Charlie Chan
Australian commercial radio
Australian commercial radio · 1936–1936
19 EpisodesSeasonalPGSince 1936
The run
- Network
- Australian commercial radio
- Years active
- 1936–1936
- Surviving broadcasts
- 19
- Genre
- detective
A Collection of Aussie Radio Shows No 180 This is the Australian Version. Charlie Chan is a fictional Honolulu police detective created by author Earl Derr Biggers for a series of mystery novels. Biggers loosely based Chan on Hawaiian detective Chang Apana. The benevolent and heroic Chan was conceived as an alternative to Yellow Peril stereotypes and villains like Fu Manchu. Many stories feature Chan traveling the world beyond Hawaii as he investigates mysteries and solves crimes. Disclaimer: By uploading these files, I make no claim to ownership or copyright. These recordings have been acquired from publicly available sources on the Internet, and my goal has been to put together a collectio Public-domain transfers from the Internet Archive.
Source collection
Internet Archive audio collections
Rights
Public domain — no renewed US copyright
Cataloguing
Air dates and notes from the Archive item record
The shape of the run
What survives, year by year
6 dated broadcasts across 91 years on the air, with 90 years where nothing is known to survive. Brightness is transfer quality; empty cells are months lost to time.
Episodes
Start here
Listen to the run in order
Restored broadcasts from 2026, in original transmission order.
- 1. The Long Silence · 31 Mar 2026
- 2. A Room Above the Street · 7 Apr 2026
- 3. Signal at Midnight · 14 Apr 2026
Signal at Midnight
4 Aug 2026 · 41 min
We go back to the beginning and read everything again.
A Room Above the Street
28 Jul 2026 · 56 min
Three interviews, one archive reel, and a question nobody wanted asked.
The Long Silence
21 Jul 2026 · 19 min
Recorded on location, with the room left in.
Dead Air
14 Jul 2026 · 34 min
New tape, a reluctant witness, and a timeline that finally stops making sense.
Sign Off
7 Jul 2026 · 49 min
The one everybody argues about.
The Case of the Missing Hour
30 Jun 2026 · 1h 4m
Short, complete and unexpectedly devastating.
Night Broadcast
23 Jun 2026 · 27 min
The episode listeners keep sending to people who never listen to podcasts.
The Last Train Out
16 Jun 2026 · 42 min
A quiet beginning that turns, halfway through, into something else entirely.
Also on Australian commercial radio
Australian commercial radio in 1936–1936
Other series the network carried while Charlie Chan was on the air.
Same seasons
detective on the air then
Series in the same genre whose runs overlapped this one.
What it became
The private eye at the microphone
First-person narration, a case that walks in the door, and a city that talks back. Marlowe, Sam Spade and Johnny Dollar turned detection into a listening form.
Lineage is written by our editors, not inferred from listening data.
Descendants
Working in the tradition of Charlie Chan
Modern series carrying this form forward.
If you liked this
More to explore
Chosen by the same editors.
