VintageRadioShows.com
VintageRadioShows.com is an archive-style podcast that revisits the golden age of American radio, presenting curated classic episodes from the 1930s through the 1950s. Its selections span genres such as comedy, mystery, drama, westerns, and adventure, drawing on a library of more than 40,000 restored episodes. New installments of hand-picked broadcasts are added regularly, making it a resource for listeners interested in early radio entertainment and nostalgia.
Episodes
Old Time Radio Mystery — Suspense: "The Lodger" (1940) | Full Episode
London, 1888. A quiet, soft-spoken man takes the upstairs room at the Buntings' boarding house, pays in advance, keeps odd hours, and asks that his landlady never touch the black bag he carries. Out in Whitechapel, a killer the papers call the Avenger is working his way through the fog. Herbert Marshall plays the mysterious lodger and Edmund Gwenn is the landlord who slowly begins to wonder whom h
Old Time Radio Adventure — John Steele, Adventurer: "Cargo Unknown" (1949) | Full Episode
Lou Cardone flew 71 fighter missions over Europe and came home too restless to sit still, so he bought a surplus twin-engine ship and called it the Anything, Anywhere Airline. Then a soft-spoken stranger with a file on every quiet cargo Lou ever flew offers him twenty thousand dollars to carry a man with a bandaged face to Argentina. An engine quits over the Atlantic, and the pilot, the passenger,
Old Time Radio Horror — Escape: "Dead of Night" (1947) | Full Episode
Before Escape ever became CBS radio's half hour of high adventure, it was auditioned with this: a chilling half hour adapted from the ventriloquist segment of the 1945 British horror classic Dead of Night. Eric Hickson has clawed his way up from cheap music halls to London's fashionable Kit-Kat Club with his wooden partner Toby. Then the American star Mel Baxter turns up in the audience with his b
Old Time Radio Adventure — Escape: "The Man Who Would Be King" (1947) | Full Episode
Escape was CBS radio's half hour of high adventure, and this is the night it began: the series premiere of July 7, 1947, produced and directed by William N. Robson. Les Crutchfield adapts Rudyard Kipling's tale of Daniel Dravot and Peachy Carnehan, two loafers who sign a contract to swear off liquor and women until they become kings of Kafiristan, a land no Englishman has entered and left alive. W
Old Time Radio Adventure — The Green Lama: "Adventure of the Perfect Prisoner" (1949) | Full Episode
Jethro Dumont spent ten years in a Tibetan monastery and came home as the Green Lama, a crime fighter who never carries a gun. In the final broadcast of the 1949 CBS series, starring Paul Frees with Ben Wright as his servant Tulku, a reform-minded warden invites Dumont to see a model prisoner pardoned, but the convict sculptor is found with a knife in his back. Then a hundred armed men seize the p
Old Time Radio Adventure — The Green Lama: "The Man Who Never Existed" (1949) | Full Episode
Jethro Dumont spent ten years in a Tibetan monastery and came home as the Green Lama, a crime fighter who refuses to carry a gun. In this audition recording of the CBS series' premiere story, starring Paul Frees with Ben Wright as his loyal servant Tulku, an old friend, archaeologist Harlan Hendricks, phones Dumont for help and is cut off mid-sentence. By nightfall Hendricks is in the morgue with
Old Time Radio Mystery — Lives of Harry Lime: "Mexican Hat Trick" (1951) | Full Episode
Orson Welles reprises Harry Lime, the charming racketeer of The Third Man, in this 1951 series that tells the con man's adventures before that fatal night in Vienna. In "Mexican Hat Trick," a broke Lime in Mexico City is handed a dying pickpocket's confession to a 17-year-old murder, and sells a grieving widow and her daughter Alicia on a search for the lost affidavits that could clear her father'
Old Time Radio Adventure — Challenge of the Yukon: "The Stolen Pups" (1947) | Full Episode
Challenge of the Yukon follows Sergeant Preston of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and his lead sled dog, Yukon King, as they keep the peace in the Klondike. In "The Stolen Pups," a simple-minded old café handyman longs for a puppy to replace the dog he lost, and two crooked bank clerks use that longing to get their hands on a prospector's $10,000. When the money and two newborn Malamute pups va
Old Time Radio Adventure — Challenge of the Yukon: "Sam's Gold" (1947) | Full Episode
Challenge of the Yukon follows Sergeant Preston of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and his lead sled dog, Yukon King, as they keep the peace in the Klondike. In "Sam's Gold," a kindly prospector once nursed a cantankerous hermit through a winter, and years later the old man's hidden gold nuggets resurface. Now a trading post owner raising his young granddaughter finds his past catching up with h
Old Time Radio Western — The Lone Ranger: "Double For An Outlaw" (1942) | Full Episode
The Lone Ranger is an iconic masked western hero who fights for justice alongside his Native American companion Tonto. Broadcast throughout the 1930s-1950s, this classic radio serial featured thrilling adventures across the American frontier with the legendary William Tell Overture as its theme. In this episode, In 'Double For An Outlaw,' the Lone Ranger faces a daring case of mistaken identity an
