A couple of Fridays ago, I did a post on Patti Abbot’s Forgotten Books for a Hashknife Hartley and Sleepy Stevens novel. Today, I’m posting on a couple of radio episodes of our range detective cowboys. They originally ran on Sagebrush Theater for the Armed Forces Radio Network in 1950 and had the cachet of a bit of narration by W. C. Tuttle himself. They way they are presented everywhere I look, these were the only two Hashknife and Sleepy stories to make radio. Frank Martin played Hashknife and Barton Yarborough played Sleepy. I couldn’t find out anything else about the rest of the cast(I probably wasn’t looking in the right place), but I believe I recognized one voice in the DOUBLE CROSS episode. Unless I’m completely goofy(not outside the realm of possibility), James Best played the young man accused of murder. Best is probably best known for his role as Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane on The Dukes of Hazzard, but I remember him more for his two spots on The Andy Griffith Show as Jim Lindsey, guitar player extraordinaire.
In DOUBLE CROSS, Hashknife and Sleepy ride into town just in time for the murder of a rich rancher. They learn he had just broke up the wedding of his daughter and a “$20 dollar a month and found” cowboy. The cowboy had threatened the rancher’s life as he stormed out.
It’s up to our two heroes, well actually just Hashknife as Sleepy seems there for comedy relief as much as anything, to figure out what’s going on and prove the young man innocent of the murder.
RANGE WAR has that old plot of two ranches wanting control of a range.
Hashknife and Sleepy ride up to find a young fellow working on a cabin on a nice piece of range land. They stop to talk, learning he’s just recently filed on the land, has a small herd of a hundred cattle, and is planning to send for his wife as soon as the cabin is finished.
About that time, the rich rancher rides up and demands he get off his land. He admits he’d always planned to file on it, having used it for grazing land for ten years, but had never got around to it. That sets the stage for the coming tussle.
Someone decides to play the two men against each other, stealing half the smaller man’s herd one night and the same amount, fifty head, of the big man’s the next. We learn early on who the culprits are and it’s up to Hashknife and Sleepy to again figure it out before blood is spilled and things really get out of hand.
These two episodes are available HERE for a reasonable price(which is what I did). It works in MP3 players and your computer, but won’t play in standard CD players. You can also listen to the two episodes HERE.(which I also did).
They were a lot of fun listening to these. I paid for them, but OTR has sent me discs in the past. I have one(of five) from the Gunsmoke radio program and the two disc set of Philip Marlowe(a particular favorite).
Not The Baseball Pitcher 
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I’ve read about these but never heard them. VERY cool! Thanks!
I never knew these existed. Thanks for the tip!
I remember this series from back when I was a kid. It ran on Mutual for probably only one season, so there may have been 39 episodes, unless it was a summer replacement series, in which case there would have been 13. My memory can’t come up with details like that. I was only eight at the time!
It’s pretty remarkable that any survived — I have both of these, dating back to when they first started to circulate among OTR collectors — and that these two exist is only because they happened to be chosen to be re-recorded for the Armed Services Network.
An added plus, as you say, Randy, are the openings and other narrative bits done by W. C. Tuttle himself.
I could listen to these in my car. I seldom listen to the radio for anything at home. Not sure why.
I’ve come across this information before but don’t think I ever heard the episodes. OTR is so much fun – and nostalgic for me given that I’m old enough to remember at least a decade of it before TV.
HASHKNIFE was the proving ground for Burt Kennedy, who wrote many of the radio scripts, before moving on to movies, Duke Wayne, Boetticher, and James Garner. Burt was quite proud of his work on this show, and felt this is where he learned a “shaggy dog” style of writing, that allowed him to become one of our finest western screenwriters.
I was an announcer – 1947 – 1952 – at a radio station which was affiliated with MBS (Mutual). I remember “Hashknife Hartley” being
carried by MBS. Right?
Jim Anderson
I recall as a boy in Vancouver BC Canada hearing the live announcement of Barton Yarborough’s unexpected death (two days earlier as I recall) on this program– the only time I can recall hearing of an actor’s death in those days. Mr Yarborough was simply written out of the two other shows he was continuing in. I think One Man’s family sent him abruptly to Hawaii- then nobody talked about him- but then Clifford was always something of a scatterbrain. ‘HH&SS’ did a nice brief tribute to him and his work. His Wiki profile doesn’t include this radio series… I remember thinking of it at the time as an ‘adult’ western (precursor for ‘Gunsmoke’, et al)- something that appealed more than the run-of-the-mill horse operas.