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 what the country people say about that: it wakes the noisy spirit, the one that throws stones. Minutes later a stone comes out of nowhere. Broadcast on CBS October 20, 1942, the third week of Oboler's fifty-two week revival, and later rerun under the title "Gravestone." Oboler closes by stepping out of the story to read from what he calls authenticated records — a London house in 1872 where stones flew and nobody ever explained it.

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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 staff that year and would go on to write more Gunsmoke than anyone but John Meston. Produced and directed by Norman Macdonnell, with Parley Baer as Chester, Georgia Ellis as Kitty, and Howard McNear as Doc. Broadcast on CBS, December 1, 1957.

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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 bees in Sussex: the plans for an experimental armored fighting vehicle have been stolen, the naval officer entrusted with them has been murdered on his honeymoon, and the agent who took them has left almost nothing behind. Part one of three.

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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 starts as an easy favor turns into a murder Holiday has to untangle among a room full of polite, well-dressed liars. Alan Ladd, then one of Hollywood's biggest box-office draws, both produced this syndicated 1948-49 series and starred as Holiday, with Sylvia Picker as his scatterbrained secretary Suzy and Edmund MacDonald as Lieutenant Kling.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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