bookmark us 
and check back often. We'll be adding more shows all the time. Thanks.
There are 3,000 "Free to download" mystery shows at the bottom half of this page.
Welcome Mystery Lovers,
We sincerely hope you will enjoy these old time radio (OTR) shows. Old time radio shows are our hobby and our passion. We really love to listen to them. We hope you do too.
Please bookmark us and check back often. We'll be adding more shows all the time. Thanks.
All of our shows are in standard mp3 format and may be listened to online or downloaded to your computer to listen to later or put on your mp3 player. Click here to see the list of shows in the club members area.
If you'd like to join our Old Time Radio Club, see the details further down this page.
What is the OTR forum and discussion board? This is our "On-line Clubhouse". It's where the club members and I hang out. What do we do here? We talk about old time radio shows, recommend good shows to each other, post club news, ask and answer questions about old time radio programs, trade shows and lot's more!
Please visit our OTR forum Everyone Welcome! All club members and visitors to our website are welcome to participate.
If you're thinking of joining our club, why not take a look at our "Recent Club News" shown below and visit our friendly Old Time Radio forum. This is the very best way to get a feel for what our club is all about and read posts from our club members. Just click on the picture of the stone doorway at your left to visit us.
| 07/02/2009 11:20 AM |
| Abbott and Costello |
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Mike uploaded a bunch of Abbott and Costello shows we didn't already have. Thanks Mike! |
| 06/30/2009 06:08 PM |
| Philo Vance |
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Joe has uploaded more Philo Vance shows for our club. Thanks Joe! |
| 06/29/2009 03:50 PM |
| Sherlock Holmes Movies |
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We added 8 more Sherlock Holmes movies to our movies folder in the club area today. |
| 06/27/2009 09:53 AM |
| More Sherlock Holmes Shows Added |
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Charles donated 80 Hobbs & Shelly "Sherlock Holmes" shows to our club. Thanks Charles! |
| 06/26/2009 09:36 PM |
| Mr. Ace And Jane |
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Added some Mr. Ace And Jane shows to the club members area today. |
To See more news items, please visit our News Blog or subscribe to our News Blog Feed.
Or click a button shown below to add our News Blog Feed to one of these services.
Our mission is to provide these fine old time radio shows to the folks who grew up listening to them and still enjoy hearing them today. Also to introduce old time radio to young people and provide them with the chance to enjoy these great shows as well. We can do it with your help.
This is a "not for profit" website. We raise money via donations to pay for our web server, bandwidth and new sets of shows for you to enjoy. We truly need and appreciate your support.
If you want old time radio right now, you've come to the right place. No waiting for the mailman. Just start listening. We'll be adding more shows all the time.
The button below is a one time donation button (Not a recurring subscription). Thank you for your donation. It's your generous support that allows us to maintain and improve this website.
If you enjoy listening to these old time radio shows, please let us know by making a donation of any size, big or small. You'll not only be supporting this website but you will be helping us to bring these fine shows back into public circulation and preserving the enjoyment of old time radio for everyone. You'll also receive a lifetime membership in our Old Time Radio Club, which includes access to thousands of other Old Time Radio shows in our Club Members area. Thank you for your support!
If you are blind, you may have a membership at no cost. Just email us. This is a vision impaired friendly site. We've tried to make it accessible to readers with text to speech web browsers. Just let us know if you have any trouble listening to the site and we'll try our best to fix it.
Folks, We really appreciate our supporters. It's you who make it possible to maintain and improve this website. Everyone who makes a donation of ten dollars or more will receive a lifetime membership in our Old Time Radio Club and receive access to our Club Members area.
The Club Members area is a special web directory where we keep all of our non-mystery radio shows we've collected over the years that represent all of the other categories of old time radio. Here you'll find Adventure, Comedy, Detective, Drama, Historical, Holiday, Musical, Horror, Sci-Fi, Serials, Westerns, Old Radio Commercials and more!
Also, many more mystery shows too.We currently have 205 Gigabytes (over 40,000 shows) in .mp3 format in the Members area (Many more shows to come, we are constantly adding to our online collection). We work on this site daily. It's our goal to make this the best Old Time Radio site on the Internet and the biggest single online collection of old time radio shows available. Thanks for helping to make it possible.
