Danger, Dr. Danfield

Also known as: Danger, Doctor Danfield

August 18, 1946 – February 9, 1947 · 26 broadcasts

Detective drama (1946-47): Dr. Daniel Danfield, a criminal psychologist, dictates his cases to his secretary Rusty Fairfax and solves the murders the police cannot. 26 transcribed episodes survive.

History & Overview

Premise and Format

Dr. Daniel Danfield is a doctor of criminal psychology with an unhappy habit of finding himself inside the murders he studies. ^c1 Every half-hour opens the same way: Danfield in his office, dictating a case summary to his secretary, Rusty Fairfax, with the dramatized scenes woven through that framing narration. ^c2 Wikipedia describes his cases as often arriving "in response to requests for help from law enforcement agencies," but a modern listener who worked through the entire surviving run instead found Danfield behaving mostly like an amateur detective — a "busybody" who turned up crime wherever he went — and the surviving episodes bear out the second description far more often than the first. ^c3 Radio Daily's own 1949 trade catalogue summarized the show's selling point more charitably, as an emphasis on solving the crime rather than dwelling on the murder itself. ^c4 Underneath the weekly mystery runs a standing romantic joke: Rusty is openly smitten with her employer, who calls her "Miss Fairfax" and holds her at arm's length for the length of the series. ^c5

Origins and Production Company

The series was a transcribed — pre-recorded — half-hour produced by Teleways Radio Productions, a Hollywood transcription house. ^c6 Teleways would later collapse; Billboard reported creditors claiming $69,000 against the company in October 1952. ^c7 Wally Ramsey produced and Ralph Wilkinson wrote. ^c8 The sponsor was the Knox Company. ^c9 Because the program existed as a set of transcription discs rather than a live network origination, it had a second life: after its ABC run ended, it was syndicated to individual stations for several more years. ^c10 The Digital Deli log records an audition episode broadcast on 1946-08-11 under the title "A One Thousand Dollar Bet," and identifies the later-aired "A Thousand Dollar Bet" as the same script — which makes the surviving "Sam Hardy Makes a Bet With Death" (also logged as "Who Will Live Longer?") very likely the reused audition script still in circulation today. ^c11

Broadcast History

This program's chronology is genuinely contested, and the two surviving accounts cannot both be literally true — both are preserved here rather than one being silently chosen.

The syndication logs agree with each other and with the held audio. The Jerry Haendiges episodic log lists 26 titles, numbered 1 through 26, airing weekly on Sundays from 1946-08-18 to 1947-02-09, and states outright: "Total Possible Episodes: 26 Missing Programs: None." ^c12 The Old Time Radio Researchers log confirms the same numbering and, with a single exception, the same dates — but not the titles: 13 of the 26 differ between the two logs, with Haendiges preserving character-name titles (e.g. "Victor Geralo," "Bald Eagle Lodge") against OTRR's more descriptive versions of the same broadcasts. ^c13 The one date conflict is episode 15: Haendiges dates it 1946-11-24, a Sunday, while the OTRR log and both held-copy filenames carry 1946-11-25, a Monday — the only non-Sunday date that would appear anywhere in an otherwise unbroken weekly run, so the spine follows the Sunday-consistent Haendiges date. ^c14

The newspaper listings tell a longer story. The Digital Deli Too log was reconstructed from contemporary radio listings in five different papers, and it produces a longer ABC network run of 32 broadcast slots ending 1947-04-20, with the program replaced the following week by Deadline Mystery. ^c15 It also records the show being pre-empted twice by the same New York Giants–Chicago Bears football fixture in different seasons: once on 1946-09-01, in the Midwest and East only (Los Angeles listings show the episode still airing there that afternoon), and a full pre-emption on 1946-12-15. ^c16 From September 1946 onward, its titles fall on different — and later — dates than the syndication logs give them, and in a few cases the same title turns up twice on different dates. ^c17

