What happens
Sam Spade, a San Francisco private detective, is questioned by police after his partner Miles Archer is shot dead in the street. Spade learns that Archer was supposed to be tailing Floyd Thursby, a man sought by a young woman, Corinne Wonderly, whose sister has run off with him from New York. Spade agrees to help her, but a visitor named Joel Cairo appears, and then a client tries to hire him for a valuable black figure of a bird. Spade meets Bridget O'Shaughnessy, who gives him partial stories and asks for his trust. The episode is a dramatization of Dashiell Hammett's novel, presented on the Lux Radio Theatre, first broadcast February 8, 1943, starring Edward G. Robinson, Gail Patrick and Laird Cregar.
San Francisco, late 1930s
Characters: Sam Spade, Miles Archer, Lieutenant Dundy, Tom Polhaus, Effie, Corinne Wonderly, Floyd Thursby, Bridget O'Shaughnessy
Listen for: Spade's wary exchanges with the police and with each new visitor, and the way Bridget's stories keep changing
Written from the episode itself; it never gives away the ending. Every recording is remastered for the stream: cleaned of rumble, hiss and mains hum (and the old TV whine where we found it), then levelled in two passes to steady broadcast loudness, so one show is never quieter than the next.