During Dick Powell’s lengthy career, he had many stages. From the 1930s to 1944, he was known as a skilled singer and comic actor. He landed the film role Philip Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet, he starred in the first true hard-boiled Private Eye show Rogue’s Gallery, and then he spent many years playing a variety of hard-boiled characters in Noir films. In many ways, Richard Diamond was a perfect marriage of the two halves of Powell’s performing career before the next stage of Powell’s career which saw him as a creative force behind programs such as the Zane Grey Theater.

The series was unusual in that there are many episodes which featured hard-boiled fisticuffs and gunfights. Then the series shifts to Richard Diamond showing up at his girlfriend Helen Asher’s (Virginia Gregg) to serenade her as he softly sings and plays the piano and the two banter back and forth. It’s an unusual series that only Powell could make work.

Diamond was a former NYPD detective who served in the O.S.S. during the war before returning home to start his own private agency. His rates are quite exorbitant at $100 a day plus expenses. Compare this to Philip Marlowe’s $25 a day. He enjoys a good relationship with Lt. Levinson of the Homicide Squad while being a bane to the existence of the slow-witted Sergeant Otis.

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