The physical evidence tips toward the newspaper account. The surviving transcription discs carry two separate numbers — a label number and a matrix number — and the two disagree: "A Diamond Pendant Stolen," for instance, is #13 on the label but #29 on the matrix, and a matrix number that high on a set of only 26 discs is itself an argument that more than 26 episodes were originally cut. ^c18 Wikipedia, following Dunning and Cox, gives the ABC run as 1946-08-18 to 1947-04-13 — close to the Digital Deli end date and hard to reconcile with a run that actually stopped in February. ^c19 The most defensible reading is that the 26 recordings in circulation are the syndication package — re-sequenced and re-labelled for sale to individual stations — rather than the network's original broadcast order; that conclusion is not settled fact, and the conflict is logged as open rather than resolved. ^c20

People and Casting

Steve Dunne played Danfield, billed on this program under his early professional name, Michael Dunne. ^c21 A Wisconsin State Journal listing from 1946-09-08 announced that "Michael Dunne stars in new mystery series as a crime doctor." ^c22 Dunne would go on to become the second actor to play Sam Spade on network radio. ^c23 JoAnne Johnson played Rusty Fairfax throughout the run. ^c24 Herb Butterfield played Captain Otis, a homicide detective, and Jay Novello played Danfield's chauffeur, identified in the Digital Deli character list as Mario Consoletti. ^c25 Otrcat describes Mario as a "classic working-class Italian who sounds like Chico Marx" — a characterization that reads today as broad ethnic comedy. ^c26

The Digital Deli principal-actor roster adds a deep bench of West Coast radio regulars: Jay Jostyn, Herb Vigran, Betty Lou Gerson, Howard McNear, Parley Baer, Peter Leeds, and Lurene Tuttle. ^c27 Listening through the whole run, critic Michael Hoskin identifies Howard McNear as audible in at least three episodes. ^c28 One newspaper listing, for 1946-09-01, credits Parley Baer as playing Oliver Norton — the character at the center of "Murder of Cora Rogers" — which is the single surviving per-episode guest-cast credit that lines up cleanly with a specific held episode. ^c29 Digital Deli also credits Steve Dunne himself as the program's announcer, meaning the voice introducing the show and the voice playing its lead were the same. ^c30

Significance and Legacy

Its significance is mostly negative, and unusually well documented. The Old Time Radio Researchers' own series summary judges that the show "consistently featured some of the worst acting and writing of any detective show to reach the airwaves." ^c31 The oldtimeradiodownloads catalogue is nearly as blunt, calling it "one of the worst detective shows ever on the network." ^c32 Wikipedia's own "See also" list places the series beside Crime Doctor and The Crime Files of Flamond — the two other network radio series built on a criminologist-as-detective premise — and that comparison is really where the show's historical interest sits: as a clean specimen of a short-lived 1940s subgenre that sold newly fashionable psychology as a crime-solving instrument. ^c33 Its other legacy is accidental. Because Teleways transcribed it, the entire 26-disc syndication package survived intact — an unbroken commercial run of a minor 1946 detective series, which is rarer than the partial survival of far more celebrated shows. That is not the same as a complete network record, though: the ABC schedule almost certainly carried more broadcasts than the 26 that circulate today. ^c34

Production

The show is scored on a lone organ throughout and is nearly silent on sound effects. ^c35 Surviving running times fall in a narrow band, roughly 24 and a half to 26 and a half minutes. ^c36 Otrcat calls it "a workman-like show" and situates it closest to Nick Carter, Master Detective, in the same company as Casey, Crime Photographer and The Falcon — all three of which preceded it onto the air. ^c37 Two of the surviving transcriptions are defective in ways the logs themselves record: "Snowbound" (1946-12-01) and "Money in a Basket" (1946-12-29) both carry no opening or closing announcements, and Digital Deli separately flags "Money in a Basket" as a badly damaged recording. ^c38

