VintageRadioShows.com

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 present this year: her mother and father, home from Paris. Their plane has gone missing in a storm — and now someone has to decide whether a child should be told the truth on the one night of the year she is certain that wishes come true. Written by Morton Fine and David Friedkin, with Ann Whitfield as Kathy and Howard McNear as Mr. Anderson. Stay to the last minute; Suspense saved one more turn. Originally broadcast December 21, 1953.

🎧 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

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 most anonymous places in the city: a crowded subway platform, where everybody saw something and nobody saw the same thing. Everett Sloane stars as Kennelly, with Ken Lynch as Lt. Matt King and Harold Stone as Sgt. Waters. Originally broadcast January 13, 1954.

🎧 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

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 carrying the same unmistakable trademark. Thousands of dollars in jewels are gone and the man taking them is a craftsman. Friday and Sergeant Ben Romero work the pattern until it points to Walter Tracy — and then learn that catching the thief was the easy half. Tracy won't say where the loot is, and a confession without recovery means nothing to sixteen robbed households.

🎧 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

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 one, a killer is loose in Los Angeles who strangles young women, and the city has no idea who he is. Friday and Romero take it with almost nothing to work from — no witness, no motive anyone can name — and grind through the files, the interviews, and the tips that lead nowhere until the pieces finally line up. Raymond Burr, eight years before Perry Mason, is the Chief of Detectives leaning on them for results. Broadcast August 11, 1949, ten weeks into the first season, and a quiet landmark: it is the first Dragnet appearance of Harry Morgan, who would return eighteen years later as Officer Bill Gannon.

🎧 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

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 the Allies' intentions before they can act on them. Watson is already there in uniform, working a dressing station within earshot of the guns, and the two of them go looking for a leak among the men in the trenches. Written by Anthony Boucher and Denis Green, it went out on the night of May 14, 1945 — six days after Germany surrendered — and the title borrowed from John McCrae's poem would have landed on that audience like a bell.

🎧 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