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Gunsmoke brought the adult Western to radio, with William Conrad as Matt Dillon, U.S. Marshal of Dodge City. In "Gone Straight," a special deputy for the New Mexico Stock Raisers Association hands Dillon a Santa Fe warrant for Dane Shaw, a former rider with Billy the Kid, and Matt and Chester make the hard two-day ride south to Tascosa on the Canadian River. There they meet Nat Temple, owner of the Red Deer saloon, the man building the town its first schoolhouse, who has given his barkeep, gunman Mike Postle, a second chance away from rustler Harry Gunter. When...

For ten dollars, a numerologist over a barbershop promises to put Fibber McGee in harmony with the universe by giving him a new name: Homer K. Frink, eleven letters, a prime number, guaranteed lucky. Fibber shows off his new vibrations to the Old Timer, Mrs. Uppington, Harlow Wilcox and Wallace Wimple, then jaywalks against a red light and tells the cop his name. Homer K. Frink, it turns out, is wanted in seven states for arson, murder, bank robbery, forgery, swindling, parole violation and bigamy. Under the station-house spotlight Fibber 'confesses' to the big Chicago fur warehouse job, and it...

A package marked FRAGILE, insured for $800, lands at 79 Wistful Vista, and inside is a leather sample case stamped in gold: Fibber McGee, special representative of a fancy watch company. Molly landed him the job at Mrs. Uppington's bridge party, and Fibber has already done the arithmetic: a hundred watches a week, a thousand dollars in commission, and a hotel suite to match. His very first sales call goes wrong in the worst possible way. Halfway through his pitch at the jewelry counter, a gunman walks in and holds up the store, Fibber gives chase, and the cop on the corner...

Before Bob Bailey, before Charles Russell, there was Dick Powell. In this December 1948 audition, never broadcast, Powell plays Johnny Dollar, the freelance insurance investigator with the action-packed expense account. East Coast Underwriters needs him to keep Milford Brooks III, a spoiled heir with a $2 million life policy, from killing himself. The beneficiary is a restaurant owner Brooks owes $200,000. Then Brooks vanishes out a window, his coat turns up on a ferry, and a matchbook in the pocket points straight at the man who collects. Dollar has to work out whether he's looking at a suicide, a murder, or a setup...

The Lone Ranger and Tonto have jailed four of the knife-throwing Tarantula gang with help from Texas Jack of the Border City Cafe, and now Jack hands over a dead sheriff's letter naming the last of them: Larkspur, who cheated old Bart Billings out of the Last Chance mine by burying its gold vein under a blast. Billings turns up in an arroyo with a Tarantula knife in his back, a knife fired from a crossbow carries the gang boss's order to kill the masked man, and an ambush at Overhang Rock closes in on two glowing headbands in the...

Caleb Saxon and his wife Edith ride the stage to Basin City hoping to leave the whispers back East behind them: a court cleared Caleb, but everyone still believes he stole the trust fund he managed for his late friend's son. Then the stranger riding up top pulls a gun, forces the coach down the lonely Creek Trail, and marches the old couple off into the woods with every dollar they own. The young man who swore to get even with Caleb is camped with the Lone Ranger, and the masked man has a hard lesson in mind for him...

The Brogan brothers, two of the most wanted killers in the West, rob the bank at Osage and shoot the banker for no reason at all, then vanish without leaving a trail. The sheriff's posse rides out without Sleepy and Missouri, two broke old prospectors who once gave away every dime from their played-out silver mine to the poor families of the county. So the Lone Ranger, posing as an Eastern mining expert, sends the old partners back to their abandoned tunnel with a hint of a new silver vein, a plan, and a bundle of blasting powder. A January 24, 1938...

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 he has let into his home, in a CBS audition broadcast that helped launch Suspense, the long-running anthology of 'radio's outstanding theater of thrills.' Adapted from Marie Belloc Lowndes' 1913 novel, the same...

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, and a young woman from Vienna spend two weeks on a twelve-foot raft with one revolver, food for two, and a game only one of them can win. From John Steele...

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 beautiful wife, and Toby starts saying things Hickson never put in his mouth. Berry Kroeger is Hickson and a young Art Carney is the voice of Toby, in the March 21, 1947 audition directed by...

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. With twenty smuggled Martini rifles and a working knowledge of Freemasonry, they find their kingdom in the snowbound mountains. Then Dravot decides a king needs a queen. Raymond Lawrence is Peachy, Eric Snowden...

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 prison arsenal, a hard-line captain readies the machine guns, and Dumont walks alone and unarmed across the yard to talk them out. The killer turns out to be...

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 a bullet in his head and every trace of his existence erased: no birth record, no driver's license, nothing. The only clue is a stolen Maya carving of the feathered serpent...

