Pat Novak, for Hire

About Pat Novak, for Hire

Pat Novak, for Hire is the old time radio show Jack Webb starred in before Dragnet, and here you can listen to it free online, around the clock, or as a free podcast. It began in 1946 at ABC's KGO in San Francisco, heard only on the West Coast, and came back in 1949 as a coast-to-coast ABC series. Webb plays Pat Novak, who rents boats on Pier 19 on the San Francisco waterfront and takes any odd job that pays. Every show opens with a foghorn, footsteps on the pier and Webb's weary "Sure, I'm Pat Novak... for hire."

Novak isn't really a detective, and the plots barely matter. Someone hires him, a body turns up, Novak gets framed, and he gets beaten up by the crooks and then by the police. Listeners tuned in for the lines, written by Webb's roommate Richard Breen, who later won an Oscar for Titanic: a woman drifts in "like 98 pounds of warm smoke" with a voice like "a furnace full of marshmallows." Radio historian John Dunning called it so hard-boiled that it tipped into high camp, even in its own day.

Raymond Burr, years before Perry Mason, plays Inspector Hellman in the 1949 shows, a cop forever trying to send Novak to the gas chamber; Burr called him "radio's most brutal cop." Tudor Owen plays Jocko Madigan, a former doctor and Novak's drinking buddy, who ends every boozy speech with "Good night, Lover." Three weeks before the last show, Webb started Dragnet, and there he deliberately moved away from Novak's brutal, crooked cops. Some of the 1940s wisecracks about women land badly today.

What you’ll hear

• Jack Webb's weary, wisecracking narration, packed with pulp-fiction similes.
• The foghorn opening and the fog, piers and dive bars of the San Francisco waterfront.
• Raymond Burr's Inspector Hellman and Tudor Owen's Jocko Madigan, Novak's two regular foils.
• Novak's closing wisecrack after "Hellman asked only one question."
• Hollywood radio regulars in the 1949 casts: William Conrad, Virginia Gregg, Parley Baer, Paul Frees and Frank Lovejoy.
• Rare 1946 and 1947 recordings from the San Francisco run, including episodes with Ben Morris as Novak.

Where to start

• "Dixie Gillian" (1946) is a rare recording of the original KGO show with Webb.
• From the 1949 network run, try "Fleet Lady" (1949), in which a dead horse leads to a dead jockey, or "Rory Malone" (1949), about a fixed prize fight.
• "Father Leahy - Joe Feldman" (1949) has a priest hire Novak to meet a convict about to escape from Alcatraz.
• Listen live any time, or follow the podcast, which adds a new episode every week in broadcast order.

Pat Novak, for Hire on the radio

ABC (West Coast regional 1946-47, network 1949), 1946-1949. With Jack Webb, Raymond Burr, Tudor Owen, William Conrad, George Fenneman, Virginia Gregg.

Where the recordings come from

The these recordings here come from the Old Time Radio Researchers' Pat Novak Singles set (26 episodes), hosted by the Internet Archive. Our thanks to the Old Time Radio Researchers, the volunteers who found, dated and assembled the set, and to the Archive and the collectors whose uploads it rests on. The sound is our remaster of those files (rumble, hiss and hum cleaned out, levelled to steady broadcast loudness); the recordings themselves are theirs. About our sources.

Every Pat Novak, for Hire episode: the full list, with air dates and stories

More to listen to

• Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar
• Let George Do It
• Boston Blackie
• Broadway Is My Beat
• Nick Carter, Master Detective

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