On the evening an indicted godfather holds his Thursday coffee hour in Prague, a shot bursts his tall window and scatters glass over the cups. Who fired it?

Listen as a podcast, with full transcripts: https://mono-noir.transistor.fm/

Prague, March 2004. Fog drifts off the Vltava as Pavel, a Malá Strana bookseller, waits behind his shop with the evening paper, and his friend Zima, a weary detective, climbs in from the wet. The headline says the godfather Kolář has been indicted, and court bailiffs with a locksmith have until Friday to box his entire archive for the state attorney. Forty crates, perhaps more, of receipts, tapes and photographs, and nobody in the city knows whose faces are in them. Zima doesn't mean to touch the paper. He means to watch who grows nervous before the seals go on. Days later the two visit Dagmar, the newspaper's editor, who is hungry for something to fill tomorrow's page. They talk of the godfather's famous Thursday coffee hours: the same room, the same tall window, ministers who sat with him off the record. Indicted is not convicted, Zima reminds her, and Kolář still keeps his table that very evening. Then the shot comes. Irena, the housekeeper who has poured the coffee for thirty years, receives the pair in the ruined room. She speaks of a kettle singing, a window kept shut against the cold since October, and a fifth cup nobody will lift. Who was in that room that evening, and what did each of them see?

From the series Velvet Shadows: a real post-communist Prague case reimagined as a modern noir radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast with an original score and sound design.

Loosely inspired by a real Czech case of the 2000s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including a bookseller, a newspaper editor, a housekeeper, a night watchman, a crime boss, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Where a real city, state, public body or newspaper is mentioned, its part in this story is invented; the newspaper, the firm and the house named in it are invented too. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: Prague, March 2004 — with Malá Strana and Lipenská Street.

Chapters:
0:00 Fog Over Malá Strana
1:41 Page One, Page Five
3:36 The Night Watchman Takes Tea
5:51 Glass Over the Coffee Cups
7:54 Nails Driven Into an Era
9:39 Evidence by the Tin Stove
11:36 A Quiet Street at Mid-Morning
12:58 Back Across Town
14:29 Midnight in the Shot-Torn Room
16:22 Two Facts and a Nightcap
17:57 Morning at the Bookshop Counter
19:42 A Cold Cup, a Warm Question
22:00 Questions Among Bare Shelves
24:06 Grey Light on the Street
25:49 Below the House Before Dawn
27:31 Midnight Bells, Quiet Street

#MonoNoirRadioDrama #NoirMystery #AudioDrama

A week after the Damascus army's radio-silence drill, a ruined wireless importer arrives at Baker Street with three seized ledgers and a whisper of treason hanging over him. Is he the traitor the army is hunting, or only the man it has settled on?

Listen as a podcast, with full transcripts: https://mono-noir.transistor.fm/

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

On a frosty February evening in 1964, a half-frozen wireless importer named Tawfiq climbs the stairs at Baker Street. A week earlier the army in Damascus held a radio-silence drill. Afterwards police arrived with a warrant and carried off his three ledgers. The bazaar has since whispered a dangerous word against him, and his credit is gone. Holmes takes the case and, with Watson, flies to Damascus. They are lodged in guest rooms belonging to Faris, a genial host home from six years in Paris, who counts ministers and colonels among his debtors. Inspector Rashid of the police shows Holmes the ledgers: ruled columns and dates, but not one figure, which he reads as the mark of a foreign paymaster. At army headquarters Major Zahran explains that a single brief burst broke the silence and that his direction-finding vans were waiting for it. Tawfiq, meanwhile, will say little about where his own roads lead. Holmes asks for patience and tells the police to let the merchant walk free for now. Who sent that burst, and why would an honest trader keep books with nothing written in them?

From the series Sherlock Holmes — The New Cases: a real crime of the 1960s reimagined as a classic Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast, with sound design and a light score that stays under the story.

Loosely inspired by a real event of the 1960s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including a ruined wireless merchant, a lavish host, a watchful concierge, an army major, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Where a real city, state, public body or newspaper is mentioned, its part in this story is invented; the block of flats, the bazaar and the army headquarters named in it are invented too. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: London and Damascus — February 1964.

Chapters:
0:00 A Frosty Night in Baker Street
2:28 Arrival in Damascus at Dusk
4:12 The Inspector's Green Lamp
5:50 The Major's Map Room
7:21 Receivers Humming Before Dawn
8:41 A Supper High Above Damascus
10:23 A Hooded Figure at Midnight
11:56 Dawn and a Note Delivered
13:22 A Quiet Mid-Morning Stroll
14:55 Down in the Cells
16:22 An Evening of Wine and Ministers
17:53 Late Talk and a Little Book
19:32 A Sleepless Night of Doubts
20:56 Ledgers Reopened at Headquarters
22:29 Holmes Calls an Afternoon Meeting
23:57 The Dinner Nobody Meant to Eat
25:46 Home to Baker Street Again

#MonoNoirRadioDrama #SherlockHolmes #AudioDrama

Who drained seven billion dollars out of Russia through twin shells and a letterbox, while the one clerk whose signature is on every confirmation begs a detective to look past her?

Listen as a podcast, with full transcripts: https://mono-noir.transistor.fm/

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

In March 2016, a settlements clerk at Halvorsen Bank comes to the Moscow detective Maksim Volkov late one rainy evening, file in hand. Seven billion dollars have left Russia over several years, and her signature is on the confirmations that moved it. She begs him to look past the signer and find whoever built the route. Volkov agrees, but warns that he will follow the paper wherever it leads, even through her. With his friend Grigori, the narrator, he visits a wine bar off Pokrovka where the bank's traders drink every night, a little faster each time, and where the clerk, by every account, never joins them. On the settlements floor she shows how the trades are paired, one city buying and the other selling in the very same minute, and admits she has kept those books alone for three years. At the economic-crime directorate on Tverskaya, Inspector Zimin offers only a thin file and two shell companies with bare names, and insists that nothing in print ties them to the money. Late that night Volkov and Grigori sit down with what they have been given. Who built the route, and why does the one person who saw every page remember no names?

From the series Moscow Rules: a real post-Soviet crime reimagined as a modern detective radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast with an original score and sound design.

Loosely inspired by a real Russian case of the 2010s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including the bankers and traders, the clerks, the bar staff and the concierge, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Where a real city, state, public body or newspaper is mentioned, its part in this story is invented; the bank, the directorate and the wine bar named in it are invented too. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: Moscow, March 2016 — with a wine bar off Pokrovka, the economic-crime directorate on Tverskaya and the fog over Sokolniki.