Old Time Radio Western — The Lone Ranger: "The Magic Belt" (1942) | Full Episode
The Lone Ranger is an iconic radio western serial about a masked former Texas Ranger and his Native American companion Tonto who right wrongs in the Old West. In this classic episode, the masked hero and his loyal companion face danger and intrigue in their mission to bring justice to the frontier. Featuring Brace Beemer as The Lone Ranger and John Todd as Tonto, with the legendary William Tell Ov
Old Time Radio Drama — Biography In Sound: "Meet Ernest Hemingway" (1954) | Full Episode
Biography in Sound, a CBS documentary series produced by Norman Corwin, presented biographical profiles of notable American figures through dramatizations, interviews, and narration. A pioneering program that brought the lives of American heroes, artists, and leaders to radio audiences. This episode profiles meet ernest hemingway, exploring his life, literary career, and lasting impact on American
Old Time Radio Sci-Fi — Mercury Theater On The Air: "War of the Worlds" (1938) | Full Episode
Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air present H. G. Wells's tale of a Martian invasion, adapted by Howard Koch and told as a live dance-band broadcast that keeps being interrupted by news bulletins. A meteor lands at Grover's Mill, New Jersey; a professor peers at the smoking crater; then the Martians rise from the pit with their Heat-Ray and the tripods begin to wade toward New York. Br
Old Time Radio Thriller — Suspense: "The Diary of Sophronia Winters" (1943) | Full Episode
Suspense presents Lucille Fletcher's first original script for the series, a study in terror told through a diary. Sophronia Winters is forty, freed by her father's death, and on her first holiday in St. Petersburg, Florida when a charming hotel owner from Maine sits down beside her on the beach and proposes within the week. Married, she rides north to his enormous, empty hotel at the end of a fog
Old Time Radio Detective — Sam Spade: "The Bouncing Betty Caper" (1948) | Full Episode
A fussy English butler named Carruthers walks into Sam Spade's office, tidies his ashtray, and hires him to go undercover as a chauffeur at Bleakcliff, a clifftop estate near Squid Beach. Someone keeps trying to kill young Kathy McGraw, and the household blames her troubled brother Tony. Kathy blames her stepfather, a psychiatrist and fortune hunter. Before Spade can prove anything, a wartime Germ
Old Time Radio Horror — Lights Out: "It Happened" (1938) | Full Episode
Jean Taylor is a spoiled rich girl from New York on a chaperoned art tour of Paris, and she is bored stiff. She slips away from the Louvre looking for fun and finds a smooth stranger who says he knows her father and offers to show her the real Paris. By nightfall she is locked in an empty house with a man who wants $150,000 in revenge, a heavy candlestick in her hand, and nowhere to run but down,
Old Time Radio Western — The Lone Ranger: "Murder Strikes Thrice" (1942) | Full Episode
The Lone Ranger and Tonto ride into Excalibur, a dusty frontier town where somebody is killing men on their birthdays. A year ago, three witnesses swore away the alibi of a young drifter named Paul Zember, and the court sent him to prison for life on his own birthday. Now Cole Rankin has been poisoned at his birthday toast, Lem Parsons knifed in his bed, and Seth Hollins shot in the street, each o
Old Time Radio Western — Have Gun Will Travel: "Strange Vendetta" (1958) | Full Episode
The very first radio episode of Have Gun Will Travel, with John Dehner as Paladin, the cultured San Francisco gunman of CBS's "thinking man's Western." San Francisco, 1875: Paladin lends his opera box to a Mexican grandee, Don Miguel Rojas, and his lovely wife. After The Marriage of Figaro, an assassin strikes from behind the curtain, the blade is poisoned, and a dying Don Miguel speaks of a famil
Old Time Radio Western — The Six Shooter: "Britt Ponset's Christmas Carol" (1953) | Full Episode
Jimmy Stewart rides the winter trail as Britt Ponset, the easygoing drifter of NBC's The Six Shooter. With Christmas coming on, he comes upon Johnny, an orphaned runaway who wants no part of the holiday, so Britt sits the boy down and tells him Dickens' A Christmas Carol the only way he knows how: as a Western, with a frontier Eben Scrooge (Howard McNear, later Floyd the barber), his clerk Bob, an
Old Time Radio Comedy — The Jack Benny Program: "Jack and the Bean Stalk" (1954) | Full Episode
Spring has come to Beverly Hills, and Jack Benny is out in the backyard in overalls and long white gloves, planting string beans again — last year's crop was so small the bugs were picking them. This time he has a miracle fertilizer. Between Rochester refusing to taste his "mushrooms," Dennis shooting the garden hose he mistook for a snake, and Mary demanding her dime back for the cucumber seeds,
Old Time Radio Comedy — Abbott & Costello: "Return to P.S. 15" (1944) | Full Episode
Bud Abbott and Lou Costello were the fastest, loudest comedy act in America, and their weekly NBC show turned every broadcast into a scheme that got away from them. In this November 1944 outing, Lou's old grade school — P.S. 15 — decides to honor its most famous dropout, and Lou heads back to the classroom to collect the tribute he has been waiting a lifetime for. The ceremony never stands a chanc
