The Six Shooter was NBC's warm, character-driven Western, starring James Stewart as Britt Ponset, an easygoing wandering cowboy who keeps drifting into other folks' troubles. In "More Than Kin" (December 13, 1953), Britt rides into town to discover everyone is buzzing about his wedding -- a wedding he knows nothing about. Minnie Flint has decided her niece and the drifting cowboy are a perfect match and arranged the whole affair without telling the groom. A warm, funny tangle of small-town matchmaking carried by Stewart's unmistakable folksy charm.

Step through the famous creaking door into Inner Sanctum Mysteries, radio's beloved horror anthology hosted by the droll, pun-loving "Raymond." In "No Coffin For The Dead" (CBS, February 20, 1945), Peter Frame is found murdered and all signs point to the deranged son of his housekeeper -- a man who escaped an asylum but was shot in flight and could no longer walk. If the only suspect physically could not have done it, who did? Les Tremayne stars in a twisting tale of murder, madness, and misdirection.

Sydney Greenstreet stars as Rex Stout's orchid-loving armchair genius in The New Adventures of Nero Wolfe. When banker John Blake asks Wolfe to safeguard a hastily typed will and a sealed letter for his long-estranged brother, then promptly vanishes, the great detective must sort kidnapping from murder from suicide. Behind the family secrets lies a masterfully staged deception -- and a trail of embezzlement only Wolfe can unravel from his brownstone armchair.

Dimension X was NBC Radio's pioneering science-fiction anthology, the first to dramatize stories by the genre's leading authors. In "The Lost Race," adapted from Murray Leinster and broadcast May 20, 1950, a shipwrecked space crew stumbles onto the ruins of an ancient, long-dead spacefaring civilization -- only to discover the wreckage hides a deadly secret with the power to destroy the present as it once destroyed the past.

Step inside a busy 1950s New York station house with 21st Precinct, the documentary-style CBS police drama that follows a case from the first phone call to the final report. In "The Certified 600," a burglary and a wrecked car take a strange turn when a caller phones in claiming to hold the stolen safe -- and demanding ransom to give it back. Captain Kennelly's men work the timeline, trace the call, and close in on a thief with a surprising connection to the victim.

From the files of Assignments Unlimited -- the agency that does anything, anywhere, at any time. In "A Kitten for Mr Katz," chief investigator Aubrey Mason takes on a deceptively simple little errand that, true to form, refuses to stay simple. A breezy, witty half-hour of 1960s detective radio with a curious client, a tidy mystery, and Mason's cool head seeing it all through.

A Quarter Century of Swing was Armed Forces Radio's love letter to the big-band era -- a half-hour anthology of swing's golden age beamed to U.S. service members stationed overseas. Show Number 485, from September 11, 1964, gathers another set of hot, danceable big-band recordings spanning the genre's first quarter-century, bringing a warm touch of home in the form of brass, reeds, and an irresistible beat. No mystery to solve here -- just the music itself, the great orchestras that made the world want to dance.

Dan Holiday, the newspaperman-turned-novelist of Box 13, runs an ad promising to go anywhere and do anything for a good story -- and the letters that land in Box 13 never disappoint. In "The Professor and the Puzzle," a deceptively academic riddle pulls Holiday into real danger, where solving the puzzle and solving the crime turn out to be one and the same. Movie star Alan Ladd both produced this syndicated 1948-49 adventure series and starred as Holiday himself.

Sydney Greenstreet is Rex Stout's brilliant, orchid-loving armchair detective Nero Wolfe, who solves crimes without ever leaving his New York brownstone while legman Archie Goodwin does the footwork. In "The Case of the Lost Heir," a fortune rides on a missing heir, and Wolfe must sort the genuine claimant from the fraud amid greedy relations and convenient corpses. Aired April 20, 1951 on NBC.

The gold standard of hardboiled radio detection: Gerald Mohr stars as Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, the wisecracking, world-weary private eye of rain-slicked Los Angeles. In "Nether-Nether Land," a frightened woman wakes Marlowe in his own apartment in the dead of night, begs him for help -- and vanishes before she can explain. This is the rare REHEARSAL recording, the cast working through the script before the live 1951 broadcast: a true behind-the-microphone look at how a top network drama was built.