Chapters:
0:00 A Clerk Arrives in the Rain
1:53 A Wine Bar Off Pokrovka
3:47 Binders on the Settlements Floor
5:19 The Directorate on Tverskaya
6:44 Past Midnight at the Piano
8:42 Cold Tea in the Small Hours
9:55 Lights Humming Over the Binders
11:54 A Week Into the Inquiry
14:12 Boxes Sealed and Taped
15:37 The Marble Lobby Near Midnight
17:24 Three Threads, Nothing Joining Them
19:13 Friday Night at the Bar
21:14 Near Dawn, Files Still Stacked
22:34 Saturday Morning on Tverskaya
24:18 The Tower Lobby by Daylight
25:54 Fog Lifting Off Sokolniki

#MonoNoirRadioDrama #NoirMystery #AudioDrama

Four witnesses were summoned to Vienna to testify about a night of killing in the Burgenland. One lies face down at the edge of a wood and another died in a burning farmhouse. Who is silencing them, and can Brenner reach the last two alive?

Listen as a podcast, with full transcripts: https://mono-noir.transistor.fm/

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

Vienna, autumn 1946. In his rooms on the Herrengasse, the private detective August Brenner is sorting the files of a dead court, his chronicler Theodor reading aloud beside him, when Poldi, a clerk of the reborn people's court, knocks with a problem. She has served four summonses on witnesses in the Burgenland village of Hohenthal. Two days later she found the gunsmith Kranzler face down at the edge of the wood, a spent cartridge by his head, which she pocketed as the court's exhibit. A chambermaid's farmhouse has burned with her inside it, and the two remaining witnesses will not open their doors. Brenner takes the file. Kranzler's own statement, given in Vienna, describes pistols he prepared for the guests of a party in March. At the village inn the landlord Wastl claims to know nothing, then admits that Kranzler sat nervous that last evening, watching the road, before he crossed toward the trees at dusk. Inspector Marek of the Vienna police walks the burial wood with them. Officially one hundred and eighty Hungarian labourers lie there, shot in March, but the parish whispers of a second grave and nobody will give a number. With two witnesses dead and two behind shut doors, what did Kranzler go into the wood to find, and can anyone still be made to speak?

From the series Vienna Files: a real Austrian crime reimagined as a post-war noir radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast with an original score and sound design.

Loosely inspired by a real Austrian case of the 1940s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including a private detective, a court clerk, an innkeeper, a cook, the guests of a shooting party, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Where a real city, state, public body or newspaper is mentioned, its part in this story is invented; the village of Hohenthal, its inn, its castle and its wood named in it are invented too. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: Vienna, October 1946 — with Hohenthal in the Burgenland.

Chapters:
0:00 A Dead Court's Cold Docket
1:44 A Clerk With a Summons
4:14 Kranzler's Statement Read Aloud
5:58 Beer and Silence at Hohenthal
7:45 Walking the Burial Wood
9:33 An Evening Below Stairs
11:29 Four Around the Lamplit Table
12:51 The Taproom Door Bolts Shut
15:02 Two Facts and No Hand
16:48 The Ledger in the Cabinet
18:43 The Register Under Lock
20:13 Schnapps Beside the Scrubbed Table
22:06 Cold Tea and the Chronicle
23:19 The Innkeeper Unbolts Again
25:25 A Wire to Hohenthal
27:28 Last Questions by Lamplight
28:57 Snow Over the Courtyard

#MonoNoirRadioDrama #NoirMystery #AudioDrama

A widow telephones Baker Street after dark to say someone has taken her husband out of his grave, and the man she asks for was his friend. Who would steal the one thing, as Watson puts it, that no one on earth could sell?

Listen as a podcast, with full transcripts: https://mono-noir.transistor.fm/

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

On a wet April evening in 1976, Holmes is clearing the post in Baker Street when a telephone call comes from a widow he counts as a friend. Someone has taken her husband out of his grave in a Swiss village. Holmes fears grief will cloud his judgment, but he flies out with Watson. At the white manor among the vineyards, she tells them the sexton found the slab laid on the grass and the grave empty. A man rang that same afternoon, before any newspaper had the story, and promised to name a price. When he rings again, an inspector of the cantonal police listens on the extension. The caller demands four hundred thousand francs over the noise of a passing train, and the trace ends at a railway-station kiosk. At the churchyard, Holmes reads one set of shoulders at work and a coffin lifted straight up on tackle. The inspector points to fresh tyre tracks from a garage van in the lakeside town. The garage owner keeps the manor's cars, knows the road blind, and is badly in debt. He protests that half the district owes money. With the caller promising to ring again, who is on the other end of the line?

From the series Sherlock Holmes — The New Cases: a real crime of the 1970s reimagined as a classic Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast, with sound design and a light score that stays under the story.

Loosely inspired by a real event of the 1970s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including a widow and her children, the garage men of a small town, the churchyard sexton, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Where a real city, state, public body or newspaper is mentioned, its part in this story is invented; the manor, the garage and the village churchyard named in it are invented too. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: London and the canton of Vaud — April 1976.

Writer v2.7 — the studio's newest writing process: the plot is planned and checked by an AI story editor, then each act is drafted with the whole story in view and edited before a word is voiced — and then cast and performed with our new casting and voice direction.

Chapters:
0:00 A Wet April in Baker Street
2:48 The White Manor Above the Vineyards
4:22 A Voice Beneath a Passing Train
5:40 Six Feet of Wet Clay
7:02 The Garage Behind the Station
8:31 The Glass Office and the Ledger
9:57 Questions Before Eight in the Morning
11:16 Beneath the Workshop's Bare Bulb
12:34 Coffee on the Hotel Terrace
13:43 Dusk on the Garage Forecourt
15:25 Waiting by the Telephone at Eight
17:11 A Midnight Call by the Embers
18:31 Cold Coffee at the Police Post
20:24 A Walk Along the Quay
21:34 First Light Among the Ramps
23:24 The Barred Room at Ten
25:24 Home Again in Baker Street

#MonoNoirRadioDrama #SherlockHolmes #AudioDrama

Who is selling a dead admiral's estate on a midnight television channel, when his daughter never agreed to part with a single piece of it?

Listen as a podcast, with full transcripts: https://mono-noir.transistor.fm/

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

December 2008. Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes share a converted craftsman above Echo Park, and the rent is two weeks short. Watson has made Holmes promise to take no cases until they are current. Then the doorbell rings after ten. Eleanor Fairchild has driven straight through from Rancho Mirage with a story she cannot let rest: her late father's estate is being sold lot by lot on a late-night channel, and the next sale is tomorrow. She brings an envelope holding a buyer's certificate dated this month and signed with the name of Admiral Holloway, a man years in his grave. Holmes calls it a dead man's name still out working, and he takes the case, bargain or no bargain. Watson grumbles and drives. That night the two of them watch the broadcast together, and Holmes studies it the way other men study a chessboard. In the morning Mrs. Fairchild reads aloud the line at the foot of the certificate, which says the lots were sold by the widow. Her mother died eleven years ago, and her father never remarried. The admiral framed his prints and dusted them, and he never priced one. The trail leads to his study in Rancho Mirage and a box of receipts she could not bring herself to open. Who put the admiral's name to that paper?