Old Time Radio Comedy — The Jack Benny Program: "Dennis Wants to Join the Air Force" | Full Episode
For more than twenty years Jack Benny ran the best-loved comedy in American radio, and the joke was always himself: vain, penny-pinching, stuck forever at 39, and hopeless on the violin. In this April 1954 broadcast it is spring-cleaning day at Jack's house. Rochester has the place turned inside out, Dennis Day breezes in to announce he is enlisting, and Jack retreats into a book for some peace an
Old Time Radio Comedy — Our Miss Brooks: "Rare Black Orchid" (1950) | Full Episode
Connie Brooks teaches English at Madison High, dodges her blustering principal, and never quite gets a date with the biology teacher. In this May 1950 broadcast, Mr. Conklin's prized rare black orchid becomes the center of the week's trouble — and Miss Brooks, as always, ends up standing closest to the wreckage. Eve Arden stars with Gale Gordon as Osgood Conklin, Jeff Chandler as Mr. Boynton, and
Old Time Radio Thriller — Lights Out: "Execution" (1943) | Full Episode
Lights Out was radio's premier horror series, and it reached its best-remembered form when writer-director Arch Oboler brought it back to CBS in 1942 — a half hour of dread delivered to a country already living through a war. Oboler used the show as readily for human terror as for the supernatural, and "Execution" is one of his sharpest wartime thrillers. In an occupied French village, a German of
Old Time Radio Detective — Sam Spade: "The Sinister Siren Caper" (1951) | Full Episode
The Adventures of Sam Spade let Dashiell Hammett's hardboiled private eye tell his own stories — every case dictated back at the office to his secretary Effie Perrine, period, new paragraph. In "The Sinister Siren Caper," broadcast March 16, 1951, a badly rattled man turns up in Spade's office with a warning he can't laugh off: his life is in danger from a red-headed woman. Spade takes the job. St
Old Time Radio Horror — Quiet, Please: "Whence Came You" (1948) | Full Episode
Quiet, Please was radio's quietest horror show and its strangest — Wyllis Cooper wrote and directed every episode, and Ernest Chappell told them to you in a calm, confiding voice with nothing behind it but an organ and a lot of deliberate silence. In "Whence Came You," an American archaeologist named Austin comes back to Shepheard's Hotel in Cairo and sees a woman in the lobby who is gone before h
Old Time Radio Detective — Philip Marlowe: "The Orange Dog" (1949) | Full Episode
Gerald Mohr played Raymond Chandler's private eye as radio's toughest and wittiest detective, working a Los Angeles of rain-slick streets, cheap hotels and expensive lies. In "The Orange Dog," a woman hires Marlowe to find her missing sister, last seen with a man named Horner. The only lead is a phrase that means nothing to anybody — the orange dog. Bodies start turning up, a Treasury agent among
Old Time Radio Western — Gunsmoke: "Carmen" (1952) | Full Episode
Gunsmoke was radio's great adult western — Dodge City, Kansas in the hard years of the cattle trade, with William Conrad as U.S. Marshal Matt Dillon. In this early episode from May 31, 1952, an army payroll is stolen and a major gives Dillon an ultimatum: get the money back, or Dodge City goes under martial law. The trail runs straight to Connie Dell, a young woman with a taste for bad company, wh
Old Time Radio Detective — Sam Spade: "The Bow Window Caper" (1947) | Full Episode
Howard Duff stars as Dashiell Hammett's San Francisco private eye in the show that made Sam Spade a weekly habit — wisecracks, fast talk, and real menace underneath, dictated each week as a case report to his long-suffering secretary Effie Perine. In "The Bow Window Caper," a respectable physician hires Sam to do something about his wife: she is wildly jealous, she turns up at his office and drive
Old Time Radio Horror — Inner Sanctum: "The Black Art" (1945) | Full Episode
Behind the creaking door, Raymond welcomes you one last time. A man waits out his final night in a small-town jail, condemned for a murder he did not commit — until a beautiful, wealthy stranger offers him a way out. She has money, she has strange powers, and she has teeth. Simone Simon, fresh from Val Lewton's Cat People, plays a rescuer you would be wise not to thank. Broadcast May 15, 1945, thi
Old Time Radio Sci-Fi — X Minus One: "A Pail of Air" (1956) | Full Episode
X Minus One was NBC's great science fiction anthology, made in cooperation with Galaxy magazine and counting down into the void every week with stories by the finest writers in the field. In this March 1956 broadcast, adapted by George Lefferts from Fritz Leiber's classic, a passing dark star has torn the Earth away from the sun. The air itself has frozen and fallen as snow, and a boy's nightly ch
Old Time Radio Western — Tales of the Texas Rangers: "Soft Touch" (1950) | Full Episode
Movie star Joel McCrea rides the airwaves as Ranger Jace Pearson in NBC's Tales of the Texas Rangers — a hard-nosed police procedural with sagebrush in its boots, dramatizing real cases from the Ranger files with technical advice from the legendary Captain M.T. "Lone Wolf" Gonzaullas. In "Soft Touch," first heard October 29, 1950, a quiet elderly couple is found beaten to death in their own home.
