Boxcars711 Old Time Radio Pod - Bulldog Drummond "Death Rides A Racehorse" (1947)

Bulldog Drummond is a British fictional character created by "Sapper", a pseudonym of Herman Cyril McNeile (1888-1937), in imitation of the hard boiled noir-style detectives appearing in contemporary American fiction. The stories followed Captain Hugh "Bulldog" Drummond, D.S.O., M.C., a wealthy former WWI officer of the Loamshire Regiment, who, after the war, spends his new-found leisure time as a private detective. Drummond is a proto-James Bond figure and a crudely debased version of the imperial adventurers depicted by the likes of John Buchan. In terms of the detective genre, the first Bulldog Drummond novel was published after the Sherlock Holmes stories, the Nayland Smith/Fu Manchu novels, and Richard Hannay's first adventure in The Thirty Nine Steps. The character first appeared in the novel Bulldog Drummond (1920), and was adapted into a number of films and radio serials. McNeile wrote in the style of the day which while it contained some jingoism (Drummond and his men had served in WWI so it could be expected), there was no racism. There was a story called "The Black Gang" which uninformed people have claimed was racism but this was merely the colour of the robes worn by Drummond and his men and could just have easily been "The Red Gang". Drummond fought a number of villains from all countries with equal zeal. After McNeile's death in 1938, his friend Gerard Fairlie continued to write stories based on the character.