From the series Holmes LA: a real Los Angeles crime reimagined as a modern Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast with an original score and sound design.

Loosely inspired by a real Los Angeles case of the 2000s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including an admiral's daughter, gallery people, auction bidders, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Where a real city, state, public body or newspaper is mentioned, its part in this story is invented; the gallery and the television channel named in it are invented too. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: Los Angeles, December 2008 — with Echo Park and Rancho Mirage.

Chapters:
0:00 A Doorbell After Ten
3:00 Midnight on Channel Forty-One
4:54 The Stamp at the Foot
6:41 The Admiral's Study
8:15 A Call to the Gallery
10:03 A Lieutenant at the Door
10:50 A Quiet Morning Call
12:38 An Optimist on the Line
14:41 Dusk at the Craftsman
15:57 Browsing the Gallery Floor
17:49 Past Midnight, Awake and Restless
19:39 A Signature with a Pen
21:24 A Broadcast at Noon
23:49 Coffee Among the Medals
25:41 After Supper, One Question

#MonoNoirRadioDrama #SherlockHolmes #AudioDrama

A sealed letter bearing the delegation's stamp, though no delegate admits to writing it, is carried through the rain to a Vienna detective. Who put the footballers' families on the road west under that stamp?

Listen as a podcast, with full transcripts: https://mono-noir.transistor.fm/

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

Vienna, December 1957, and the night is wet. Tibor Sallai, an official of the footballers' federation, climbs to the rooms of the private detective August Brenner on Tuchgasse with a sealed letter he has snatched from a refugee family at the Westbahnhof. It carries the delegation's stamp, yet nobody in the delegation will own it. Sallai explains that the stranded squad is gathered at the Hotel Belvara, that nobody flies home, and that the federation wants watchers on every man. By morning Brenner brings the unopened letter to the hotel lobby, where Captain Balogh holds his players together, Resi Lengl shepherds the waiting wives upstairs, and Ilonka Varga asks in vain for word of her husband. Only fourteen of the twenty-two players are under the hotel's roof. At the railway police post, Inspector Karasek shows Brenner and his friend Dr. Fuchs a file of nineteen wives and children, every one entered at the border as a cook or a masseur, even a nine-year-old girl, and all of it kept from the press at the federation's written request. Ilonka Varga, meanwhile, says she wants only a kitchen somewhere west and the chance to cook again. Who ordered a squad's families written down as kitchen staff, and why under a stamp that no delegate will claim?

From the series Vienna Files: a real Austrian crime reimagined as a post-war noir radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast with an original score and sound design.

Loosely inspired by a real Austrian case of the 1950s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including the footballers, their wives and children, the hotel staff, the federation officials, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Where a real city, state, public body or newspaper is mentioned, its part in this story is invented; the hotel, the railway station and the football federation named in it are invented too. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: Vienna, December 1957 — with Brussels.

Chapters:
0:00 A Wet Night on Tuchgasse
1:41 The Lobby of the Belvara
3:28 Nineteen Names at the Westbahnhof
5:24 A Wife in the Parlor
7:38 High Rooms After Midnight
9:49 Grey Hours at the Desk
11:08 Marble Hall at Midday
12:49 Afternoon at the Railway Post
14:25 Tea by the Lobby Fire
16:03 A Late Knock at the Door
18:10 Two Men and No Sleep
20:10 First Light Under the Platforms
21:59 The Brussels Train Waits
23:26 A Stove at the Police Post
25:27 Lamplight Above Tuchgasse

#MonoNoirRadioDrama #NoirMystery #AudioDrama

After a Sirkeci freight clerk is strangled and his death is filed as a robbery, why does his widow bring his hidden book to a detective instead of the police?

Listen as a podcast, with full transcripts: https://mono-noir.transistor.fm/

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

Istanbul, January 1942. In rooms above a glass-roofed arcade, the detective Kemal Arslan reads the evening papers while his friend Demir clips them. One small item bothers him: a clerk from the Sirkeci freight yard has been strangled, and the police call it a thieves' job, although the thieves took a purse and a coat but left the one man who had weighed and signed every ton of chrome bound west. Next morning, in a Pera hotel lobby, the proprietress Madlen introduces a broker who moves a foreign mission's freight through the yard. He is courteous and generous with coffee. That evening the clerk's widow, Naciye, climbs the stair with a bundle wrapped twice in oilcloth. Her husband kept a private weight-book in pencil, told no one what was in it, and said only that the yard was heavier than its books. She would rather put it in Arslan's hands than the police's. Then an inspector of National Security summons Arslan and tells him the case is closed, because the chrome convoys outrank one dead bookkeeper. If the file is shut by order, who needed it shut, and what did a careful man's pencil leave behind?

From the series Istanbul Confidential: a real wartime Istanbul case reimagined as a classic espionage noir radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast with an original score and sound design.

Loosely inspired by a real Istanbul case of the 1940s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including a yard clerk and his widow, a hotel keeper, a freight broker, a night watchman, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Where a real city, state, public body or newspaper is mentioned, its part in this story is invented; the freight yard, the hotel and the liaison office named in it are invented too. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: Istanbul, January 1942 — with the Sirkeci freight yard, a Pera hotel and a liaison office above the Pera post office.

Chapters:
0:00 Evening Papers Above the Arcade
1:28 Coffee in the Pera Lobby
3:16 A Widow Climbs the Stair
5:20 Pencil Figures Past Midnight
7:04 A Summons from the Ministry
8:47 The Watchman at the Chain
10:43 Hats in Hand, Again
12:20 Return to the Midnight Gate
14:05 Cold Tea and Two Facts
16:25 Dusk by the Water Tower
18:01 Morning Lamplight at Tahsin's Desk
19:41 Black Coffee, Days Later
21:28 A Samovar Hissing at Midnight
22:29 The Lantern Is Lit Tonight
24:38 Near Midnight, Brass and Coffee
27:00 Before the Shutters Close

#MonoNoirRadioDrama #NoirMystery #AudioDrama

Eighteen masterpieces have vanished overnight from a country house in County Wicklow, and it is the housekeeper, not the family, who has crossed the Irish Sea to fetch Sherlock Holmes. What does a servant want him to find?