Old Time Radio Horror — Creeps By Night: "Six Who Did Not Die" (1944) | Full Episode
Creeps by Night was the Blue Network's 1944 anthology of subtle, psychological chillers — a series so unnerving that listeners with heart conditions were warned to stay away. Boris Karloff launched it; by this July broadcast the host was known only as "Dr. X." In "Six Who Did Not Die," the captain of a pearl-diving schooner murders his crew so he can keep their share of the haul. Greed draws him b
Old Time Radio Western — The Six Shooter: "Hiram's Gold Strike" (1954) | Full Episode
James Stewart stars as Britt Ponset, the drifting Texas plainsman of NBC's The Six Shooter. Old Hiram Grover has spent forty years scratching at the hills, and at last the assay comes back rich — Hiram has struck gold. But word of a strike travels faster than a man can guard it. Two drifters get to Hiram first and leave him shot up and near death, and it falls to Britt and Doc Nibbles to keep the
Old Time Radio Sci-Fi — X Minus One: "How-2" (1956) | Full Episode
X Minus One was NBC's great science fiction anthology, adapting the best of Galaxy and Astounding for adult ears. In this Clifford D. Simak story, Gordon Knight orders a build-it-yourself robot dog kit and receives, by clerical error, an experimental android named Albert. Albert never tires, never sleeps, and — given raw material — can build more of himself. Soon a crew of robots is remaking the K
Old Time Radio Comedy — Our Miss Brooks: "Mr. Boynton's Parents" (1950) | Full Episode
Eve Arden is Connie Brooks, the wisecracking English teacher of Madison High, forever fielding a blustering principal, a scheming student, and one bashful biology teacher who will not take a hint. In this Mother's Day broadcast from May 14, 1950, Mr. Boynton's mother and father arrive in town, and Connie sees the opening she has waited two years for: win over the parents, and maybe the son will fi
Old Time Radio Western — Have Gun Will Travel: "Doctor From Vienna" (1960) | Full Episode
Paladin is a West Point man with a Shakespeare habit, a suite at San Francisco's Carlton Hotel, and a business card that reads "Have Gun, Will Travel." John Dehner plays him with velvet in his voice and gravel underneath. This time the trouble comes to his own front door: a physician calling himself Doctor Dreckle, lately of Vienna, opens a consulting parlor right inside the Carlton, and the fashi
Old Time Radio Detective — Boston Blackie: "The Buckley Protection Agency" (1947) | Full Episode
Boston Blackie is the reformed jewel thief who works the underworld from the inside — an enemy to those who make him an enemy, a friend to those who have no friend. In this 1947 episode, the Buckley Protection Agency is a shakedown racket dressed up as a business, and it wants Blackie on the payroll. When he turns the offer down, the outfit answers with a murder: Harry Dale turns up dead and Mary
Old Time Radio Western — Have Gun Will Travel: "Five Days To Yuma" (1960) | Full Episode
Paladin dressed for the opera and rode out in black — a West Point man with a chess-knight calling card who would rather talk you down than shoot you, and who was very good at both. Here the Governor of Nevada wants a man named Jeremy Thompson delivered to Carson City, and Thompson is locked up down in Yuma. That's five days of desert between the prison gate and the handoff: five days alone with a
Old Time Radio Thriller — Suspense: "Headshrinker" (1958) | Full Episode
For twenty years Suspense was radio's outstanding theater of thrills, dropping ordinary people into extraordinary danger and letting the tension do the rest. In "Headshrinker," a psychiatrist crosses the line with the patient he is supposed to be healing, and the affair poisons the very thing that was meant to save her. When she finally understands what has been done to her, she walks back into hi
Old Time Radio Horror — Quiet Please: "Wear the Dead Man's Coat" (1948) | Full Episode
Quiet Please was radio's quietest horror show — Wyllis Cooper writing, Ernest Chappell talking straight to you, one organ in the dark, and almost no sound effects at all. In "Wear the Dead Man's Coat," a freezing, broke man kills a stranger in the street for the overcoat on his back. It's the warmest coat he's ever owned, he feels nothing about how he got it, and he's certain he'll never be caught
Old Time Radio Detective — Boston Blackie: "Joe Nelson's Pet Shop Gambling Scheme" | Full Episode
Boston Blackie is the reformed jewel thief who solves the cases the police can't — "enemy to those who make him an enemy, friend to those who have no friend" — with Inspector Faraday always half a step behind and usually pointing at Blackie. In this June 25, 1947 episode, ex-con Joe Nelson is going straight behind the counter of his pet shop when a racket boss offers to put a gambling setup in his