Context and Controversies

The show arrived at exactly the wrong moment. It premiered in August 1946, into a postwar detective field that had turned hard-boiled, and Otrcat's assessment is that it played "just a little too stodgy" for a genre that had picked up a harder edge after the war. ^c39 Modern listeners have been no kinder to the lead: Hoskin finds Danfield "simply far too smarmy to be an acceptable protagonist," and judges his deductions closer to educated guesswork dressed up as psychology than to anything scientific. ^c40 The Rusty Fairfax material has aged just as badly on its own terms — a subordinate woman's unreciprocated infatuation with her boss, played every week for comedy — with Otrcat noting flatly that "the way he treats Rusty is criminal." ^c41

Odd Bits

• A KABC spot advertisement dated 27 October 1946 survives, and it misspells its own genre: Digital Deli's caption on the scan notes that it really does read "Mistery." ^c42
• The program opened each week with a scripted epigraph in which Danfield compares the human mind to a cave holding "dark passage ways and mysterious recesses" whose secrets he alone has explored. ^c43
• The Haendiges log preserves at least two typographical fossils from its own era: episode 23 is filed as "MENTAL HOSPETAL" and episode 2 as "MANUAL ABELLO." ^c44
• Episode 24, "Tunnel Smelled of Death," is described by its plot source as turning on the deaths of "seventy groundhogs" in a tunnel collapse — almost certainly a corruption of "sandhogs," the trade name for tunnel workers, which also fits the municipal-corruption angle the same script carries elsewhere. ^c45
• Danfield is at least twice the victim of his own plots: caught passing counterfeit ten-dollar bills himself in one episode, and committing himself to an asylum to expose a crooked doctor in another. ^c46

Reception

Contemporary reception is thinly documented — no ratings figures surfaced in this research pass — and what survives is almost entirely retrospective, and almost entirely unflattering, echoing the same verdicts already quoted above under Significance. Hoskin, working through the whole run decades later, declines to fully endorse the harshest of those verdicts: "I won't co-sign that, but I do admit this is not a great detective show" — probably the fairest reading the record actually supports. ^c47 The one positive signal from the period is commercial rather than critical: the package was still being sold, and still listed in Radio Daily's Shows of Tomorrow catalogue in 1949, two full years after ABC had dropped the show from its schedule. ^c48

Cast & Creators

Steve Dunne carried every one of the 26 surviving episodes as Dr. Daniel Danfield, though listeners at the time would not have recognized his name — he was billed on this program under his early professional name, Michael Dunne, and doubled as the show's own announcer. It was a full decade before his best-remembered old-time-radio role: taking over as the second network Sam Spade. Opposite him, JoAnne Johnson played secretary Rusty Fairfax across the entire run — the dictation frame that opens every episode is played to her every week, and the show's running gag is her unreciprocated attachment to a boss who keeps her permanently at "Miss Fairfax" distance. Almost nothing else is documented about Johnson; no other credit, photograph, or biographical record has surfaced.

Two more character actors recur through the series. Herb Butterfield played Captain Otis, the homicide detective who feeds Danfield his cases, in a career built on exactly this kind of authoritative-older-man part. Jay Novello played Danfield's chauffeur, named Mario Consoletti in the surviving cast list — described by one contemporary catalogue as a "classic working-class Italian" in a broadly comic mode typical of the period, and typical of the ethnic stereotyping radio comedy leaned on at the time.

Beyond the four recurring principals, the Digital Deli roster names a bench of West Coast radio regulars attached to the production without surviving per-episode attributions: Jay Jostyn, Herb Vigran, Betty Lou Gerson, Howard McNear, Parley Baer, Peter Leeds, and Lurene Tuttle. Of these, only one has a documented specific appearance — a 1946-09-01 newspaper listing credits Parley Baer as Oliver Norton, the blackmailed producer at the center of "Murder of Cora Rogers," matching a role that actually survives on tape. Howard McNear is reported audible in at least three episodes by a listener who worked through the whole run, though which three is not recorded. The rest are rostered at the program level only, with no episode-by-episode record to draw from.

