Between 1940 and 1942, 20th Century Fox made seven films starring Lloyd Nolan as Brett Halliday’s detective, Michael Shayne. Detective movies were among the most dependable of B-features — cheap to make, easy to take — and Fox added Shayne to a roster that already included low-budget series involving those inscrutable Oriental minstrels, Charlie Chan and Mr. Moto. Like them, the Shayne films usually ignored the novels; but rather than create original stories, the scriptwriters adapted novels involving other characters, from the forgotten Great Merlini to the immortal Philip Marlowe.

Last year, Fox released a DVD of the third in the series, “Dressed To Kill” (not to be confused with a 1946 Holmes entry of that name), which is distinguished by its theatrical milieu, dry wit, and double denouement, in which the detective’s fiancée jilts him. Now the company has boxed four more on double-sided discs, mysteriously leaving the final two — including “Time To Kill,” a fairly faithful adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s “The High Window” — for another day. These films have a peculiar charm, thanks to subtle period references, droll dialogue, solid supporting performances, and Nolan’s interpretation of Shayne. “Sleepers West” (1941) is a splendid example of shaggy-dog B-movie plotting.

Halliday is no longer read, in part because he turned out too many novels and created a factory of scribes to turn out even more. His two-fisted, Irish, and usually Miami-based Shayne was dully revived in a postwar movie series, as a TV show, and as the name of a magazine. But if Shayne proliferated as relentlessly as the Hardy boys, Halliday was no slouch at plotting and settings, especially in the novels set in New Orleans. His first Shayne novel “Dividend on Death,” appeared in 1939; the first Shayne movie, loosely based on it, appeared the next year. It may be Hollywood’s first venture into the hard-boiled. Better make that poached.

Nolan could throw a convincing haymaker and rejoinder, but he was always too normal, too average to fit a stereotype. Everything about him was distinct — voice, face, laugh, and line readings — but most distinct was his lack of distinction. He stole scenes by standing around, looking very real, as though a human being had somehow sneaked into a passel of actors. No one was better at making small talk sound like small talk.

Watch his characteristic entrance in “Sleepers West” as he strolls through a train station (a rare location shot, in Inglewood) twirling a key chain, amiable, unhurried, unconcerned, stopping at a magazine stand, bantering, meeting an old flame, bantering again, and heading for his train, giving no sign that he’s on a case. Unlike most B-movie sleuths, Shayne wasn’t burdened by a slowwitted pal or excessive comic relief, because Nolan was naturally witty — his voice is a tranquilizing foghorn, nasal yet musical, and his laugh a jaunty teeth-baring sneeze. He was by no means handsome, but he had charm and knew how to wear a fedora.

“Sleepers West,” based on a previously filmed 1933 Frederick Nebel novel called “Sleepers East,” takes place almost entirely on a train traveling from Denver to San Francisco. The plot is suspiciously similar to the 1952 Richard Fleischer thriller, “The Narrow Margin,” except that Shayne is trying to protect a woman who will testify for rather than against a defendant. His method is to ignore her. A gangster tells Shayne, “My name is …” Shayne: “Carl Izzard.” Gangster: “How’d you know?” Shayne: “I don’t know. You just look like a fellow who’d have a name like Izzard.”

The key storyline is repeatedly interrupted by scenes of a conductor determined to keep the train on time, rumor-mongering porters (a who’s who of black comic actors, including Mantan Moreland, Sam McDaniel, and Ben Carter), and an accidental, seriously inebriated romance between the witness and a fleeing husband (Louis Jean Heydt) who had a Flitcraft-type epiphany that his life was boring. Trust the movie to ultimately braid the strands.

If not for the Production Code, “Sleepers West” would have been a B-classic. The performances are so disarming, you may actually be surprised when the husband returns to his wife and the witness turns from alcoholic hussy to bright-eyed waitress. You don’t mind because the witness is played by Mary Beth Hughes, a blond and buxom Shayne-series regular who worked all the time but rarely got parts this good. She almost always left more of an impression than the female leads — in this case, the appealing Lynn Bari.

Hughes is reduced to flinging lamps in “Blue, White and Perfect” (1942), which is fascinating because it was made a few weeks before Pearl Harbor and released a few weeks after, and has Shayne (and apparent gigolo George Reeves) on the heels of Nazi diamond smugglers. The last-act patriotic reversals have a prophetic post-Pearl ring. The film is set on a Hawaii-bound ship, with everyone traveling under an alias. “Michael Shayne, Private Detective” (1940) and “The Man Who Wouldn’t Die” (1942) are conventional mysteries, complete with standard-issue brainless cops — it’s amazing no one protested this tradition of prewar detective movies; after the war, cops were simply corrupt.

Except for Eliot Ness. And what better segue to Paramount’s fourdisc set, “The Untouchables, Season 1, Volume 1” — 16 broadcasts, half a season in 1959 — than Nolan, who plays the title character in the third episode, “The Bugs Moran Story” (no relation to the real-life gangster of that name), as a silken-tongued union corrupter, who is so patient, gentlemanly, and rational, he makes even Robert Stack seem agitated.

One reason the show holds up is the high body count of good character actors, among them Neville Brand (an unforgettably psychotic Capone), Barbara Nichols, Nehemiah Persoff, Claire Trevor (as Ma Barker), Lucille Fletcher, Jack Warden, Jack Lord, Charles McGraw, Whit Bissell, Phyllis Coates, William Bendix, Timothy Carey (he burns his victims alive), Jack Elam, Martin Landau, and one of Shayne’s nemeses, Douglas Dumbrille.

In addition, there is that nagging Nelson Riddle theme, Walter Winchell’s nattering narration, shiny night-for-night black-and-white photography, tommy gun violence, and fake Italian accents — especially that of Brand, who goes in and out of vowel-heavy locutions. Capone was born in Brooklyn: These actors say, “Dotsa wotsa gonna happen a-Mr. Ness-a,” for the same reason all black actors in the Shayne films say, “You is welcome.”

Stack is famously understated. He appears in a supporting role in many episodes, which are soap operas about the private pathologies of gangsters, famous (if dead) or invented. After the pilot, nothing is said of Ness’s private life or his wardrobe: He wears the same three-piece suit and hat in every segment, blowing a steady stream of frustrated air between his few lines, most of which require him to recruit citizens to risk and usually lose their lives to help him prosecute a case.

Thanks to Stack’s characterization and the show’s four-year run, Ness became the most mythologized lawman since Wyatt Earp. Like Earp, Ness set the legend in motion by dictating his memoirs to an unreliable journalist and died before they were published. The show began with two installments on the “Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse” that follow the memoir close enough to omit Capone and his depredations from the first half. His evil is presented as a kind of Simple Simon laughter — the boys can laugh only when he laughs. A compensating touch is Ness’s romantic date, during which he tips the waiter for booze. The real Ness neither prosecuted nor shot people and often invited the press to watch him bust up a warehouse. J. Edgar Hoover hated the show; he’s never mentioned.

In 1962, the Desilu pilots were stitched together and released as a film, “The Scarface Mob,” which is how it is presented here. As it was directed by the crime specialist Phil Karlson, it has some stylistic interest, though it hardly ranks among Karlson’s best work. On the other hand, the two shows directed by Tay Garnett ought to be considered in any evaluation of his erotically charged films, especially “The Jake Lingle Story,” in which Jack Lord, wearing a satin robe, is fought over by Charles McGraw and Ness, each eyeing him with more than 18th Amendment interest.