Old Time Radio Mystery — Box 13: "The Haunted Artist" (1948) | Full Episode
Dan Holiday, the mystery novelist who goes looking for trouble through a newspaper classified ad — "Adventure wanted, will go anywhere, do anything, write Box 13" — opens a letter from a painter who thinks he needs an exorcist. Michael Davis works alone in a studio at 183 Lincoln Mews, and he swears that something finishes his canvases while he sleeps: brushstrokes and details he never put there,
Old Time Radio Detective — Sherlock Holmes: "The Elusive Agent Part 2" (1949) | Full Episode
John Stanley's Sherlock Holmes carried Baker Street through radio's late golden age, each half-hour framed as a case Dr. Watson recalls over a glass of sherry. "The Adventure of the Elusive Agent" is a rare three-part serial from the spring of 1949, set not in the gaslit 1890s but in 1913, with Europe drifting toward war. Mycroft Holmes has called his brother down from his bees in Sussex: the plan
Old Time Radio Detective — Johnny Dollar: "The Star of Capetown Matter Part 3" (1956) | Full Episode
Bob Bailey stars as Johnny Dollar, the freelance insurance investigator with the action-packed expense account. A jittery underwriter sent him to Cape Town to guard the Star of Capetown, a $150,000 diamond owned by a playboy who treats a priceless stone like pocket change — and by the end of the last chapter Johnny was flat on his back and the diamond was gone. In this third chapter of the five-pa
Old Time Radio Mystery — Box 13: "Double Mothers" (1948) | Full Episode
Alan Ladd stars as Dan Holiday, the newspaperman who walked away from the city desk to write mystery novels and went looking for plots by running a standing ad in the Star-Times: "Adventure wanted, will go anywhere, do anything — Box 13." Tonight the box holds an unsigned note asking him to come to a park bench after dark. What waits for him there isn't a client at all but a small girl sitting alo
Old Time Radio Sci-Fi — Flash Gordon: "Rules Over Cave World" (1935) | Full Episode
Before Buster Crabbe ever pulled on the boots, Flash Gordon flew through American living rooms on the Mutual Broadcasting System — a 26-week serial adapted almost panel for panel from Alex Raymond's celebrated Sunday comic page, with Gale Gordon the very first actor to play the hero. In this chapter, broadcast May 25, 1935, Flash collects his prize from the tournament staged by Ming the Merciless
Old Time Radio Detective — Johnny Dollar: "The Star of Capetown Matter Part 2" (1956) | Full Episode
Bob Bailey stars as Johnny Dollar, the freelance insurance investigator with the action-packed expense account. A nervous underwriter sends him to Cape Town to babysit a fabulous diamond belonging to an eccentric playboy who treats a priceless stone like loose change. In this second chapter of the five-part case, the assignment falls apart: Johnny is knocked cold, the Star of Capetown vanishes, an
Old Time Radio Western — The Six Shooter: "The Capture of Stacy Gault" (1953) | Full Episode
James Stewart stars as Britt Ponset, the drifting Texas cowboy at the heart of NBC's folksy 1953 Western The Six Shooter. Word tears into the town of Elk Point that Stacy Gault — bank robber, outlaw, killer — is riding their way, and panic does the rest. Britt sees the rumor for what it is and finds himself the only cool head in town, trying to talk Elk Point down before a jumpy posse guns down a
Old Time Radio Detective — Sherlock Holmes: "The Adventure of the Gray Pasha" (1949) | Full Episode
Every week the announcer calls on a retired Dr. Watson, who pours a glass, opens the old tin dispatch box, and unwraps one more case from the Baker Street years. In "The Adventure of the Gray Pasha," first broadcast May 16, 1949, John Stanley's Holmes takes on an original radio mystery with a whisper of the Empire's far corners about it — a client with more to hide than to tell, and a small detail
Old Time Radio Sci-Fi — X Minus One: "Mars Is Heaven" (1955) | Full Episode
X Minus One is the finest science fiction ever produced for radio — NBC's half hour of adult SF, drawn from the pages of Astounding and Galaxy and adapted by staff writers Ernest Kinoy and George Lefferts. "Mars Is Heaven" is its most famous half hour. The first rocket to Mars lands in 1987 and the crew comes down the ladder braced for a hostile world. What they find is Green Bluff, Illinois, 1928
Old Time Radio Horror — Lights Out: "Poltergeist" (1942) | Full Episode
