Paladin, the cultured gunfighter-for-hire of CBS Radio's Have Gun -- Will Travel, rides out on an unusual errand: to find Wylie Dawson and tell him he's no longer a wanted man. But clearing a name can be as dangerous as collecting a bounty, and the man Paladin is trying to help may not want to be found. John Dehner stars in this June 12, 1960 western.

Sydney Greenstreet stars as Rex Stout's brilliant, orchid-loving armchair detective Nero Wolfe in this 1951 NBC mystery. It's bullets on Broadway: when a prominent stage director is found murdered, Wolfe and his quick-witted legman Archie Goodwin are called in -- and the whole case turns on the riddle of the shell casings that vanished from the scene. A polished gem of golden-age radio detection.

Richard Diamond, Private Detective starred Dick Powell as a wisecracking, song-singing former NYPD cop turned Manhattan private eye. In this episode, originally heard on 8 January 1950, a worried Italian butcher and his fellow independent meat-shop owners come to Diamond for help: a vicious protection racket is squeezing them for payoffs, threatening their families and their shops if they refuse. Diamond goes undercover, trades wisecracks with the muscle, and ends up using both his fists and his .38 before he can hand the gang to Lt. Levinson -- then wraps things up with a song at Helen's piano on Park Avenue.

Inner Sanctum Mysteries was radio's beloved half-hour anthology of horror and macabre suspense, famous for its slowly creaking door and its smirking host Raymond. In "Voice On The Wire" (29 November 1944), a tormented man begins receiving telephone calls from a voice he is certain belongs to someone already dead -- and as the calls grow more insistent, his grip on reality slips toward a final, ghoulish twist. A quintessential wartime chiller from one of old-time radio's defining horror shows.

NBC's gentle Thursday-night comedy turns the Anderson house into a museum of black cats, broken mirrors, and unlucky ladders in 'Superstitious Folk,' first heard 25 May 1950. Robert Young's Jim Anderson sets out to cure his family of their nonsense -- and predictably, his own logic trips him up first. Warm Midwestern domestic comedy from one of radio's best-loved family series.

The Adventures of Sam Spade brought Dashiell Hammett's wisecracking San Francisco private eye to NBC every week, telling each new 'caper' with snappy banter, hard-boiled atmosphere, and a leading man who was equal parts danger and dry humor. In 'The Prodigal Panda Caper' (29 December 1950, with Steven Dunne in the trench coat and Lurene Tuttle as Effie), Sam takes on his most unlikely client yet -- a determined nine-year-old boy who insists his treasured stuffed panda has been stolen. What sounds like a child's errand quickly leads Sam where Sam Spade cases always lead: into something far stranger and more dangerous than anyone bargained for.

From CBS's short-lived 1950 science fiction anthology Beyond Tomorrow -- the network's bid to rival Dimension X. In "The Trouble with Robots," a near-future household discovers that the real problem with mechanical servants isn't what they do, but what their owners have stopped doing. A smart, quietly unnerving Cold War-era robot story from the golden age of radio sci-fi.

BBC Radio's landmark 1953 science fiction serial. Captain 'Jet' Morgan and his crew are the first humans on the Moon -- and while exploring a vast lunar crater, Jet vanishes from sight without warning. As Doc, Mitch and Lemmy try to make sense of it, other inexplicable things start happening in the airless quiet. At its peak, Journey Into Space was the last radio programme in Britain to outdraw television.

Jack Webb's Sergeant Joe Friday and his partner Frank Smith work a string of high-priced shopliftings hitting Los Angeles department stores. Aired May 3, 1953 on NBC, "The Big Carney" is classic Dragnet: patient legwork, terse interrogations, and the unglamorous grind of real police work, all drawn from actual LAPD case files. Episode 202 of the landmark procedural that taught American crime drama how to tell the truth, only with the names changed to protect the innocent.

Welcome back to The Hall of Fantasy, the series of radio dramas dedicated to the supernatural, the unusual, and the unknown. In "The Dance of the Devil Dolls," originally broadcast February 9, 1953 on WGN Chicago and the Mutual Network, a wicked mistress makes her tiny carved figures dance to her will -- and the dolls become weapons against the living. A low-budget but genuinely creepy horror anthology with the kind of downbeat ending Hall of Fantasy fans came to expect: the supernatural always wins.