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Old Time Radio Detective — Dragnet: "Sixteen Jewel Thieves" (1949) | Full Episode Aug 11, 2026

Show notes

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

Old Time Radio Detective — Dragnet: "The Maniac Murderer" (1949) | Full Episode Aug 10, 2026

Show notes

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

Old Time Radio Detective — Sherlock Holmes: "In Flanders Fields" (1945) | Full Episode Aug 09, 2026

Show notes

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

Old Time Radio Detective — 21st Precinct: "The Plant" (1953) | Full Episode Aug 08, 2026

Show notes

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 portraits of every patrolman in the house. Then a holdup call comes in and the routine goes out the window. Witnesses are interviewed, a uniformed officer turns up something worth chasing and trades the bag for plainclothes, and the trail leads to a tight-lipped man named Nellie who finally gives up his accomplice. Broadcast Christmas night, December 25, 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

Old Time Radio Comedy — Our Miss Brooks: "The Burglar" (1950) | Full Episode Aug 07, 2026

Show notes

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 going missing: Mr. Conklin's fountain pen and his watch, Mr. Boynton's desk, a sewing machine out of the home economics room, every piece of silverware in the school cafeteria. Half an hour of Connie Brooks watching one good deed turn into a crime wave — and being wrong about all of it. Eve Arden stars as radio's sharpest, most underpaid English teacher, with Gale Gordon as principal Osgood Conklin, Jeff Chandler as the biology teacher who never notices, Richard Crenna as Walter Denton, and Jane Morgan as Mrs. Davis. Broadcast on CBS, March 12, 1950. 🎧 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

Old Time Radio Comedy — Fibber McGee and Molly: "Mouse In The House" (1939) | Full Episode Aug 06, 2026

Show notes

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, and the great white hunter goes straight up the wall. Thirty minutes of one man trying to get rid of one mouse before his alibi comes back: a hardware store that stocks nothing but a Technicolor mousetrap with a toy usher, an exterminator who turns up with a machine gun because somebody said there was a rat to rub out, and Horatio K. Boomer emptying his coat pockets looking for a trap he does not have. Broadcast February 28, 1939, during the stretch when Marian Jordan was off the air and the programme was quietly retitled "Fibber McGee and Company" — Molly is mentioned once and never appears. Listen for the last scene: both men jammed in the hall closet, Fibber hanging on two hooks with his feet in the umbrella stand. That closet would not become the most famous sound effect in American radio for another full year. 🎧 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

Old Time Radio Detective — Sherlock Holmes: "The Unfortunate Tobacconist" (1945) | Full Episode Aug 05, 2026

Show notes

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 thing Whitehall explains. A fourth man will die unless Holmes reaches the right shop first. An original case by Anthony Boucher and Denis Green, and a rare radio appearance for Mycroft. 🎧 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

Old Time Radio Detective — Philip Marlowe: "The King in Yellow" (1947) | Full Episode Aug 04, 2026

Show notes

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 costs a house detective his job. That is the easy part of the night. A body turns up across town, then another, and the trail runs back through the hotel to an old killing everyone agreed to forget. This broadcast is the only one that puts both radio Marlowes in the same studio — Heflin plays the detective, and Gerald Mohr, who would take over the role on CBS the following year, plays the King. 🎧 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

Old Time Radio Detective — Sam Spade: "The Rushlight Diamond Caper" (1948) | Full Episode Aug 03, 2026

Show notes

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, the prize among them the fabled Rushlight Diamond. The stone doesn't stay put, a body turns up before morning, and Sam finds himself working a murder inside the polished world of San Francisco's elite, where every guest has a motive and nobody has a straight answer. 🎧 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

Old Time Radio Horror — Adventures by Morse: "The City of the Dead Part 1" | Full Episode Aug 02, 2026

Show notes

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 where Bart's father is the caretaker — the man the locals call the Mayor. Waiting for them: a church bell that rings with nobody in the tower, a fresh corpse that has no business being there, and something pale and long-haired moving between the headstones on clawed feet. 🎧 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

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