Listen as a podcast, with full transcripts: https://mono-noir.transistor.fm/

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

On a warm July evening in 1984, Holmes sits among his re-indexed commonplace books in Baker Street while Watson loses a chess problem to him from across the room. Then an inspector of the Castlemoyne Garda station arrives, fresh from the Irish plane, with news that Kilmarren House in County Wicklow was robbed the night before. The housekeeper, Peg, has asked for Holmes by name and is waiting in the hall below. Holmes protests that he has no standing in Ireland, but Watson points out that the family did not send for him; their servant did. Next day, at Kilmarren, the guide, Fenella, walks them through the saloon wall by wall, naming each painting that hung there and is now only a brass hook and a darker square on the velvet. Holmes notes that not one hook is bent. Peg, forty years in the house and pensioned off in ten weeks, can hardly speak of what the old master said to her that morning. Fenella has already pinned a card reading House Closed to the door, and with it goes her living. Why would the owner of the stolen pictures look at his oldest servant and ask what she was paid?

From the series Sherlock Holmes — The New Cases: a real crime of the 1980s reimagined as a classic Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast, with sound design and a light score that stays under the story.

Loosely inspired by a real event of the 1980s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including the country-house servants, the village tradesmen, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Where a real city, state, public body or newspaper is mentioned, its part in this story is invented; the country house, the village and its police station named in it are invented too. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: London and Castlemoyne — July 1984.

Writer v2.7 — the studio's newest writing process: the plot is planned and checked by an AI story editor, then each act is drafted with the whole story in view and edited before a word is voiced — and then cast and performed with our new casting and voice direction.

Chapters:
0:00 A Warm Evening in Baker Street
2:44 Empty Hooks in the Saloon
4:39 Tea Below Stairs at Kilmarren
6:12 A Card on the Oak Door
7:29 A Squat Grey Station House
9:12 Dusk Falls on Kilmarren
10:43 A Poor Welcome for Visitors
12:07 A Warm Range, a Cold Question
14:08 The Long Walk to Castlemoyne
15:03 Before the Household Wakes
16:24 Morning Errands in Castlemoyne
17:39 Ten O'Clock at the Station
18:53 Apologies in the Housekeeper's Room
21:04 One Lamp in the Saloon
22:18 A Gathering at the Long Table
23:44 Afternoon at the Station Window
25:08 A Wire from Ireland

#MonoNoirRadioDrama #SherlockHolmes #AudioDrama

A policeman flies the Atlantic with an envelope too secret to telegraph: a scientist is to meet a foreign contact at a London museum gate at eleven at night. Who is the man, and what will Holmes find waiting at that gate?

Listen as a podcast, with full transcripts: https://mono-noir.transistor.fm/

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

London, October 1945. The city is learning to leave its curtains open again, and Sherlock Holmes is boiling something foul at the sitting-room table when a weary officer of the Dominion Frontier Constabulary arrives with an envelope meant for Holmes's hands alone. At Scotland Yard, Inspector Lestrade is made to wait while the visitor lays out photographs and decoded cables from a foreign embassy. A clerk there, ignored by the officials he first approached, has walked out with proof that a scientist from a wartime laboratory in Canada has passed secrets abroad. The papers also say the scientist will be in London within days. Holmes and Watson attend a public lecture on the new bomb and meet the scientist's former colleagues over tea: a lecturer, a typist, and a penniless chemist who cannot say where he worked and begs for any post. A further cable names a meeting place, a museum gate, and an hour: eleven o'clock on the night of the seventh. Only a few people in London know it. The Yard has already begun to watch one of the colleagues. Which of the people at that tea table is the one the cables describe?

From the series Sherlock Holmes — The New Cases: a real crime of the 1940s reimagined as a classic Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast, with sound design and a light score that stays under the story.

Loosely inspired by a real event of the 1940s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including the scientists, the typist, the landlady, the frontier policeman, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Where a real city, state, public body or newspaper is mentioned, its part in this story is invented; the museum, the college and the lodging houses named in it are invented too. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: Baker Street and Bloomsbury — October 1945.

Writer v2.7 — the studio's newest writing process: the plot is planned and checked by an AI story editor, then each act is drafted with the whole story in view and edited before a word is voiced — and then cast and performed with our new casting and voice direction.

Chapters:
0:00 Rotten Eggs in Baker Street
2:30 Photographs on the Inspector's Blotter
4:10 Tea After the Lecture
6:04 Cold Cocoa at the Yard
7:30 Black Railings on Pelham Row
8:53 A Cupboard Office of Cabinets
10:04 A Wet Bench in the Corridor
11:30 Four Flights Up in Bloomsbury
13:28 An Hour Before the Watch
14:41 A Doorway Across the Gates
16:25 Waiting by the Grey Thames
17:44 Noon at Scotland Yard
19:09 Back Among the Filing Cabinets
20:57 Carbolic and Cells Beneath the Yard
22:22 Dusk Beneath the Portico
23:32 A Room Above the River
25:32 Pipe Smoke and Farewells

#MonoNoirRadioDrama #SherlockHolmes #AudioDrama

What became of a family's household that was meant to follow them to Shanghai, and why does it turn up in a Vienna auction room just before the hammer falls?

Listen as a podcast, with full transcripts: https://mono-noir.transistor.fm/

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

Vienna, 1946. In his courtyard office off the Herrengasse, the private detective Brenner sorts rescued files while his chronicler Fuchs keeps count of something odd: four flats emptied in six days, each left behind with nothing owed and the furniture untouched. An unclaimed zither has stood in the corner for three days, and a visitor is climbing the stairs two at a time. She is Hella Feldmann, whose parents sailed for Shanghai in the war's first winter. Their household, shipped as lift seven, was meant to follow on a later boat, and it never came. This morning she found her family's crates listed in the preview catalogue of the Halberg House. Brenner and Fuchs go to the preview, where the clerk Mizzi Kern shows them eleven ownerless lots brought in by a porter who paid cash and left no name. Hella recognises the stencil and the carpenter's chisel mark on the planks, but the sale is set for Friday noon. At the freight yards by the Nordbahnhof, a forwarder offers coffee, talks of shut ports and tells them the authorities have taken the stranded lifts in hand. The sale, he says, goes ahead. Who is able to turn a family's household into someone else's bargain?

From the series Vienna Files: a real Austrian crime reimagined as a post-war noir radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast with an original score and sound design.

Loosely inspired by a real Austrian case of the 1940s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including a private detective and his chronicler, a young woman whose family sailed to Shanghai, an auction clerk, a freight forwarder, a yard watchman, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Where a real city, state, public body or newspaper is mentioned, its part in this story is invented; the auction house, the freight yard and the restitution desk named in it are invented too. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: Vienna, 1946 — with the Herrengasse courtyard, the Halberg House auction rooms, the Nordbahnhof freight yards and the Rossauer Lände.