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's name. The trail leads to the sleepy mountain town of León, a church bell that lost its music the year of the killing, a ragged beggar who tries to kill Harry, a...

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 vanish from a cabin, Preston puts King on the scent through the melting northern snow. 🎧 Hundreds more classic radio shows free at https://www.vintageradioshows.com 📱 Listen anywhere with the Vintage...

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 him, and Preston must sort out a moral dilemma and a daring kidnapping attempt in the brutal northern cold. 🎧 Hundreds more classic radio shows free at https://www.vintageradioshows.com 📱 Listen anywhere with the Vi...

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 and deception. Someone is impersonating the masked hero, causing trouble and endangering innocent people. The Lone Ranger and Tonto must work together to expose the imposter and restore justice to the frontier. 🎧 Hundreds more classic radio shows fre...

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 Overture as its theme. 🎧 Hundreds more classic radio shows free at https://www.vintageradioshows.com 📱 Listen anywhere with the Vintage Radio app for iPhone and iPad: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vi...

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 letters. Originally broadcast on 1954-12-19. 🎧 Hundreds more classic radio shows free at https://www.vintageradioshows.com 📱 Listen anywhere with the Vintage Radio app for iPhone and iPad: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vintage-radio/id455577974

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. Broadcast on CBS on Halloween eve, October 30, 1938, with Welles as Professor Pierson and Bernard Herrmann conducting, it is the most famous half hour in the history of radio, and it...

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 foggy road, where the doors are locked and her husband has strange things to say about his late sister-in-law, who happened to share her name. Agnes Moorehead, fresh from Citizen Kane...

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 German land mine goes off in the doctor's office. Howard Duff plays Spade and Lurene Tuttle is Effie in this 1948 CBS caper, heard here in its Armed Forces Radio Service rebroadcast. 🎧 Hundreds more classic radio shows free at...

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, into the black, rushing sewers beneath the city. Down there an old man named Louis pulls her from the water. He has...

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 on his birthday. The town is sure the convict has come back for revenge, the honest sheriff has been voted out, and the judge who passed sentence...

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 family blood feud. His last wish: pay Paladin $1,000 to escort his coffin safely across the desert to his home in Mexico. But a coffin can carry more than a body, and the road...

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, and three ghosts who have to ride a long way to change a hard man's heart. With Dick Beals as Johnny and Eleanor Audley as Aunt Millie. Written by...

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, Jack dozes off on the sofa and dreams the beans came up after all: a beanstalk through the clouds, a fall broken by the Los Angeles smog, a rabbit who asks "Wh...

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 chance: between the guest of honor's own memory of his school days and baby brother Sebastian turning up with a plan, the whole occasion comes apart at high speed. Classic burlesque cros...

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 and quiet -- which is when the show hands itself over to the story. Jack becomes a distinguished psychiatrist, the patients start filing in, and Mel Blanc arrives as a man who is absolutely...

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 Richard Crenna as Walter Denton. 🎧 Hundreds more classic radio shows free at https://www.vintageradioshows.com 📱 Listen anywhere with the Vintage Radio app for iPhone and iPad: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vintage-radio/id455577974

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 officer claims a woman fired on him from a darkened window. The reprisal is announced at once: unless she comes forward, fifty women of the village will hang. What follows is a long, airless ni...

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. Stephen Dunne stars as Spade with Lurene Tuttle as Effie, in one of the last capers of the series' final NBC season. 🎧 Hundreds more classic radio shows free at https://www.vintageradioshows.com 📱 Listen anywhere...

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 he can cross to her. Out at the dig, a newly opened chamber holds a gold-robed figure with the head of a hawk, a wall painting of Osiris and his daughter — wear...

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 them, and the trail runs into Chinatown, where Marlowe nearly gets taken at gunpoint. By the time he learns what the orange dog really is, he is standing in the middle of a co...

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, who may be the marshal's best lead or his prime suspect. With Parley Baer as Chester, Georgia Ellis as Kitty, and Howard McNear as Doc. 🎧 Hundreds more classic radio shows...

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 drives the patients out, she is wrecking a practice he spent years building — and now she has started talking about a gun. What looks like a delicate domestic errand curdles fast, and Sam find...

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, this is the last Inner Sanctum hosted by Raymond Edward Johnson, who left radio's most famous ghoul behind to join the Army. 🎧 Hundreds more classic radio shows free at https://www.v...

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 chore is to carry a pail out into the endless black cold and bring back a load of frozen oxygen so his family can breathe. Then, out in the dark beyond...

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. Robbery looks like the motive, but the savagery of the attack tells Pearson something uglier: this was no panicked amateur. Working the lab evidence, the pawn tickets, and the neighborhood gossip, Jace and Charcoal close in...

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 back to the same lagoon for another run at the king-size pearls — until the new head diver, alone on the bottom in a brass helmet, reports that there are men down ther...