If you are wondering what our club area looks like, it is exactly like what you see if you go into any of the mystery show folders listed at the bottom of this page. We use a simple directory structure format. What you see in the folder is exactly what is on the server in that particular directory.
You will be given your username and password to the Members area immediately after making your donation. Thanks for supporting Old Time Radio Mystery Theater! You will also receive a downloadable membership certificate, suitable for printing (located in the club members area) when you join.
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See our complete listing of Old Time Radio, Music Shows and Movies by clicking the link below.
Click Here to see what we have in our club members area. |
Here is a nice letter we received from one of our club members. It's a great feeling knowing that people are enjoying these shows. The passing of many years has not altered the fun and excitement of old time radio!
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Dear Mr. Webmaster Brad: The word "thanks" just doesn't express how wonderful a service Mystery Shows provide. there are, indeed, thousands upon thousands of shows of all different genres and types. The first show to which I listened was the one about the "ice king--Richard Tudor. Next I heard an adventure of the Sea Hound. I'd never heard of that old time radio show before. After that I delved into a whole basketful of the Lone Ranger. That was DELICIOUS___. Pardon me while I don my parka for a trip to check up on the whereabouts of Sergeant Preston's horse Rex and his wonder dog Yukon King--fastest and strongest lead dog of the Northwest. Thanks again for opening up a retroworld of adventure, drama, mystery and fantasy among other treasures. Sincerely, Patrick M. |
Please note: These old time radio shows are in .mp3 format. They can be played with Windows Media Player (comes free with Windows), Apple Itunes (Free from Apple) and almost any modern audio playing software. If you need a great free mp3 player, you can use VLC Media Player. If any of these shows don't sound right, try adjusting or turning off the equalizer in your player's software. These radio shows are old, so please forgive any little sound problems you may encounter.
We hand pick a great mystery show every week or so and add it to our Old Time Radio Mystery Theater podcast. Give it a try!
Podcast Instructions:
Some web browsers support RSS feeds. Just click the orange podcast button and see.
The rss feed URL of our podcast is: http://www.mysteryshows.com/Podcasts/Mystery-Shows-Feed.xml Just copy and paste it into your "Google feed reader" or "My Yahoo RSS feed reader". Or you can use a desktop software feed reader such as "Greatnews". It works great and it's free. You can get a copy at: http://www.curiostudio.com/
If you use Itunes. Just click on the "Advanced" menu item at the top of the Itunes program. Then select "Subscribe to Podcast". Paste in the link shown in yellow above.
Or click a button shown below to add our podcast to one of these services.
Note: If you have no idea or care about podcasts and rss feeds and you just want to hear the shows in our podcast we've set up an rss feed reader on our server. Just go there and enjoy the shows. You might want to bookmark that page and visit it again to hear the new shows as we add them. Simply click the following link to enjoy our podcast. Old Time Radio Mystery Theater Podcast Player
The podcast is totally free. You don't even need to sign up to use it. Just click and enjoy.
(Date Unknown)
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(1957-1958)
ABC Mystery Time was hosted by Don Dowd and starred Sir Laurence Olivier.
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(1947-1951)
Mr. Malone is our amazing hero, a Chicago lawyer who's hobby is collecting cliches, and each weeks show is based off of one.
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(1951-1955)
Barry Craig, Confidential Investigator was a radio detective drama heard on NBC from October 3, 1951 to June 30, 1955. Detective Barry Craig (William Gargan) worked alone from his Madison Avenue office. Unlike his contemporaries Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, Craig had a laid-back personality, somewhat cutting against the popular "hard-boiled detective" stereotype. Others in the cast included Parley Baer and Betty Lou Gerson.
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(1948-1949)
Box 13 was a syndicated radio series about the escapades of newspaperman-turned-mystery novelist Dan Holliday, played by film star Alan Ladd. Created by Ladd's company, Mayfair Productions, Box 13 premiered August 22, 1948, on Mutual's New York flagship, WOR, and aired in syndication on the East Coast from August 22, 1948, to August 14. 1949. On the West Coast, Box 13 was heard from March 15, 1948 to March 7, 1949.