Chapters:
0:00 Emptied Flats and an Unclaimed Zither
1:34 A Breathless Visitor on the Stairs
3:17 Crates in the Preview Room
5:05 Evening at the Courtyard Office
7:09 Coffee and Closed Ports at Nordbahnhof
8:59 The Desk on the Rossauer Lände
10:57 A Long Night at the Cabinet
12:26 Night Shift by the Timber Shed
15:09 The Hammer Waits at Noon
17:03 Dusk in the Courtyard Office
18:39 Back to the Freight Yards
21:17 Morning at the Restitution Desk

#MonoNoirRadioDrama #NoirMystery #AudioDrama

In January 1943 the Admiralty drags Sherlock Holmes across a winter Atlantic to New York over one letter that came back undelivered. Why would the Royal Navy send for a detective over a returned letter, when New York has police of its own?

Listen as a podcast, with full transcripts: https://mono-noir.transistor.fm/

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

London, January 1943. While Holmes feeds his post to the fire and Dr Watson fishes it out again for the paper salvage, a Commander Tremayne of the Admiralty telephones with an urgent request: Holmes must come to New York about a letter that came back. After a hard crossing, the pair meet Inspector Gallagher of Centre Street, who has little welcome for a London desk in his city. Tremayne explains that a woman in Dayton, Ohio, was sent back a letter she never wrote, posted in New York, addressed to San Teodoro and meant for Tokyo. It is cheerful chatter about dolls, yet one doll is a British carrier, and damaged Allied ships are mending in American yards. Holmes goes shopping on Madison Avenue, where a dealer and her salesgirl teach him the doll trade. He then meets the frightened collector from Ohio, who buys by post from three New York shops and has a son on a destroyer in the Pacific. At the British Consulate Tremayne spreads the letter under a lamp and insists its sender's identity be kept among a handful of people. Which ship is the bride doll with the torn veil, and who is writing these letters?

From the series Sherlock Holmes — The New Cases: a real crime of the 1940s reimagined as a classic Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast, with sound design and a light score that stays under the story.

Loosely inspired by a real event of the 1940s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including dealers, shop girls, collectors, naval officers, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Where a real city, state, public body or newspaper is mentioned, its part in this story is invented; the doll shop, the lodging house and the town of San Teodoro named in it are invented too. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: London and New York — January 1943.

Writer v2.7 — the studio's newest writing process: the plot is planned and checked by an AI story editor, then each act is drafted with the whole story in view and edited before a word is voiced — and then cast and performed with our new casting and voice direction.

Chapters:
0:00 Paste-Pots, Salvage and a Telephone
2:45 A Cold Welcome at Centre Street
4:32 A Lesson in Dolls on Madison
6:16 The Frightened Lady from Dayton
7:55 A Locked Room at the Consulate
9:25 A Cracked Doll and a Question
10:33 A Map of the Brooklyn Waterfront
11:50 A Morning Visit from Centre Street
13:20 Four Flights Up on Sands Street
14:41 Crossing the Bridge at Dusk
15:36 Storm on Madison Avenue
17:14 A Cable from Washington
18:43 Carbolic and Cold Morning Light
20:35 Madison Avenue After Closing Time
21:45 A Delegation at the Door
23:58 Noon in the Charge Room
25:38 Home to Baker Street Again

#MonoNoirRadioDrama #SherlockHolmes #AudioDrama

A manager and his secretary fly halfway round the world to fetch Sherlock Holmes to Sydney, where a stranger on the telephone kept an airliner circling in the sky until three hundred and fifty thousand dollars was paid in a dark lane. Who could make an entire airline obey a voice?

Listen as a podcast, with full transcripts: https://mono-noir.transistor.fm/

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

In the wet July of 1973, Holmes and Watson are interrupted at Baker Street, mid-quarrel over an empty revolver and a ruined ceiling, by a secretary named Belinda. She works for the manager of Norvale, an Australian airline, and her employer waits below in a taxi with the meter running. He has flown across the world to take Holmes back to Sydney that very night. Thirty hours later the two Englishmen stand beside a drilled-open luggage locker with the manager, Mr Allard, and a blunt inspector of the bomb squad. A caller who named himself Mr Grey had claimed that one bomb sat in that locker and another aboard a passenger jet, set to explode if the aircraft descended below a certain height. The jet circled for hours, burning fuel, while Norvale's staff chalked up the dwindling figures and answered frantic families. Allard then drove alone to a lane between shuttered wool stores and passed the ransom through a stranger's car window in a canvas bag. The aircraft was searched seat by seat and nothing was found, yet the locker bomb was real. Holmes walks the empty lane and the crisis room and studies the inspector's guarded manner. Mr Grey has the money and has vanished. Who could have known enough about Norvale's night to shape it so exactly?

From the series Sherlock Holmes — The New Cases: a real crime of the 1970s reimagined as a classic Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast, with sound design and a light score that stays under the story.

Loosely inspired by a real event of the 1970s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including airline managers and secretaries, crisis-room staff, flight crews, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Where a real city, state, public body or newspaper is mentioned, its part in this story is invented; the airline, its head office, the airport and the streets named in it are invented too. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: London and Sydney — July 1973.

Writer v2.7 — the studio's newest writing process: the plot is planned and checked by an AI story editor, then each act is drafted with the whole story in view and edited before a word is voiced — and then cast and performed with our new casting and voice direction.

Chapters:
0:00 A Wet Night in Baker Street
2:38 Before the Drilled Locker
4:09 The Crisis Room Above the Square
5:22 A Dark Lane Between Wool Stores
6:52 Pipe Smoke at Police Headquarters
8:15 A Door Closed on the Typing Pool
9:17 Words by the Lifts
10:14 The Board Sits on Monday
11:34 Beneath Police Headquarters
13:14 A Notebook and a Late Window
14:06 A Dealer's Docket from Parramatta Road
15:33 Waiting Beside the Telephones
16:54 Tea in the Crew Room
18:39 A Summons to Allard's Office
20:44 An Afternoon in the Vehicle Yard
22:06 A Long Night of Rereading
23:18 Gathered Round the Switchboard
25:05 A Bare Table, a Quiet Room
26:37 Baker Street Under a New Ceiling

#MonoNoirRadioDrama #SherlockHolmes #AudioDrama

Her employer was shot and disfigured in his Rome office on Saturday night, and a husband and wife in custody each swear the other went in alone. Whose word can Sherlock Holmes trust?

