In 1936, Warner Bros. began to develop an adaptation of the MacBride and Kennedy stories by detective novelist Frederick Nebel. These stories featured a no-nonsense cop named MacBride and his friend known as Kennedy, a hard-drinking newspaperman. For the film version, Kennedy was changed to a woman named "Torchy" Blane and became the love interest of the cop, whose name was now spelled "McBride". Torchy's lifestyle was more compatible with the Hays Code than a faithful on-screen adaptation of Kennedy would have been.