On the production side, Ralph Wilkinson wrote and Wally Ramsey produced for Teleways Radio Productions, the Hollywood transcription house that recorded the series to disc for the Knox Company's sponsorship — the arrangement responsible for all 26 episodes surviving as a single intact commercial package. Neither Wilkinson nor Ramsey has a biographical dossier yet; both are firmly credited but unresearched beyond that credit. No director is named in any source consulted, and the show's organist — heard under every scene, every week — is likewise unidentified in the record as it stands.

• Steve Dunne — Dr. Daniel Danfield (lead, billed as Michael Dunne)
• JoAnne Johnson — Rusty Fairfax, Danfield's secretary
• Herb Butterfield — Captain Otis, homicide detective
• Jay Novello — Mario Consoletti, Danfield's chauffeur
• Parley Baer — Oliver Norton (guest, "Murder of Cora Rogers")
• Howard McNear — Principal-cast roster (uncredited episodes)
• Jay Jostyn — Principal-cast roster
• Herb Vigran — Principal-cast roster
• Betty Lou Gerson — Principal-cast roster
• Peter Leeds — Principal-cast roster
• Lurene Tuttle — Principal-cast roster

Sources & Citations

Primary Sources

• Danger, Doctor Danfield -- episodic log (Jerry Haendiges Vintage Radio Logs) — otrsite.com (via Wayback, 2016-03-22)
• Danger, Doctor Danfield log (Old Time Radio Researchers) — otrr.org
• The Definitive Danger Dr. Danfield Radio Log with Steve Dunne — The Digital Deli Too (via Wayback, 2017-05-10)
• Danger Dr Danfield episode pages — oldtimeradiodownloads.com
• Danger, Dr. Danfield (Wikipedia) — en.wikipedia.org
• Danger Doctor Danfield — otrcat.com
• Radio Recap: Danger, Dr. Danfield (Michael Hoskin) — section244.blogspot.com
• Shows of Tomorrow (10th ed.), p.35 — Radio Daily, 1949 (worldradiohistory.com)
• Danger, Dr. Danfield - Single Episodes (OTRR) — archive.org
• Phase-3 wide-net provenance notes — local

