Fatman
Australian commercial radio
Australian commercial radio · 1945–1945
40 EpisodesWeeklyPGSince 1945
The run
- Network
- Australian commercial radio
- Years active
- 1945–1945
- Surviving broadcasts
- 40
- Genre
- detective
A Collection of Aussie Radio Shows No 55 (Incomplete Series) The Fat Man was advertised as “Dashiell Hammett’s most exciting character” despite the fact Hammett had little to do with the writing of any of the radio shows based on his characters. Whatever his origins, the Fat Man became one of radio’s great icons with its opening: There he goes, into that drugstore. He’s stepping on the scales. Weight: 239 pounds. Fortune: Danger. Who is it? THE FAT MAN The Australian version of The Fat Man, which premiered on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on September 9, 1954 and ran through 1955 for a total of 52 episodes. It was later syndicated by the Artansa label, and 36 episodes remain in cir Public-domain transfers from the Internet Archive.
Source collection
Internet Archive audio collections
Rights
Public domain — no renewed US copyright
Cataloguing
Air dates and notes from the Archive item record
The shape of the run
What survives, year by year
10 dated broadcasts across 82 years on the air, with 80 years where nothing is known to survive. Brightness is transfer quality; empty cells are months lost to time.
Episodes
Start here
Listen to the run in order
Restored broadcasts from 2025, in original transmission order.
- 1. A Room Above the Street · 4 Nov 2025
- 2. Signal at Midnight · 11 Nov 2025
- 3. The Last Train Out · 18 Nov 2025
The Long Silence
4 Aug 2026 · 23 min
Short, complete and unexpectedly devastating.
Dead Air
28 Jul 2026 · 38 min
The episode listeners keep sending to people who never listen to podcasts.
Sign Off
21 Jul 2026 · 53 min
A quiet beginning that turns, halfway through, into something else entirely.
The Case of the Missing Hour
14 Jul 2026 · 16 min
The one everybody argues about.
Night Broadcast
7 Jul 2026 · 31 min
Short, complete and unexpectedly devastating.
The Last Train Out
30 Jun 2026 · 46 min
The episode listeners keep sending to people who never listen to podcasts.
Signal at Midnight
23 Jun 2026 · 1h 1m
We go back to the beginning and read everything again.
A Room Above the Street
16 Jun 2026 · 24 min
Three interviews, one archive reel, and a question nobody wanted asked.
Also on Australian commercial radio
Australian commercial radio in 1945–1945
Other series the network carried while Fatman was on the air.
Same seasons
detective on the air then
Series in the same genre whose runs overlapped this one.
What it became
The private eye at the microphone
First-person narration, a case that walks in the door, and a city that talks back. Marlowe, Sam Spade and Johnny Dollar turned detection into a listening form.
Lineage is written by our editors, not inferred from listening data.
Descendants
Working in the tradition of Fatman
Modern series carrying this form forward.
If you liked this
More to explore
Chosen by the same editors.