To seek out new ideas for his fiction, Holliday ran a classified ad in the Star-Times newspaper where he formerly worked. "Adventure wanted, will go anywhere, do anything -- Box 13." The stories followed Holliday's adventures when he responded to the letters sent to him by such people as a psycho killer and various victims.
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(1949-1951)
"Candy Matson, YU 2-8209" aired on NBC from March 1949 to May 1951 and featured Natalie Parks as Candy Matson, PI. Each job took her from her apartment on Telegraph Hill to numerous specific locations in San Francisco.
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It's a foggy night on old Cape Cod. A perfect night for a mystery...
Jack London declared nothing could match the pleasure of curling up with a good book and a bag of candy on a Saturday afternoon. While nothing can match it, one thing that can surpass it is driving down a moonlit road, bathed in the green glow of the dash lights and listening to a riveting radio thriller!
Cape Cod Radio Mystery Theater is a grass-roots theater troupe established in 1982 with the purpose of continuing the fine tradition of Old Time Radio through a series of original mysteries and thrillers set on Cape Cod. The series features suspense shows and Captain Underhill whodunits.
Series author, Steven Thomas Oney, is recipient of the prestigious Raven Award given by the Mystery Writers of Amercia. Past winners have included Alfred Hitchcock, Edward Gorey, Vincent Price, Angela Lansbury, Eudora Welty and Steven Bochco. Publishers Weekly called the series "Audio Mystery at its finest."
The publisher of this series of original mystery thrillers has graciously provided three complete episodes of this well written and produced show for the enjoyment of our visitors and club members. Excellent sound quality and suspenseful mysteries. A club favorite!
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(Date Unknown)
Adventures in excitement and suspense based on the best-selling novels by Carter Brown.
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(1946-1950)
Originally heard over Mutual from 06/03/46 to 12/25/49, then the series moved to ABC from 01/25/50 to 08/31/50.
Gale Gordon starred as the amateur detective / antique dealer Gregory Hood. The show was a summer replacement for Sherlock Holmes. Only a very few episodes of "The Casebook of Gregory Hood" survive.
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(1943-1955)
Casey, Crime Photographer (aka Crime photographer; Flashgun Casey; Casey, Press Photographer; Stephen Bristol, Crime Photographer) was a media franchise, in the 1930s through the 1960s. Created by George Harmon Coxe, the photographer Casey was featured in radio, film, theater, novels, magazines and comic books.
Launched in a 1934 issue of the pulp magazine Black Mask, the character Jack "Flashgun" Casey, was a crime photographer for the newspaper The Morning Express. With the help of reporter Ann Williams (portrayed on radio and TV by Jan Miner), he solved crimes and recounted his stories to friends at The Blue Note, their favorite tavern.
Begun as stories in Black Mask, the stories were brought to radio under multiple names. The series aired on CBS for all its entirety. 07/07/43 - 11/16/50 and 01/13/54 - 04/22/55.
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(1974-1982)
(The CBS Radio Mystery Theater (or CBSRMT) was an ambitious and sustained attempt in the 1970s to revive the great drama of old-time radio. Created by Himan Brown (who had by then become a radio legend due to his work on Inner Sanctum Mysteries and other shows dating back to the 1930s), and aired on affiliate stations across the CBS Radio network, the series began its long run on January 6, 1974. The final episode ran on December 31, 1982.
The show was broadcast nightly and ran for one hour, including news and commercials. Typically, a week consisted of three to four new episodes, with the remainder of the week filled out with reruns. There were 1,399 original episodes broadcast. The total number of broadcasts, including reruns, was 2,969.
The format was similar to that of classic old time radio shows such as The Mysterious Traveler and The Whistler, in that there is a host, E.G. Marshall, who introduces each episode and provides pithy wisdom throughout; but, unlike the hosts of those shows, Marshall is fully mortal, merely someone whose heightened insight and erudition plunge the listener into the world of the macabre.