Notes

1. Dr. Daniel Danfield is a doctor of criminal psychology who repeatedly finds himself entangled in the murders he studies. en.wikipedia.org, www.oldtimeradiodownloads.com
2. Each half-hour opens with Danfield dictating a case summary to his secretary, Rusty Fairfax, with the dramatized scenes interspersed through that framing narration. en.wikipedia.org, www.oldtimeradiodownloads.com
3. Wikipedia describes cases as often arriving in response to requests for help from law enforcement, while a modern listener working through the whole run instead found Danfield behaving mostly as an amateur busybody who found crime everywhere he went -- and the surviving episodes bear out the second description more often. en.wikipedia.org, section244.blogspot.com
4. Radio Daily's 1949 trade catalogue summarized the show's appeal as an emphasis on solving crime rather than dwelling on the murder itself. www.worldradiohistory.com, en.wikipedia.org
5. A running romantic joke undergirds the mysteries: Rusty is openly smitten with her employer, who calls her "Miss Fairfax" and keeps her at arm's length for the length of the series. www.otrcat.com, section244.blogspot.com
6. The program was a transcribed (pre-recorded) half-hour produced by Teleways Radio Productions, a Hollywood transcription house. en.wikipedia.org
7. Teleways later collapsed; Billboard reported creditors claiming $69,000 against the company in October 1952. en.wikipedia.org
8. Wally Ramsey produced and Ralph Wilkinson wrote the series. en.wikipedia.org, section244.blogspot.com
9. The sponsor was the Knox Company. en.wikipedia.org
10. Because the show existed as transcription discs rather than a live network origination, it had a second life: after its ABC run it was syndicated to individual stations for several more years. en.wikipedia.org
11. The Digital Deli log records an audition episode on 1946-08-11 titled "A One Thousand Dollar Bet," and identifies the later broadcast "A Thousand Dollar Bet" as the same script -- making the surviving "Sam Hardy Makes a Bet With Death"/"Who Will Live Longer?" episode very likely the reused audition script. web.archive.org
12. The Jerry Haendiges episodic log lists 26 titles, numbered 1-26, running weekly on Sundays from 1946-08-18 to 1947-02-09, and states "Total Possible Episodes: 26 Missing Programs: None." web.archive.org
13. The Old Time Radio Researchers log agrees with Haendiges on the numbering and, with one exception, on the dates, but 13 of the 26 titles differ between the two logs -- Haendiges preserving character-name titles, OTRR using descriptive ones. web.archive.org, www.otrr.org
14. The one date conflict is episode 15: Haendiges dates it 1946-11-24 (a Sunday), while the OTRR log and both held-copy filenames carry 1946-11-25 (a Monday) -- the only non-Sunday date that would appear in an otherwise unbroken weekly run, so the spine follows Haendiges here. web.archive.org, www.otrr.org
15. The Digital Deli Too log, reconstructed from contemporary newspaper radio listings in five different papers, instead reconstructs a longer ABC network run of 32 broadcast slots ending 1947-04-20, with the program replaced the following week by Deadline Mystery. web.archive.org
16. Digital Deli records the show being pre-empted twice by the same New York Giants-Chicago Bears football fixture in different seasons: on 1946-09-01 (in the Midwest and East only -- Los Angeles listings show it aired there that afternoon) and a full pre-emption on 1946-12-15. web.archive.org
17. From September 1946 onward, Digital Deli's newspaper-derived titles fall on different, later dates than the syndication logs give them, and in a few cases the same title is listed twice on different dates. web.archive.org
18. Physical evidence favors the newspaper chronology: the surviving transcription discs carry both a label number and a matrix number that disagree with each other -- "A Diamond Pendant Stolen" is #13 on the label but #29 on the matrix, a number that implies more than 26 discs were originally cut. www.oldtimeradiodownloads.com
19. Wikipedia, following Dunning and Cox, gives the ABC run as 1946-08-18 to 1947-04-13 -- close to the Digital Deli end date and difficult to reconcile with a run that stopped in February. en.wikipedia.org
20. The most defensible reading is that the 26 circulating recordings are the syndication package -- re-sequenced and re-labelled for sale to stations -- rather than the network's actual running order; this is recorded as an open, unresolved conflict rather than settled either way. web.archive.org, www.otrr.org, web.archive.org, www.oldtimeradiodownloads.com, en.wikipedia.org
21. Steve Dunne played Danfield, billed on this program under his early professional name Michael Dunne. en.wikipedia.org, web.archive.org, section244.blogspot.com
22. A Wisconsin State Journal listing from 1946-09-08 announced that "Michael Dunne stars in new mystery series as a crime doctor." web.archive.org
23. Dunne would go on to become the second actor to play Sam Spade on network radio. web.archive.org
24. JoAnne Johnson played Rusty Fairfax, Danfield's secretary, throughout the run. en.wikipedia.org, web.archive.org