Listen as a podcast, with full transcripts: https://mono-noir.transistor.fm/

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

On a wet Sunday evening in March 1966, Holmes and Watson are interrupted at Baker Street by Miss Avery, a young secretary who has flown in from Rome that same day. Her employer, Mr Farid, was murdered the night before, and she wants Holmes on the morning aeroplane. Holmes doubts that a private Englishman can be of any use to a jealous foreign police force, until Watson points out one odd thing about how she has travelled. They fly at first light. In Rome, photographers besiege the building where Farid kept his offices, and its concierge, Pasqualina, bolts the door behind them and begs to be kept out of the newspapers. Upstairs, Inspector Tedesco of the Questura shows them the sealed private room. Four shots were fired at close range, and acid was thrown over the dead man's face, so that even his mother cannot name him at the morgue. Two people are in custody, a cotton merchant, Signor Karim, and his wife, Signora Nadia, taken together at Naples. Yet each swears the other entered the room alone. Miss Avery opens her appointment diary for Saturday, and Holmes studies the entry for seven o'clock. Two cells, one dead man and two sworn stories that cannot both be true: which of them is telling the truth?

From the series Sherlock Holmes — The New Cases: a real crime of the 1960s reimagined as a classic Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast, with sound design and a light score that stays under the story.

Loosely inspired by a real event of the 1960s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including the secretary, the concierge, the merchant and his wife, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Where a real city, state, public body or newspaper is mentioned, its part in this story is invented; the office building, the café and the police headquarters named in it are invented too. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: London and Rome — March 1966.

Writer v2.7 — the studio's newest writing process: the plot is planned and checked by an AI story editor, then each act is drafted with the whole story in view and edited before a word is voiced — and then cast and performed with our new casting and voice direction.

Chapters:
0:00 A Sunday Evening at Baker Street
2:47 Cameras on the Doorstep
4:33 Red Wax on the Private Room
6:20 The Secretary's Appointment Diary
8:03 A Prisoner in the Interview Room
9:48 The Wife Before the Inspector's Desk
11:21 Pasqualina's Glass Box by the Stair
12:42 A Statement Waiting to Be Signed
14:27 Afternoon at a Pavement Café
15:43 Inventory in the Dead Man's Office
17:20 The Cell Beneath the Courtyard
18:53 A Dark Lodge, a Quiet Courtyard
20:40 Notes on a Questura Bench
21:55 The Inspector Shuts the Door
23:41 Past Eleven at the Questura
25:47 Home to the Baker Street Rain

#MonoNoirRadioDrama #SherlockHolmes #AudioDrama

Six Moscow banks fail within a week and twelve billion rubles disappear. So why was a quiet bank employee beaten on the street for writing down a number plate?

Listen as a podcast, with full transcripts: https://mono-noir.transistor.fm/

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

Moscow, 2012. A retired official, Semyon, brings his bruised and limping son-in-law Rutger to the flat of the detective Maksim Volkov, near Chistye Prudy. Rutger works at a bank, pays his taxes and has no known enemies. Three men and a black SUV with tinted windows beat him, and he wrote down the plate before they caught him at it. The militia call it road rage, and Semyon, who spent thirty years inside the state machine, knows when a file is stalling. Volkov takes the notebook and leaves it on his piano. He then joins the queue outside a bank branch on Myasnitskaya, where depositors like the pensioner Nina lost their savings when six banks were declared insolvent. Men from the regulator carried boxes out of a back office and gave no receipts. The notice offers ten kopecks on the ruble, if the paperwork survives. Volkov goes to the economic-crimes squad off Petrovka, where an inspector ran the plate before Volkov reached the stairs, then told him to go home and let it lie. Nobody will say who ordered the beating, or whether it has anything to do with the vanished money. Who is so keen to keep a number plate quiet?

From the series Moscow Rules: a real post-Soviet crime reimagined as a modern detective radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast with an original score and sound design.

Loosely inspired by a real Russian case of the 2010s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including a retired official, a bank employee, depositors, bankers, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Where a real city, state, public body or newspaper is mentioned, its part in this story is invented; the six banks, the regulator and the economic-crimes squad named in it are invented too. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: Moscow, 2012 — with Chistye Prudy, Myasnitskaya Street and Petrovka.

Chapters:
0:00 A Visitor With Bruised Ribs
1:43 The Queue on Myasnitskaya
3:42 Notebook on the Piano
5:21 Petrovka and a Tired Inspector
7:06 Where the Depositors Gather
9:04 Two Facts by Lamplight
11:03 A Meeting in Full Cry
12:53 Behind the Locked Cabinet
13:27 Registers Across the Piano Lid
15:22 An Appointment That Went Wrong
17:12 Grey Hours at the Steel Desk
19:08 The Last Day of Payouts
21:13 Phrases Laid Out Like Music
23:12 Morning Beneath the Head Office
24:59 After Midnight, Waiting
27:19 Paper on the Steel Desk
29:02 Rain Over Chistye Prudy

#MonoNoirRadioDrama #NoirMystery #AudioDrama

Why does the son of a murdered machinery dealer send across Europe for Sherlock Holmes, with a young newsreader and a running cab meter, rather than trust a telephone with what he knows?

Listen as a podcast, with full transcripts: https://mono-noir.transistor.fm/

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

On a blustery June evening in 1956, Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson are at Baker Street, with Watson packing trout rods for a weekend on the Test and a half-crown wagered on the weather, when a young newsreader from Radio-Genève arrives straight from the aeroplane. Simone brings word that Henri Vautier, a machinery dealer, was killed at his home in Vessy-les-Pins the night before, and that his son Gilles, a sound engineer, will not trust a telephone and wants Holmes in Geneva. Holmes hesitates to arrive as a foreigner without standing, but Watson points out that a man who sends for help by air has something he cannot say on a line. At the shuttered house, the dead man's widow waits in the hall beside a chair she has set before the sealed room, and mother and son trade sharp words about secrets kept under that roof for a year. At the radio station, Gilles's name is being passed to the press, and reporters crowd the door. An inspector of the Sûreté then receives the visitors coolly and describes the wounds: a shot from across the room, then a blade. What did Gilles need to tell Holmes that he could not say to anyone else?

From the series Sherlock Holmes — The New Cases: a real crime of the 1950s reimagined as a classic Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast, with sound design and a light score that stays under the story.

Loosely inspired by a real event of the 1950s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including a radio newsreader, a sound engineer, a machinery dealer and his family, the station's staff, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Where a real city, state, public body or newspaper is mentioned, its part in this story is invented; the radio station, the village and its streets named in it are invented too. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: London and Geneva — June 1956.

Writer v2.7 — the studio's newest writing process: the plot is planned and checked by an AI story editor, then each act is drafted with the whole story in view and edited before a word is voiced — and then cast and performed with our new casting and voice direction.