Lights Out is the program that taught radio how to frighten people — Arch Oboler writing for the ear alone, half an hour at a time, with a warning up front to send the children out of the room. In "Poltergeist," three young women from the city are walking a snowbound country road when they come across an old burying ground, and one of them dances on a grave as a joke. The nervous one tells them wh
Old Time Radio Western — Gunsmoke: "Jud's Woman" (1957) | Full Episode
Gunsmoke is the show that invented the adult western on radio: Matt Dillon is the U.S. Marshal of Dodge City in the 1870s, and William Conrad plays him tired, blunt, and often too late to help. "Jud's Woman" comes from the sixth season, a Marian Clark script built around a marriage the whole town can see going wrong and a marshal with no legal standing to stop it. Clark had joined the writing staf
Old Time Radio Detective — Sherlock Holmes: "The Elusive Agent Part 1" (1949) | Full Episode
John Stanley's Sherlock Holmes carried Baker Street through radio's late golden age, each half-hour framed as a case Dr. Watson recalls over a glass of sherry. "The Adventure of the Elusive Agent" opens a rare three-part serial, broadcast in the spring of 1949 and set not in the gaslit 1890s but in 1913, with Europe drifting toward war. Mycroft Holmes calls his brother down from retirement and his
Old Time Radio Mystery — Box 13: "Short Assignment" (1948) | Full Episode
Dan Holiday, mystery novelist and former newspaperman, keeps a standing ad running in the Star-Times: "Adventure wanted, will go anywhere, do anything — write Box 13." In "Short Assignment," the letter comes from Walter Flit, a private detective who is short on height and shorter on nerve, and who wants Holiday to stand in for him at a party where a suicide may have been nothing of the kind. What
Old Time Radio Thriller — Suspense: "Twas the Night Before Christmas" (1953) | Full Episode
For twenty years Suspense was radio's outstanding theater of thrills, and its favorite trick was to take a warm, ordinary room and put something terrible just outside it. Here the room is a house on Christmas Eve, the tree lit and the stocking hung, and the terrible thing is a wire from an airline. Greer Garson stars as the housekeeper raising a little girl named Kathy, who wants exactly one prese
Old Time Radio Detective — 21st Precinct: "The Platform" (1954) | Full Episode
The 21st Precinct: 160 patrolmen, 11 sergeants, and four lieutenants — and Captain Frank Kennelly is the boss of all of them. CBS built this series from adaptations of true New York criminal records, told from the policeman's point of view, with the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association looking over its shoulder. In "The Platform," a tour of duty on Manhattan's Upper East Side turns on one of the mos
Old Time Radio Detective — Dragnet: "Sixteen Jewel Thieves" (1949) | Full Episode
Dragnet built its reputation on the unglamorous truth of police work — real LAPD case files, the names changed to protect the innocent, and Jack Webb's Sergeant Joe Friday moving through them at the pace of a man who has done this before. In this eleventh broadcast from the summer of 1949, a wave of burglaries is rolling across Los Angeles: sixteen jobs in sixteen nights, one every night, each one
Old Time Radio Detective — Dragnet: "The Maniac Murderer" (1949) | Full Episode
Dragnet was the show that taught American radio what real police work sounded like. Jack Webb built it out of actual Los Angeles Police Department case files, with the department's cooperation, and threw out everything crime drama had leaned on for twenty years — no gunplay every act, no hard-boiled narration, no lone hero. Just Sgt. Joe Friday and his partner working a case the slow way. In this
Old Time Radio Detective — Sherlock Holmes: "In Flanders Fields" (1945) | Full Episode
Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce starred in The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes for Mutual, with Dr. Watson settling into a chair by the fire each week to tell another case his old friend had sworn him to keep quiet. In "In Flanders Fields," the story leaves Baker Street entirely: Holmes is called out of his Sussex retirement and sent to the Western Front, where a German agent is somehow reading t
Old Time Radio Detective — 21st Precinct: "The Plant" (1953) | Full Episode
21st Precinct was a New York police drama told strictly from the policeman's point of view — adaptations of true criminal records, produced in cooperation with the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association of the City of New York, with Everett Sloane as Captain Frank Kennelly. In "The Plant," the captain is buried in the least glamorous part of command: paperwork, and arranging a photographer to take por