25. Herb Butterfield played Captain Otis, a homicide detective, and Jay Novello played Danfield's chauffeur, named Mario Consoletti in the Digital Deli character list. en.wikipedia.org, web.archive.org
26. Otrcat describes Mario as a "classic working-class Italian who sounds like Chico Marx" -- a characterization that reads as broad ethnic comedy today. www.otrcat.com
27. The Digital Deli principal-actor roster adds a deep bench of West Coast radio regulars: Jay Jostyn, Herb Vigran, Betty Lou Gerson, Howard McNear, Parley Baer, Peter Leeds, and Lurene Tuttle. web.archive.org
28. Listening through the whole run, critic Michael Hoskin identifies Howard McNear as audible in at least three episodes. section244.blogspot.com
29. A newspaper listing for 1946-09-01 credits Parley Baer as playing Oliver Norton, the character at the center of "Murder of Cora Rogers" -- the one surviving per-episode guest-cast credit that lines up with a specific held episode. web.archive.org, www.oldtimeradiodownloads.com
30. Digital Deli also credits Steve Dunne himself as the program's announcer. web.archive.org
31. The Old Time Radio Researchers' own series summary judges that the show "consistently featured some of the worst acting and writing of any detective show to reach the airwaves." section244.blogspot.com
32. The oldtimeradiodownloads catalogue similarly calls it "one of the worst detective shows ever on the network." www.oldtimeradiodownloads.com
33. Wikipedia's own "See also" list places the series beside Crime Doctor and The Crime Files of Flamond, the two other radio series built on a criminologist-as-detective premise -- a clean specimen of a short-lived 1940s subgenre that sold newly fashionable psychology as a crime-solving instrument. en.wikipedia.org
34. Because Teleways transcribed the series, the entire 26-disc syndication package survived intact, rarer than the partial survival of far more famous shows -- though not the same as a complete network run, since the ABC schedule almost certainly carried more than the 26 broadcasts that circulate. en.wikipedia.org, web.archive.org, www.oldtimeradiodownloads.com
35. The show is scored with an organ throughout and is nearly silent on sound effects. www.otrcat.com
36. Surviving running times fall between about 24 and a half and 26 and a half minutes. web.archive.org
37. Otrcat calls it "a workman-like show" and situates it alongside Nick Carter, Master Detective, in the same league as Casey, Crime Photographer and The Falcon, all three of which preceded it. www.otrcat.com
38. Two of the surviving transcriptions are defective in ways the logs record: "Snowbound" (1946-12-01) and "Money in a Basket" (1946-12-29) carry no opening or closing announcements, and Digital Deli separately marks "Money in a Basket" as a badly damaged recording. www.otrr.org, web.archive.org
39. The show premiered in August 1946 into a postwar detective field that had turned hard-boiled; Otrcat judges it "just a little too stodgy" for a genre that had picked up a bleeding edge after the war. www.otrcat.com
40. Modern critics have been no kinder to the lead: Hoskin finds Danfield "simply far too smarmy to be an acceptable protagonist" and judges his deductions closer to educated guesswork than to psychology. section244.blogspot.com
41. The Rusty Fairfax material has aged particularly badly on its own terms -- a subordinate woman's unreciprocated infatuation with her boss, played for comedy -- with Otrcat noting flatly that "the way he treats Rusty is criminal." www.otrcat.com
42. A KABC spot advertisement dated 27 October 1946 survives, and misspells its own genre -- Digital Deli's caption notes that it really does read "Mistery." web.archive.org, www.oldtimeradiodownloads.com
43. The program opened each week with a scripted epigraph in which Danfield compares the human mind to a cave holding "dark passage ways and mysterious recesses" whose secrets he alone has explored. web.archive.org
44. The Haendiges log preserves at least two typographical fossils from its own era: episode 23 filed as "MENTAL HOSPETAL" and episode 2 as "MANUAL ABELLO." web.archive.org
45. Episode 24, "Tunnel Smelled of Death," is described by its plot source as turning on the deaths of "seventy groundhogs" in a tunnel collapse -- almost certainly a corruption of "sandhogs," the trade name for tunnel workers, which also fits the municipal-corruption angle the same script carries. www.oldtimeradiodownloads.com, web.archive.org
46. Danfield is at least twice the victim of his own plots -- caught passing counterfeit ten-dollar bills himself in one episode, and committing himself to an asylum to expose a crooked doctor in another. www.oldtimeradiodownloads.com
47. Hoskin declines to fully endorse the OTRR verdict, writing "I won't co-sign that, but I do admit this is not a great detective show" -- probably the fairest available assessment. section244.blogspot.com
48. The one positive contemporary signal is commercial rather than critical: the package was still being sold and listed in Radio Daily's Shows of Tomorrow catalogue in 1949, two years after ABC had dropped the show. www.worldradiohistory.com