Detectives, killers and the creaking door, ranked
The crime and horror canon: hard-boiled investigators, fair-play puzzles, police procedure and the anthologies that frightened a continent on a shoestring.
Cast a ballot on any entry to move it in the listeners' order.
The head of the list
1939–1952 · NBC / Mutual
Carlton E. Morse's serial of three adventurers and a detective agency, capable of running a single horror story across weeks. Devotedly remembered by everyone who heard it as a child, and it holds up.
The most sheerly enjoyable serial radio ever ran.
Attached: The Case of the Missing Hour2026-08-0414 min
1939–1948 · CBS / NBC / ABC
The fair-play puzzle taken seriously enough to stop the programme before the solution and let a guest panel guess. Detective fiction's only genuine game show.
The one mystery series that let you play along, honestly.
Attached: Dead Air2026-08-0420 min
1945–1951 · NBC / CBS / Mutual
Vincent Price as Simon Templar, thoroughly amused by everyone in the room. The lightest touch in crime radio, and the hardest to imitate.
Villainy foiled by a man who finds it all rather funny.
Attached: Night Broadcast2026-08-0419 min
Four to 8
1947 · NBC
Peter Lorre performing Poe, Gogol and Wilde with an intensity that occasionally seems unsafe. Eight surviving weeks of a star being allowed to go too far.
“Peter Lorre, unsupervised.”
1931–1938 · WOR / Mutual
The first horror anthology on American radio, hosted by an old woman and her cat, and the direct ancestor of everything else in this column. Old Nancy invented the horror host.
“Where all of this came from.”
1946–1951 · Mutual
An importer of curios who investigates because the objects lead him there, created by the writers of the Rathbone Holmes. Genteel, well-plotted and unusually literate.
“Detection for people who collect things.”
1954 · NBC
A late, brief series with a jazz score and a New York private eye written by Henry Kane from his own novels. Radio drama already dying, and still trying something.
“A last good idea, arriving too late.”
1930s–1940s · Syndicated
A cackling host, a cave, an organ and a half-hour of cheap horror out of Detroit and later Los Angeles. Crude next to Suspense, and the surviving transfers are exactly the reason a generation slept with the lamp on.
“The cheapest chill on the dial, and still effective.”
The editors’ order is judgement, not arithmetic; the listeners’ order is your ballots, one per entry, and you can change or withdraw a vote at any time. Programme dates and networks are taken from the surviving broadcast record; the recordings attached are real transfers held in this archive, with their own titles and dates left exactly as they came.