Old Time Radio Comedy — Our Miss Brooks: "The Burglar" (1950) | Full Episode
Five o'clock in the morning at Mrs. Davis's boarding house, and there is a man in the kitchen working his way through the refrigerator. Connie Brooks catches him — Joe Phillips, out of work for months, stealing breakfast because there is nowhere else to get it. She doesn't call the police. She feeds him, then gets him a job at Madison High filling in for the custodian. Which is when things start g
Old Time Radio Comedy — Fibber McGee and Molly: "Mouse In The House" (1939) | Full Episode
Lord Bingham, a visiting big-game hunter, is looking for a partner for his next African expedition, and Fibber McGee has spent the afternoon selling him a life story he never lived — years in the pygmy country, forty miles trailing a leopard that turned out to be a mule. Bingham steps out to think it over. The moment the door shuts, a mouse runs across the living room floor at 79 Wistful Vista, an
Old Time Radio Detective — Sherlock Holmes: "The Unfortunate Tobacconist" (1945) | Full Episode
Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce as Holmes and Watson, broadcast April 30, 1945. Three shopkeepers have been murdered along the fog-blind London docks, and all the police have is a rumour that a bearded Hindu haunts the waterfront. Then the trail turns toward Mycroft Holmes — the brother who never leaves his chair at the Diogenes Club — and whose interest in a dead tobacconist is not the sort of thi
Old Time Radio Detective — Philip Marlowe: "The King in Yellow" (1947) | Full Episode
Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles private eye came to radio in the summer of 1947 with Van Heflin in the trench coat — half an hour of blackmail, bad money, and a detective who narrates his own trouble. "The King in Yellow" (8 July 1947) starts with a 2 a.m. trumpet solo in a hotel corridor: King Leopardi, the famous bandleader in room 815, is playing for the whole eighth floor, and throwing him out
Old Time Radio Detective — Sam Spade: "The Rushlight Diamond Caper" (1948) | Full Episode
The Adventures of Sam Spade brought Dashiell Hammett's wisecracking San Francisco private eye to the air every week, with Howard Duff dictating each new "caper" to his long-suffering secretary Effie Perine — snappy banter and dry humor laid over real menace. In "The Rushlight Diamond Caper" (4 July 1948), Sam takes what looks like easy money: one night guarding a pile of society wedding presents,
Old Time Radio Horror — Adventures by Morse: "The City of the Dead Part 1" | Full Episode
Carlton E. Morse wrote "I Love a Mystery" and "One Man's Family," then went out on his own in the mid-1940s and turned out 52 half-hour adventures for San Francisco private investigator Captain Bart Friday and his drawling Texas partner Skip Turner. This is chapter one of "The City of the Dead," the ten-part serial that opened the series. Friday and Skip are called out to an enormous old cemetery
Old Time Radio Western — Wild Bill Hickok: "Happy New Year" (1954) | Full Episode
Marshal Wild Bill Hickok and his gravel-voiced sidekick Jingles P. Jones ride into New Year's Eve on the frontier, where a town full of celebrating cowhands gives trouble all the cover it needs — and a lawman's badge never gets a holiday. Guy Madison and Andy Devine starred in this fast-moving Mutual western, sponsored by Kellogg's Sugar Pops, with Jingles hollering the line every kid in America k
Old Time Radio Comedy — My Favorite Husband: "George's Mother Visits" (1949) | Full Episode
Before there was Lucy Ricardo, there was Liz Cooper. My Favorite Husband starred Lucille Ball as the scheming, big-hearted wife of Sheridan Falls bank man George Cooper (Richard Denning) — the CBS comedy whose writing team would head straight from this microphone to I Love Lucy. In this one, George gets word that his mother is moving to town, and Liz knows exactly what that means. Leticia Cooper (
Old Time Radio Horror — Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: "Henry's Childhood" | Full Episode
Before the potion, before the laboratory, before Mr Hyde — there is only a boy named Henry Jekyll, and the first faint signs of the two natures already at war inside him. This is the opening chapter of the 52-part Australian serialization of Robert Louis Stevenson's classic, produced by George Edwards, the pioneer of the Australian radio serial. Edwards played Jekyll and Hyde himself, along with P
Old Time Radio Comedy — Bing Crosby Show: "The Andrews Sisters" (1950) | Full Episode
