If you head down to Pier 19 at the San Francisco waterfront, you’ll find Pat Novak For Hire renting boats and doing anything else to keep a few steps ahead in one of radio’s best noir detective dramas. Featuring duplicitous dames, gun-toting toughs, and dialogue right out of a pulp novel, the series packed a punch then and now. Jack Webb stars as Novak in a pair of episodes: “Father Leahy” and “Geranium Plant.” Then, Ben Morris is Novak in “The Mysterious Set of Books” (originally aired on ABC on August 10, 1947).