Chapters:
0:00 A Wager at Baker Street
2:33 The Shuttered House at Vessy-les-Pins
3:55 The Red Lamp at Radio-Genève
5:43 An Inspector's Smoke-Filled Office
7:17 Kitchen Table by Lamplight
8:46 The Room Behind the Seals
10:14 A Midnight Reckoning in the Hall
11:48 Cold Morning, Heavy Doors
13:02 Simone's Dressing Room
14:29 Two Columns on Hotel Notepaper
15:26 Noon at the Oilcloth Table
16:48 A Telegram at Dusk
18:22 Questions in the Inspector's Office
19:55 One Lamp by the Stove
21:23 Two in the Morning, Lakeside
22:31 Gathered Round the Long Table
24:38 Noon in the Cigar Smoke
26:22 Baker Street, a Week Later

#MonoNoirRadioDrama #SherlockHolmes #AudioDrama

Who told the city where to look for a house that nobody can find? S01E04 of Special Matters, a continuing noir superhero audio drama from the Mono Noir Super Series. New here? Start with the pilot, S01E01, The Man in the Harbor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euQ1l6eKjg4
Previous: S01E03, The Woman Who Finds Things: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksejQYJ3eD4

Listen as a podcast, with full transcripts: https://mono-noir.transistor.fm/

Beacon Hill, December 1950. Number fourteen Joy Street is the one house in Boston that nobody can find, kept by a landlady who has not stepped past her own front step in twelve years, and full of lodgers with gifts they never asked for: a woman who ages every time she mends something, a man who makes the sound go dead around him, twins who feel each other's pulse. Jonah, the man with no pulse who hears every heartbeat in a room, has lived there for three days. Nell Harrow, the policewoman at the basement desk for the cases nobody else will file, climbs the hill in the first heavy snow of the winter and is given the room next to his for the night. Then somebody tells the city where to look.

From the series Special Matters, the first of the Mono Noir Super Series: a continuing, episodic superhero audio drama in which the same characters return, grow and carry what happened into every new case. This is S01E04; the story continues in order. About forty-seven minutes, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast with an original score and sound design.

An original work of fiction. All names, characters and dialogue are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character, including the police, the city officials and the doctors, are invented for drama. Where a real city, neighborhood, street or public body is mentioned, its part in this story is invented, and no character in this story is a real person. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution.

Setting: Boston, December 1950 — Beacon Hill, in the first snow of the winter.

Chapters:
0:00 The First Snow
3:07 Supper in the Basement
7:26 The Parlour, Nine O'Clock
10:54 Sunday, Before Dawn
14:28 A Quarter to Six
17:17 Sunday, Half Past Six
20:12 Sunday, Eight O'Clock
23:58 Sunday, Half Past Eleven
28:35 The Front Door, Noon
32:48 The Dining Room, Three O'Clock
35:56 The Roof, Sunday Night
41:38 Monday, Seven O'Clock
44:55 The Kitchen, Monday

#MonoNoirRadioDrama #SuperheroAudioDrama #AudioDrama

Why would nearly every letter sent to three million students come back undeliverable, when the bank had sampled the list and signed for it, and who stands to lose if Friday's launch goes ahead?

Listen as a podcast, with full transcripts: https://mono-noir.transistor.fm/

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

On a mild November Monday, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are busy with the honey harvest in their Brooklyn brownstone when Ruth Okafor, a bank accountant, appears at the door near ten at night. She has been sent by Gus Ferreira, the bank's marketing chief, who will not discuss the matter over the phone. A mass mailing to the three million students on a newly purchased app's list has almost entirely come back undelivered. Holmes, unable to resist a puzzle, crosses the bridge into Midtown. On the bank's integration floor, desks once belonging to the app's staff now carry bank lanyards. Dana Whitlock, the app's founder, insists every name was earned. Ferreira worries about his neck, and Okafor, who folds two sets of books against a launch clock, says names are not her column. In the mailroom, Holmes and Ferreira sort through trays of returned post stamped with the same three refusals. Back on the old floor, Whitlock dismisses the failures as ordinary decay and refuses to open her logs without a legal process. The launch is Friday. Holmes holds a box of returned letters and Whitlock holds her number. Who is telling the truth about the list?

From the series Holmes NYC: a real New York crime reimagined as a modern Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast with an original score and sound design.

Loosely inspired by a real New York case of the 2020s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including bankers, app founders, accountants, academics, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Where a real city, state, public body or newspaper is mentioned, its part in this story is invented; the bank, the app company and the university named in it are invented too. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: New York City, 2022 — with Brooklyn and Midtown Manhattan.

Chapters:
0:00 Honey Season on the Roof
2:35 Lanyards on the Integration Floor
4:19 Trays of Returned Post
5:14 Sharp Words Over a Banker's Box
7:00 Late Afternoon in the Data Room
8:46 Morning Beside Two Ledgers
10:46 Two Chairs and a Filing Cabinet
12:27 Late Afternoon at the Precinct
13:56 A Second Visit, Mid-Morning
15:41 Champagne Two Nights Before Launch
16:51 Past Ten in the Brownstone
19:13 Near Midnight on Launch Eve
21:16 A Quiet Phone in Brooklyn

#MonoNoirRadioDrama #SherlockHolmes #AudioDrama

What do you do when the one woman in Boston who can find anything cannot find a missing child? S01E03 of Special Matters, a continuing noir superhero audio drama from the Mono Noir Super Series. New here? Start with the pilot, S01E01, The Man in the Harbor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euQ1l6eKjg4
Previous: S01E02, The Man Who Took the Blame: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWom5xQyPeQ

Listen as a podcast, with full transcripts: https://mono-noir.transistor.fm/

Boston, December 1950. In the Lost Property office at South Station, Daisy Quill can feel anything that somebody wants back: a wedding ring, a child's mittens, a watch pawned six years ago on Hanover Street. Twelve-year-old Lottie Marsh has been missing for four days, and her father is begging for help. Nell Harrow, the policewoman at the basement desk for the cases nobody else will file, comes to take Daisy to headquarters, with Jonah, the man with no pulse who hears every heartbeat in a room. There they learn that a car is coming for Jonah at nine the next morning, to take him to the city's health department for three days of what is called a short clinical examination. And Daisy can feel everything lost in Boston except that one little girl.

From the series Special Matters, the first of the Mono Noir Super Series: a continuing, episodic superhero audio drama in which the same characters return, grow and carry what happened into every new case. This is S01E03; the story continues in order. About forty-eight minutes, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast with an original score and sound design.

An original work of fiction. All names, characters and dialogue are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character, including the police, the city officials and the doctors, are invented for drama. Where a real city, neighborhood, street, railway station or public body is mentioned, its part in this story is invented, and no character in this story is a real person. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution.

