The Adventures of the Falcon
A Character With a Tangled Past
Before The Adventures of the Falcon ever went out over the air, the character at its center had already lived at least two different lives — and whose creation it actually was had become genuinely murky. The radio series credited a writer named "Drexel Drake" as the originator of Michael Waring, the Falcon. That name was a pseudonym for Charles H. Huff, who had published three Falcon novels through J.B. Lippincott in the late 1930s: The Falcon's Prey (1936), The Falcon Cuts In (1937), and The Falcon Meets a Lady (1938). In those books, the hero wasn't even named Michael Waring — he was Malcolm J. Wingate, a shadowy New York crimefighter who worked alongside his ex-cop partner Steve "Sarge" Hardy. The radio name was its own invention.
Meanwhile, RKO Pictures had credited Michael Arlen — whose short story "Gay Falcon" appeared in the May 1940 issue of Town & Country — as the source for a whole film series. The Gay Falcon became the first of sixteen RKO pictures, with George Sanders playing the hero (named Gay Lawrence in those films) through four installments before the character was killed onscreen in The Falcon's Brother in 1942. That film introduced Sanders's real-life brother Tom Conway as the new Falcon, although producer Maurice Geraghty later admitted that Conway was recruited mainly as a way to get Sanders to make one last picture — the plan was for the series to end there. It ran ten more films instead. The confusion between the Drake novels and the Arlen story as the character's true origin was never resolved, and as Kevin Burton Smith of Thrilling Detective observed, the radio show and the films "weren't shy about insinuating that their Falcon was also the hero of the RKO films," and "both the radio shows and the movies benefited from the confusion."
As a footnote: "Drexel Drake" had its own odd resonance. That exact name was used as the fictitious heir at the center of an infamous 1920s confidence scheme run by American swindler Oscar Hartzell. Whether Huff picked the name knowing that history isn't recorded.
How the Show Worked
The Adventures of the Falcon premiered on the Blue Network on April 10, 1943, and ran there through the end of that year. The format was 30 minutes throughout the show's entire run, which stretched — with some gaps — all the way to November 27, 1954.
Michael Waring was a freelance detective, described in the show's own framing as "always ready with a hand for oppressed men and an eye for repressed women." Each episode opened with a phone ringing — always a woman on the other end — and Waring answering in a voice described as smooth with a trace of a British accent. He'd call her "angel" and work through whatever trouble she brought him. Before the main action got underway, he'd deliver a humorous excuse for having to break a date, something along the lines of needing to "teach some gangsters that you can't get away with murder, especially since the murder they want to get away with is mine." It was a light touch, done every week, and it set the show's tone neatly.
Waring's approach to detection sat somewhere between Ellery Queen and Richard Diamond. He had an eye for detail, but his manner was more wisecracking than methodical. The police in the Falcon's world were consistently portrayed as incompetent, and Waring let them know it with sarcastic, snappy dialogue at every opportunity. Mandel Kramer played the recurring police character Sgt. Johnny Gleason, and Ken Lynch appeared as Sgt. Corbett — both serving as reliable foils. Joan Banks played Nancy, Waring's secretary, throughout the entire run from 1943 to 1954. Born in Petersburg, West Virginia, Banks was married to actor Frank Lovejoy from 1940 until his death in 1962, and her continuous presence across all three networks gave the show unusual consistency through a cast that otherwise changed frequently. The radio dramatizations never once explained where the Falcon nickname came from.
The Cast Across Eleven Years
Four actors played Michael Waring across the show's run, and each brought something different to it. Berry Kroeger originated the role on the Blue Network in 1943. James Meighan took over when the show moved to Mutual in 1945 and held the part through 1947. Les Tremayne came in during the late 1940s, Les Damon carried the role into the early 1950s, and George Petrie also stepped in at some point during the run.
