Night Beat, which aired from 1950 to 1952, is one of the gems of the drama genre from the Golden Age of Radio. It features Randy Stone (played in an excellent no-nonsense manner by Frank Lovejoy), a reporter for the Chicago Star who works, of course, the night beat -- trying to get that last up-to-the-moment notable scoop before the presses start rolling for the morning edition. It's a good format for radio drama, because it allows each episode to have a definite, familiar structure while also allowing you any content that might end up in the news. It's also an easier genre than detective fiction, because there's less pressure to try to make every story clever. Randy Stone does often solve a crime, sometimes cleverly, but when he does so, it's primarily because he's that dogged reporter who doesn't stop digging until he actually has the story.
Because of all this, the stories tend to be diverse and interesting, ranging from quirky to creepy to puzzling to humorous. One of the quirkier ones that is also good for leading up to Halloween is "The Devil's Bible". Randy Stone is looking into a possible story when he meets Dante Alighieri. A fourteenth-century poet, a blasphemous Bible coveted by book collectors, a murder, a cold-hearted woman, and nothing is quite what it seems.
You can listen to "The Devil's Bible" at the Internet Archive (#29 in the list).
