That Hammer Guy
How It Got on the Air
The path from Mickey Spillane's novels to Mutual radio ran through a friendship rather than a boardroom. Director and co-producer Richard Lewis secured the radio and television rights to Mike Hammer not through a licensing negotiation but through what he himself called being "a beer drinking friend of Mickey Spillane." That personal connection gave Lewis something most producers chasing a hot property couldn't claim: direct access to the source. Spillane came on as a creative advisor, though he didn't write a single script. The actual writing fell to Ed Adamson, who worked within the constraints of network broadcast standards while still managing to capture the gritty atmosphere and colorful language that had made Spillane's books sell by the millions.
Lewis was no newcomer to radio crime drama. He had previously directed both The Falcon and Murder and Mr. Malone, so he understood the form well enough to know what could carry across from the page and what would have to be adjusted. The show went into development sometime in the latter half of 1952 — audition recordings from that year survive, annotated with the phrase "sex and slaughter" as a blunt summary of Spillane's appeal — and Billboard announced it as part of Mutual's 1953 lineup before it premiered on January 6, 1953, airing Tuesday nights at eight o'clock. The run continued through October 5, 1954.
The show went out under two names. The primary title was That Hammer Guy, though it also circulated as Mickey Spillane Mysteries. Ed Ladd served as announcer for at least a portion of the run, and the series was distributed through the Mutual/Don Lee Network, reaching West Coast audiences through the Don Lee affiliate chain.
The Mike Hammer on Radio
The Mike Hammer of Spillane's novels was a blunt instrument — violent, sexual, and operating by his own moral code outside any institutional framework. Network radio in 1953 couldn't carry all of that. The explicit violence and sexual content were substantially toned down to meet broadcast standards, which put Adamson in the position of maintaining the feel of Spillane's world without most of its shock content. The result, by contemporary OTR commentary, was a show noticeably darker than its radio contemporaries. Where programs like Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar and Richard Diamond leaned into wit and humor, That Hammer Guy didn't go for laughs. It was harder and grimmer, which set it apart in a crowded field of radio detectives.
Hammer himself carried a .45 Colt M1911 pistol he called "Betsy," kept in a shoulder harness under his left arm — a detail carried over from the novels and used throughout the run. His secretary Velda, a recurring presence in Spillane's books, appeared throughout the series as well, played by Jan Miner, who also voiced other female characters as they arose. One surviving episode, "The Saddle Shoes," broadcast April 7, 1953, gives a snapshot of the show's commercial context: sponsors included Esquire Magazine, Kix cereal, and Camels cigarettes, with G&D Vermouth listed as a local sponsor.
Three Men, One Hammer
One of the more unusual features of That Hammer Guy was that it ran through three different actors in the title role over the course of its broadcast life. Larry Haines originated the part, followed by George Petrie, and then Ted de Corsia. Rotating leads weren't unheard of in radio, but three passes at the same lead character in a run of roughly two years is notable.
Haines, born Larry Hecht on August 3, 1918, in Mount Vernon, New York, came to the role with an enormous amount of radio experience behind him. He is estimated to have appeared in more than 15,000 radio programs across the 1940s and 1950s, including The Chase, Cloak and Dagger, Inner Sanctum Mystery, and The Man Behind the Gun. He had starred as Joe Lincoln in Treasury Agent on Mutual from 1947 to 1948. When he started as Hammer in January 1953, he was already two years into another long-running commitment — a neighbor character named Stu Bergman on the CBS soap opera Search for Tomorrow, a role he had taken in 1951 and would hold for thirty-five years, winning Daytime Emmy Awards in 1976 and 1981. After radio wound down, Haines moved into theater: he made his Broadway debut in 1962 in Herb Gardner's A Thousand Clowns alongside Jason Robards, originated the role of Speed in The Odd Couple on Broadway in 1965 — reprising it in the 1968 film — and earned Tony nominations in 1966 for Generation and in 1969 for Promises, Promises. He died July 17, 2008, in Delray Beach, Florida, at eighty-nine.
Ted de Corsia, born Edward Gildea De Corsia on September 29, 1903, in Brooklyn, came to the role from a long career in radio crime and mystery. His gravelly voice had already been put to work on The Shadow, Gang Busters, The Adventures of Ellery Queen (as Sergeant Velie), Richard Diamond (as Lieutenant Levinson), and Pursuit (as Inspector Peter Black of Scotland Yard). He was also building a parallel film career in crime pictures — his debut came in Orson Welles' The Lady from Shanghai in 1947, followed by The Naked City (1948), The Enforcer (1951), Crime Wave (1954), The Big Combo (1955), Stanley Kubrick's The Killing (1956), and Baby Face Nelson (1957). De Corsia died of a cerebral thrombosis on April 11, 1973, in Encino, California.
George Petrie, who held the role between Haines and de Corsia, was a character actor active in radio, television, and film from the 1940s through the 1990s.
Jan Miner and the Rest of the Cast
Jan Miner's contribution to That Hammer Guy went beyond a supporting role. Playing Velda while also voicing whatever female parts the scripts required, she was effectively the female voice of the entire series. Miner, born Janice Miner on October 15, 1917, in Boston, was the kind of radio professional who worked multiple shows simultaneously — a common arrangement for actors skilled enough to be in demand. Before taking on Velda, she had played Della Street on Perry Mason, Ann Williams on Casey, Crime Photographer, and Mary Wesley on Boston Blackie, and had worked on The Mysterious Traveler, Radio City Playhouse, Cloak and Dagger, and Dimension X.
Television audiences would eventually know Miner from a different context entirely. Starting in 1966, she appeared as Madge the manicurist in Palmolive dish-washing detergent commercials and stayed with that campaign for twenty-seven years, through 1992 — one of the longer continuous runs as a product spokesperson in American television history. Her most prominent film work came in Bob Fosse's Lenny (1974), where she played Sally Marr, the mother of Lenny Bruce, opposite Dustin Hoffman. Miner died February 15, 2004, in Bethel, Connecticut.
Spillane's Hammer Beyond Radio
Mickey Spillane, born Frank Morrison Spillane on March 9, 1918, had introduced Mike Hammer in the 1947 novel I, the Jury, reportedly written in six days. By the time That Hammer Guy went to air, Hammer was already a cultural phenomenon, and the radio run existed alongside a parallel surge of activity in other media. The theatrical film I, the Jury was released in 1953 — the same year the radio series launched — directed by Harry Essex and starring Biff Elliot as Hammer, originally released in 3-D. In 1963, Spillane himself played Hammer in The Girl Hunters.
The radio show's director, Richard Lewis, moved directly from That Hammer Guy into television, producing a Mike Hammer pilot in 1954 with Brian Keith in the title role, written and directed by Blake Edwards. CBS declined to pick it up — reportedly because CBS chief William Paley was put off by what he perceived as Spillane and Hammer's "sleazy image." The character eventually found a long television home in the 1980s with Stacy Keach playing Hammer across the CBS series Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer from 1984 to 1987, and again in a syndicated revival from 1997 to 1998. In all, the Hammer character has appeared in four television series, five TV movies, and five motion pictures beyond the radio run.
Fourteen episodes of That Hammer Guy are known to survive, with a combined running time of roughly five hours and forty-two minutes — enough to hear what Adamson and Lewis built with Spillane's material on the Mutual airwaves, if not quite enough to trace the full arc of three actors working through the same role.