Tremayne is worth a longer look. Born Lester Tremayne Henning in Balham, London on April 16, 1913, he moved to Chicago at age four and started his radio career at seventeen. During his peak Chicago years, he reportedly worked forty-five radio programs per week. A survey in the late 1930s identified his voice as one of the three most recognized in America, alongside Bing Crosby and Franklin D. Roosevelt. By his own 1974 account, he had made more than 30,000 radio broadcasts over his career. He was elected to the National Radio Hall of Fame in 1995, and film audiences know him from the 1953 version of The War of the Worlds and as the auctioneer in Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959).
Les Damon, who played Waring in the early 1950s, had trained with the Old Vic company in Lambeth before returning to the United States for radio work. He served in the Air Force during World War II and received the Bronze Star. During the Damon years, the show shifted Waring's role significantly — he was working for Army Intelligence and solving espionage cases overseas rather than freelancing in New York. Damon also played Nick Charles in The Thin Man radio series and Inspector Mark Sabre on ABC's Mystery Theater, among other roles. The majority of surviving Falcon recordings happen to feature Damon, which makes his tenure the best-documented stretch of the run.
Three Networks and Several Sponsors
After the Blue Network run ended in December 1943, the Falcon came back on Mutual starting July 3, 1945, and stayed there through April 30, 1950. Gem Razors and Blades sponsored the show for most of that stretch, from 1945 to 1947, with Anahist picking up a brief stint from January to March 1950.
The Gem Razor Blades commercials from around 1945 became something of a period curiosity on their own. An announcer delivered the message in a whisper against the ticking and tolling of a clock, dropping individual words between chimes to build to the message: "Avoid five o'clock shadow! Use Gem Blades!" It was an unusually atmospheric approach for a product spot.
NBC picked up the show on May 7, 1950 — reportedly because the program had been more successful against Jack Benny than any other competition it had faced. Kraft Foods sponsored the NBC run from 1950 to 1951, and Kraft's product integrations were notably smooth: in those episodes, Michael Waring would stop at a diner and chat with a counter clerk about Miracle Whip. The show ran on NBC through September 14, 1952, typically in a Sunday afternoon slot, though it also spent the summer of 1951 in a Wednesday night slot filling in for The Great Gildersleeve. General Mills then sponsored a final Mutual run from January to July 1953, and the show continued on Mutual without sponsor credit until its last broadcast on November 27, 1954.
The show originated from New York for most of its life, with a two-year stretch out of the Don Lee Mutual studios in Hollywood. Orchestra leaders over the years included Emerson Buckley and Harry Sosnik, with Bob Hamilton on organ. Announcers included Ed Herlihy, Jack Costello, and Russ Dunbar. Production was handled throughout by Bernard L. Schubert, with directors Carlo De Angelo, Richard Lewis, and Stuart Buchanan. Writers included Gene Wang, Bernard Dougall, Jay Bennett, Palmer Thompson, and Stanley Niss. Adrian Penner handled sound effects during the Mutual years.
After Radio
The Falcon didn't stop with the radio series. Three low-budget films produced by Film Classics in 1948 featured actor-magician John Calvert playing a character billed as "The New Falcon" — inexplicably renamed "Michael Watling" in those pictures, though the credits still claimed the character was based on Michael Arlen.
Then in 1954, a syndicated television series titled Adventures of the Falcon went into production, running 39 episodes through 1955. Charles McGraw — born Charles Crisp Butters on May 10, 1914, and best known for his film noir work in The Killers (1946), T-Men (1947), and The Narrow Margin (1952) — played Mike Waring. The TV series was produced by Federal Telefilms and distributed by NBC Films, with primary writing by Gene Wang, who had also written for the radio show, and direction in part by George Waggner. The television version updated the premise for the Cold War moment, recasting Waring as a secret agent rather than a freelance detective. McGraw received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on February 8, 1960, at 6927 Hollywood Boulevard. Bernard Schubert produced the television version as well, and went on to produce other early TV series including Mr. and Mrs. North (1952–54) and Topper (1953–55).
Approximately 88 surviving episodes of the radio series have been identified and preserved, representing the bulk of what is known to exist from a run that spanned more than eleven years across three networks.