Wednesday nights on CBS, Bing Crosby hosted the most relaxed half hour in radio — a few songs, some easy banter, and whoever happened to drop by the studio. On this March 29, 1950 Chesterfield broadcast, two guests turn up at once: the Andrews Sisters, the best-selling sister act in America, and the Firehouse Five Plus Two, the Dixieland band of moonlighting Disney animators who played in fire hel
Old Time Radio Sci-Fi — Exploring Tomorrow: "Planet of Geniuses" | Full Episode
Exploring Tomorrow was science fiction made by science fiction people — hosted, edited and adapted by John W. Campbell Jr. of Astounding Science Fiction, the editor who shaped Asimov, Heinlein and half the Golden Age, with scripts by working SF authors instead of radio staffers. In this Poul Anderson story, scientists seed a distant world with human colonists, strip away their machines and every m
Old Time Radio Detective — That Hammer Guy: "The Lillian Martin Case" (1953) | Full Episode
Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer was never a gentleman sleuth. He was a blunt instrument with a conscience — a New York private eye who took the beating, threw it back twice as hard, and believed in rough justice when the law ran out of room. In this April 1953 Mutual broadcast, Hammer takes the Lillian Martin case and follows a pair of two-tone saddle shoes through a city that would rather he didn't
Old Time Radio Comedy — The Life of Riley: "Thanksgiving Flashback" (1948) | Full Episode
Chester A. Riley was radio's most lovable blunderer — a big-hearted riveter at the Cunningham Aircraft plant who could turn the simplest situation into a full-blown catastrophe. In this 1948 Thanksgiving broadcast, the holiday sends Riley down memory lane and straight into the story of the father-in-law trouble that nearly cost him Peg in the first place. Every attempt to impress backfires, every
Old Time Radio Horror — Dark Fantasy: "The Headless Dead" (1942) | Full Episode
Dark Fantasy was NBC's supernatural thriller anthology, spun each Friday night in 1941–42 from a studio in Oklahoma City by writer Scott Bishop. In "The Headless Dead," a skeptic named Frederick Holman tours the Tower of London and laughs off his guide's warning that the old fortress is haunted — until a visitor is locked inside overnight and midnight brings a terrifying ceremony of the dead, one
Old Time Radio Adventure — Tarzan: "Congo Christmas" | Full Episode
Tarzan brought Edgar Rice Burroughs' Lord of the Jungle to radio, and this holiday episode from the 1950s revival trades the usual outlaws and beasts for a quieter Christmas tale. In the isolated village of the Karmiki, Reverend Collier has built a mission school and a small church — but the High Priest of the Moon God opposes him at every turn, defending the heathen rites of the Temple of Neomopo
Old Time Radio Western — Frontier Gentleman: "The Shelton Brothers" (1958) | Full Episode
An English gentleman with a pen in one hand and a pistol in the other — Frontier Gentleman starred John Dehner as J.B. Kendall, a London Times correspondent roaming the American West of the 1870s. In this series premiere from February 2, 1958, Kendall rides into South Sunday, a Montana Territory town where carrying a gun is against the law and strangers are turned away at the edge of town. Sheriff
Old Time Radio Comedy — You Bet Your Life: "Audition" (1947) | Full Episode
You Bet Your Life was the quiz show that was really a comedy show, built entirely around the lightning-fast wit of Groucho Marx. This is the original audition recording — the demonstration disc that Groucho and producer John Guedel financed and cut themselves at a CBS studio on September 15, 1947, weeks before the show's official ABC premiere. It captures the very first time the format was tried o
Old Time Radio Drama — Screen Guild Theater: "Casablanca" (1943) | Full Episode
The Screen Guild Theater condensed Hollywood's biggest pictures into half-hour dramas, with the original stars reprising their roles and donating their fees to the Motion Picture Relief Fund. In this celebrated April 1943 broadcast, Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, and Paul Henreid step back into Casablanca — the story of Rick Blaine, a hard-shelled American running a nightclub in wartime Morocco,
Old Time Radio Horror — The Weird Circle | Full Episode
The Weird Circle was radio's syndicated home for classic horror, heard from 1943 to 1945, dramatizing the great tales of terror by Poe, Stevenson, Dickens, and Maupassant — all summoned by the toll of a great bell. This episode is pure Weird Circle: a gothic tale of dread told with no musical score, its terror carried entirely by voices, silence, and the slow creep of sound toward a shivering clim
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