Mystery Podcasts

Early in Nero Wolfe – The Tell Tale Ribbon. . ep23, 510330, from Nero Wolfe – Retro Radio Podcast, a phone call reaches the room before the story does. Archie Goodwin relays it in pieces: a man was due an hour ago, a woman has been killed, and his boss grumbles about silly little cases. We hear only half the conversation. That is the mystery podcast's oldest trick and still its best. The ear gets fragments, and the listener starts assembling them before anyone at the microphone has finished talking.

Vintage radio fills the biggest shelf, and the cases here move fast. The Falcon - Sleepy Radio sends Mike Waring among bookies and racketeers. In The Falcon The Case Of The Wandering Wife, a round of accusations turns on whether a hired tail was ever paid, and the banter never pauses long enough for anyone to look innocent. The sponsors are part of the fabric. In The Falcon - The Case Of The Plenty Twenty, lunch-counter talk about the case slides into a Miracle Whip pitch voiced by the characters. That episode also arrives wrapped in modern betting ads.

The Advenures of Sam Spade - Moonlight Radio, spelled that way in the feed, is quicker with a joke and more knowing about its genre. Early in Sam Spade - The SQP Caper, someone proudly reads the title's initials off a drugstore neon sign, "Stability, quality, purity," and is told that isn't quite the answer. In Sam Spade - The Vaphio Cup Caper, Spade guards a package on a train and waits for "the inevitable small dark man who plays the Peter Lorre part." Someone else turns up. The gag works because the show knows its own furniture.

Candy Matson|Great Detectives of Old TIme Radio Mystery Dramas comes with a guide. Adam Graham sets the scene from Boise, Idaho. Before Candy Matson: The Allison Gray Case, he explains that it was a new audition, built from a 1949 script, after NBC showed interest in taking the show national. Candy, a post-war hard-boiled private eye in San Francisco, is the reason to stay. In Candy Matson: San Juan Bautista, she tells a mission priest, "You police the soul, don't you?"

Two neighbours stretch the type. Good Old Radio - Vintage Old Time Radio Shows carries Box 13, with Alan Ladd as Dan Holliday, a former reporter now writing fiction who answers letters left in a box number. In Box 13 1948 (03) Blackmail Is Murder (03), a special-delivery note summons him to room 718 at the Bradford Hotel. Old Time Radio - Lives of Harry Lime trades the sleuth for Orson Welles's rogue. Early in Harry Lime - 5000 Pengoes and a Kiss, the narration offers a little lesson in economics: returns are likely to be high for someone willing to take risks outside the law. The Radio Drama page has more in this vein.

Holmes sits between radio and the bookshelf. Old Time Radio - Sherlock Holmes mixes productions. Sherlock Holmes - The Valley of Fear is an 82-minute BBC version with Carlton Hobbs as Holmes and Norman Shelley as Watson. Sherlock Holmes - Limping Ghost carries a Petri Wine introduction for Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, then a castle ghost and a suit of armour found in a heap on a library floor.

Readings ask for more patience and repay it in texture. The Return of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle splits stories into parts. In 01 – The Adventure of the Empty House, part 1, Watson is poking around a shooting in a closed room when he knocks the books from an elderly stranger's arms and notes one title, "The Origin of Tree Worship." Remember that stranger. One caution: the recording loops a phrase several times, which sounds like a fault in the audio.

That Mainwaring Affair by Anna Maynard Barbour, a novel, suits listeners who like procedure. 09 – Tangled Threads is largely an inquest. Its most charged testimony comes from a guest who sat at her window watching the moon over the Hudson while hearing Mr. Scott pace the room next door. The Secret Passage by Fergus Hume is gossipier: in 03 – A Mysterious Death, Mrs. Octagon says that whenever she opens the papers, she expects to read of her sister's death by violence. Other shelves hold Weapons of Mystery by Joseph Hocking, heavy on mesmerism and menace, and Mystery Of Cloomber, The by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859 - 1930). In the latter, Israel Stakes describes a general walking his lamp-lit house "frae midnight till cockcrow." The Classic Literature page goes further.

Inner Sanctum Mystery plays the slide from whodunit to horror for laughs at the door. In Inner Sanctum Mysteries - Boomerang, the host jokes about a ghost with pleats in her shroud, front and back, "just in case she should turn over in her grave." In Inner Sanctum Mysteries - Death of a Doll, a reporter is given one more day on a case the police are closing, and he hears a dead girl's doll speak a name. The tone is pulpy, but the episode is still built like a mystery.

The Accursed is the freshest hybrid here. Ghost stories about a woman named Hazel are being left in the narrator's little library. The narrator reads them aloud, then turns detective about who is leaving them. In The moon made the shadoWs come alive, the narrator weighs neighbours as suspects. One is a librarian judged clever enough but described as looking exhausted. Another is a teenager unlikely to spend hours talking to an adult neighbour. Stray capitals in titles such as ThE crows told me and He said he was the nigHt invite a sharp-eyed listener to treat them as clues. The stories themselves contain blood and a menacing presence in a family home, while the frame around them is warmer.

In The Six Disappearances of Ella McCray, six witnesses give conflicting accounts of how Ella vanished. In Chapter 1, one stammering witness describes her growing wings, then snaps at the interviewer for staring. The V22 Podcast is horror first, with these stories told in the first person. My Friend Wanted Proof the Ghost Town Was Haunted. We Found Something Worse. builds its fear from crying that becomes "something mimicking crying." One limitation: in It Was In The Cold With Us, ad reads land in the middle of a tense scene. The Horror Fiction page picks up from here, and the Audio Drama page covers newer serials.

Ghosts In The Burbs, which its publisher describes as ad-free, is the gentlest door in. In 81 - i was lonely, the narrator is waiting outside theatre practice, playing Fishdom Solitaire and re-listening to Agatha Raisin, when a woman raps on the window and lets herself into the passenger seat. PREVIEW - Fatal Fall Fest - Part I sets a cozy whodunit inside a cutthroat elementary school PTA. The narrator admits to knowing who dies and who killed them, and little else yet. For mystery as black comedy, The Amelia Project imagines an agency that fakes its clients' deaths, and its publisher recommends starting with Season 1. Anthology listeners will find more on the Short Stories page, and the Fiction page maps the wider territory.