Every Saturday evening, a group of us get together online and read mostly radio play scripts together, each of us taking roles. It’s enormous fun. Naturally, we have certain shows that we like better than others. We’re particularly obsessed with Lux Radio Theatre, though that’s at least in part because it ran for decades and there are hundreds if not thousands of scripts, many of which are available online. Still, there are a few others. Today, I’d like to talk to you about one of the best of them, one that should be resurrected and turned into either a Major Motion Picture (my preferred casting is Michelle Rodriguez) or possibly a fun TV series.

Candy Matson is a private detective. A, gasp, female private detective in San Francisco. The show was made in the late ’40s and early ’50s. She’s a smart, wisecracking woman who takes no crap from anyone. Her best friend is the gay-coded Rembrandt Watson. Her love interest, conveniently, is San Francisco homicide detective Ray Mallard, yes pronounced like the duck. Candy and Mallard routinely go on dates that are interrupted by his having to go off and deal with murders. You can actually get a pretty decent overview of San Francisco geography from it.

Candy isn’t grimdark. She isn’t gritty. She isn’t even entirely hardboiled. She’s definitely capable of being tough if that’s what the situation calls for, but she’s also kind and thoughtful. In one of the scripts, we see her saddened by one of the murders because the victim was one of her old friends. She’s kind, loving, and compassionate. She’s got a dry wit. She’s often using it to cover up how stressed she is, and with some of the characters, it’s just how they interact because it’s fun.

What’s more, the world she’s in is well-populated with interesting characters. Rembrandt routinely has . . . friends over, with whom Candy cheerfully banters. There are lots of clients and suspects and things. I find Mallard a little bland, but that’s par for the course for the romantic interest of female leads. It’s only since they cast Chris Pine in the role that anyone can remember Steve Trevor’s name. Candy is one of those characters who loves sharing the spotlight, and there’s a lot that can be done there.

I would hope you’d make it a period piece, and not just because I think there need to be more period pieces that aren’t Serious Drama. ’40s San Francisco is a fun, exciting location. And this is after the war, which has some other interesting aspects to it. Also no internment camps, so that’s nice. It would be a funny mystery, and we’ve definitely seen that those are worth watching if done well. In a way, doesn’t that just make Candy Matson, as she arguably was on the radio, an heir to Nick and Nora Charles?

I don’t have Nora’s fortune, but you can support interesting ideas like these by contributing to my Patreon or Ko-fi!