop”), Malloy remained in close touch with old police buddies, Lt. Bergstrom and Lt. Barnett — the latter of whom was voiced primarily on radio by Tom Hubbard, the character’s co-creator and co-writer. Malloy often involved these cop friends in cases, and when old informants assumed Malloy was still active-duty police, the detective didn’t correct the assumption.

Since Malloy was an Irish-American character, the famous Dublin folk song “Molly Malone” was used as the basis for the radio show’s music in early episodes. The radio stories may have had the feel of New York City, but when there was a rare mention of location, it was actually Los Angeles.

Unfortunately, the Malloy character came up against some particular industry circumstances that were difficult to overcome, no matter his toughness.

For one, ABC Radio, after running it as a weekly series in the summer of 1953, put Mike Malloy, Private Eye (and several other shows) into a “strip programming” format beginning in October 1953, meaning that mysteries wouldn’t get solved in a single episode any longer; they’d be serialized across multiple shorter, 15-minute episodes, five nights a week. This experimental move was understandable. After all, it was the twilight of the “Golden Age of Radio,” and ABC was throwing ideas against a wall to see what stuck.

But strip programming didn’t turn out to be radio’s salvation either, and so all “strips” were pulled from ABC’s nighttime lineup, and Mike Malloy, Private Eye went off the air for the first time, in 1954.

Over in the TV medium, Malloy didn’t fare much better. The appropriately named production company, Mike Malloy Productions, had created a spec pilot early in ’53 and was all set to produce 39 first-season episodes. But the pilot was shockingly violent for the time. During the course of the story, Malloy gets battered by multiple brutes (sometimes until bloody), and the neck and face of one female character are manhandled — first creepily, then violently — by the episode’s psychopath. Despite being shot by an Oscar-nominated DP, the pilot didn’t go to series. It never even aired.

By the time the radio version left the air in 1954, Mike Malloy, Private Eye was being produced by Bill Broidy, whose brother, Steve, was the president of Allied Artists, a second-tier movie studio. The idea of a Mike Malloy feature got some rumblings in the press, but no movie ever materialized.

However, Malloy did return to radio in 1956, when ABC launched Mysterytime, a crime anthology show  with Mike Malloy, Private Eye occupying the Monday-night slot of the five-nights-a-week wheel format. This version lasted until 1957.

Malloy was once again initially played by Steve Brodie and was his only stab at radio, outside of some fill-in work he did on another Tom Hubbard show.  He was primarily a big-screen character actor, appearing in many crime films and westerns, including Winchester 73, Out of the Past, and Crossfire. In fact, at one point he stepped away from the radio show to concentrate on his film career, and Gerald Mohr stepped in as his replacement.

Brodie played Malloy as hot-tempered and with a rough masculinity. Mohr, famous for playing Chandler’s Philip Marlowe on radio, gave Malloy a smoother, more urbane touch. One might presume that Marlowe was Mohr’s favorite radio sleuth, but in a 1956 newspaper interview, Mohr cited Mike Malloy as holding that distinction.

UNDER OATH

• “’Mike’ always was my favorite radio detective, and I’ve played a lot of them. Although television is a marvelous medium, radio still is amazing to me.”
  — Gerald Mohr (August 2, 1956, The Jackson Sun)
• “…a notch above the run-of-the-mill hard-boiled private eye type of show. Qualities which distinguished it from the ordinary are a slick scripting job by Fred Eggers and Tom Hubbard and the soft-spoken underplaying of Steve Brodie. The Eggers-Hubbard script on initialer had a matter-of-fact quality and some sharp dialog that struck of reality. And Brodie’s approach to the role was a pleasant surprise.”
  — Robert Chandler (June 10, 1953, Variety)

RADIO

• MIKE MALLOY, PRIVATE EYE
  (1953-54, ABC)
  30-minute episodes, weekly
  Then 15-minute episodes, daily
  Created by Tom Hubbard & Fred Eggers
  Writers: Tom Hubbard, Fred Eggers, Lloyd Peyton, Jr., et al
  Producers: Bill Broidy, Glenn E. Miller
  Starring Steve Brodie as MIKE MALLOY
  Later played by Gerald Mohr
  • “Homicide Details” (1953)
• ABC MYSTERYTIME
  (aka Mysterytime, Mystery Time)
  (1956-57, ABC)
  30-minute episodes, weekly (on Mondays)
  Host: Don Dowd
  • MIKE MALLOY, PRIVATE EYE
    Created by Tom Hubbard & Fred Eggers
    Starring Steve Brodie as MIKE MALLOY
    Later played by Gerald Mohr
    
  • “Roses for Joni” (May 14, 1956; aka “The Case of the Badgered Brunette”)
    Sadly, the only Malloy episode currently commercially available.

TELEVISION

• MIKE MALLOY
  (1953)
  Television pilot (unaired)
  Based on characters created by Tom Hubbard & Fred Eggers
  Starring Steve Brodie as MIKE MALLOY

FURTHER INVESTIGATIONS

THE DICK OF THE DAY

Respectfully submitted by Mike Malloy, with additional info from Jack French and Kevin Burton Smith.