The show began with the ominous sound of a creaking door, slowly opening to invite listeners in for the evening's adventure, accompanied by Marshall's disturbing intonation of, "Come in! ... Welcome; we am E.G. Marshall." At the end of each show, the door would creak and slam shut, followed by Marshall's classic signoff, "Until next time, pleasant ... dreams?," segueing into the show's haunting woodwind theme music.
Marshall hosted the program every year but the final one, when actress Tammy Grimes took over, maintaining the format.
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(1939-1948)
On radio, The Adventures of Ellery Queen was heard on all three networks from 1939 to 1948. During the 1970s, syndicated radio fillers, Ellery Queen's Minute Mysteries, began with an announcer saying, "This is Ellery Queen..." and would go on to describe a case in one minute. The radio station would then encourage callers to try to solve the mystery and win a sponsor's prize. Once they got a winner, the solution part of the spot would be played as confirmation.
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(1947-1948)
Told in first person by Barton Drake (played by Glen Langan), Mystery is My Hobby is played before a live audience.
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(1950-1951)
The New Adventures of Nero Wolfe began October 20, 1950, with "Stamped for Murder." Sydney Greenstreet starred as Nero Wolfe.
"Rex thought Greenstreet a splendid choice for the role and Greenstreet did, in fact, fill every reasonable expectation," wrote Stout biographer John McAleer. A succession of Archies included Gerald Mohr, Herb Ellis, Larry Dobkin, Wally Maher and Harry Bartell. The series ended April 27, 1951, with "The Case of Room 304."
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(1943-1955)
Nick Carter, Master Detective was a Mutual radio crime drama based on tales of the famed detective from Street & Smith's dime novels and pulp magazines. Nick Carter first came to radio as The Return of Nick Carter, a reference to the character's pulp origins, but the title was soon changed to Nick Carter, Master Detective.
With Lon Clark in the title role, the series began April 11, 1943, on Mutual, continuing in many different timeslots for well over a decade. Between October 1944 and April 1945, it was heard as a 30-minute program on Sunday afternoons at 3pm, sponsored by Acme Paints and Lin-X, with a 15-minute serial airing four or five times a week in 1944 from April to September. In April 1945, the Sunday series moved to 6pm, continuing in that time slot until June 1946, and it was also heard in 1946 on Tuesday from March to August.
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(1945-1950)
Philo Vance is a fictional American amateur detective who appeared in twelve novels written by S. S. Van Dine (the pen name of Willard Huntington Wright) published in the 1920s and 1930s. During that time, Vance was immensely popular in books, movies, and on the radio. He was portrayed as a stylish, even foppish dandy, a New York bon vivant possessing a highly intellectual bent. The novels were chronicled by his friend Van Dine (who appears as a kind of Dr. Watson figure in the books as well as the author).
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1942-1951
Listen, as Superman solves baffling mysteries and fights crime! The Adventures of Superman, adapted from the DC Comics character created in 1938 (see Superman), came to radio as a syndicated show on New York City's WOR on February 12, 1940. On Mutual, it was broadcast from August 31, 1942, to February 4, 1949, as a 15-minute serial, running three or, usually, five times a week. From February 7 to June 24, 1949 it ran as a thrice-weekly half-hour show. The series shifted to ABC Saturday evenings on October 29, 1949, and then returned to afternoons, twice-a-week on June 5, 1950, continuing on ABC until March 1, 1951.
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(1937 - 1957)
True Detective Mystery ran in various years, In 1937 it was Syndicated by Trans American Syndication. In 1946 It was again on the air. This time It was on the Mutual Network where it ran in various years until 1957. Its stories were based on stories which appeared in True Detective Mystery Magazine.
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(1948-1962)
Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar was a radio drama about the "fabulous freelance insurance investigator with the action-packed expense account". It aired from February, 1949 to September 30, 1962 on CBS, giving it an amazing 14-year run.
Charles Russell was the first to star as Johnny Dollar, followed by a succession of actors including Edmund O'Brien, John Lund, Bob Bailey, Bob Readick, and Mandel Kramer. Each new star gave Johnny a slightly different persona.
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