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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 knew by heart: "Hey, Wild Bill, wait for me!" Half an hour of hoofbeats, hard riding, and a clean showdown before the closing theme. First broadcast December 31, 1954 — the final night of the show's original network run.

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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 (Eleanor Audley) arrives with a mountain of luggage and a promise to stay "just a few days," then takes over the household so thoroughly that Katie the maid quits on the spot. When George finally works up the nerve to send Mother home, she trips over her own suitcase at the front door, sprains her ankle, and settles in for six more weeks. First broadcast November 4, 1949, with Hans Conried and Ruth Perrott.

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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 Poole the butler and Franz besides, and rather than squeeze the novella into a single hour he stretched it across five months of nightly quarter-hours — beginning with the childhood Stevenson left entirely blank. What sounds at first like an ordinary boyhood becomes, in hindsight, a warning. With Hazel Hollander as Margaret Utterson and Nell Stirling as Hetty Wilson.

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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 helmets and rang a real fire bell. The music runs from the novelty hit "Wilhelmina" and "Candy and Cake" to a red-hot "Everybody Loves My Baby" and a tender "A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes" from Disney's brand-new Cinderella. Crosby taped it just two weeks after an emergency appendectomy — and you would never know it from the voice. With Ken Carpenter announcing, John Scott Trotter's orchestra, and Jud Conlon's Rhythmaires.

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