Setting: Boston, December 1950 — with South Station and the South End.

Chapters:
0:00 South Station, Lost Property
5:10 The Captain's Office
9:37 The Marsh Kitchen, Noon
18:42 Half Past Two
23:48 A Quarter to Three
29:23 The Same Kitchen, the Same Minute
33:14 Late Afternoon
35:56 Wednesday, Dusk
41:06 The Back Step, Near Midnight

#MonoNoirRadioDrama #SuperheroAudioDrama #AudioDrama

Why would four hostages refuse to be rescued from the man who is holding them in a bank vault?

Listen as a podcast, with full transcripts: https://mono-noir.transistor.fm/

Stockholm, September 1975. A trunk call reaches Baker Street from the Swedish police: a gunman who speaks nothing but English has taken four bank clerks down into the vault of a city-centre bank, and he has asked for money, a getaway car and a prisoner named Blom. He has not asked for food, a blanket or a doctor for the people he is holding. By Saturday the hostages are telling a Minister of State that it is the police they are afraid of. Holmes and Watson cross the North Sea to a square full of cameras, a command post full of exhausted men and a vault that will not explain itself.

From the series Sherlock Holmes — The New Cases: a real 1970s hostage siege reimagined as a classic Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast with an original score and sound design.

Loosely inspired by a real 1970s hostage siege in Sweden. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions and motives of every character, including the police, the Minister, the hostages and the gunman, are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. It is not the outcome of the real case, and no character in this story represents or accuses any real person. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution.

Setting: London and Stockholm — September 1975.

Directed Edition: the same story, newly performed line by line with a directing pass for every voice: each actor's delivery is chosen for the moment, from a dry aside to a held breath.

Chapters:
0:00 A Gale at Baker Street
2:54 The Banking Hall
5:46 The Cashier and the Prisoner
8:47 A Voice on the Vault Line
11:30 The Minister Calls
14:03 The Mail Book and the Hole in the Floor
17:15 Four Nights
18:18 Cold Coffee in the Canteen
21:41 Four O'Clock in the Vault
27:51 Dawn on Brunnsplan
29:32 Baker Street, Three Weeks Later

#MonoNoirRadioDrama #AudioDrama

Eleven classified folders have vanished from a locked vault at a defence plant in California, and the lock shows no sign of force. Three men hold the combination, and the company's own security chief has flown to London to say so. Who among them could have opened it?

Listen as a podcast, with full transcripts: https://mono-noir.transistor.fm/

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

In the first week of August 1983, a wet grey morning in London, an American security chief named Barrow is shown into the sitting room at Baker Street. He has flown through the night from Calder Avionics, a defence contractor in Culver City, California. Eleven folders of classified guidance material have gone from the company vault, and the lock is untouched: no forced entry, nothing broken. Only three men know the combination, and Barrow is one of them. Holmes agrees to come on one condition: no police, no press, no questions at the gates. With Watson he crosses the Atlantic, and the next morning they stand in the emptied vault, where the shelves show a clean outline of every folder taken. Barrow counts the keys that exist, and the list is short. A radar engineer is summoned, wearing worn cuffs and a defensive manner. Holmes asks for the vault's tally books and the names of every man who holds a key. How does a locked vault give up eleven folders without leaving a mark?

From the series Sherlock Holmes — The New Cases: a real crime of the 1980s reimagined as a classic Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast, with sound design and a light score that stays under the story.

Loosely inspired by a real event of the 1980s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including the security men, the engineers, the club staff, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Where a real city, state, public body or newspaper is mentioned, its part in this story is invented; the avionics company and the club named in it are invented too. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: London and Los Angeles — August 1983.

Chapters:
0:00 A Caller at Baker Street
2:10 The Emptied Vault at Culver City
3:41 Tally Books and Missing Numbers
5:15 Veranda Above the Tennis Courts
7:13 An Early Visitor at the Hotel
9:06 An Inspector Brings a Folder
10:27 Tea as the Light Fades
12:13 Monday Morning in the Security Office
13:59 Behind the Club Bar
15:14 The Steward's Desk, Late Afternoon
17:40 Morning Report at the Hotel
18:18 Pacing Before the Hotel Window
20:10 Dusk on the Final Saturday
23:01 Empty Courts, Evening Falls
24:34 Home to Baker Street

#MonoNoirRadioDrama #SherlockHolmes #AudioDrama

On Whit Monday evening a typist with a bandaged hand brings Sherlock Holmes a letter the police laughed at: an apology from whoever shot a racing driver outside a Hampstead pub. Why would a gunman stop to say sorry to a stranger?

Listen as a podcast, with full transcripts: https://mono-noir.transistor.fm/

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

On the evening of Whit Monday, 1957, Holmes and Watson are idling at Baker Street over a wager about a passer-by when a woman arrives with a cab waiting at the kerb. Rosalind Ridley, a solicitors' typist, was wounded in the hand by a stray bullet outside the Black Heron in Hampstead, where a racing driver was shot dead the night before. She has since received a typed note of apology, and the police have filed it with the cranks. Holmes is reluctant to take on what looks like legwork for Scotland Yard, but Watson points out that cranks boast and accuse, and never apologise. At Ferndale Rise, Inspector Lestrade shows them the chipped brickwork, the low bullet marks and the grim facts of the shooting. Next morning Watson dresses Mrs Ridley's torn hand and gives her a hard verdict about her trade, while Holmes asks her to relive the minutes before the first shot. The police station register records a revolver found beneath a plane tree across from the pub. The station also holds the note itself. A woman's life's work has been taken by a bullet meant for someone else. Who would be sorry enough to write, yet cold enough to fire?

From the series Sherlock Holmes — The New Cases: a real crime of the 1950s reimagined as a classic Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast, with sound design and a light score that stays under the story.

Loosely inspired by a real event of the 1950s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including a racing driver, a club proprietor, a typist, a barman, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Where a real city, state, public body or newspaper is mentioned, its part in this story is invented; the pub, the club and the newspaper named in it are invented too. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: Baker Street and Hampstead — June 1957.

Writer v2.7 — the studio's newest writing process: the plot is planned and checked by an AI story editor, then each act is drafted with the whole story in view and edited before a word is voiced — and then cast and performed with our new casting and voice direction.

Chapters:
0:00 A Wager at the Window
2:38 Bullet Marks in Ferndale Rise
4:05 A Typist's Bandaged Hand
5:47 The Station Register
7:16 Back on the Pavement
8:51 Contents of a Dead Man's Pockets
10:15 Past Midnight Above Knightsbridge
11:53 The Office Behind the Bar
13:34 A Constable's Book of Empty Houses
15:23 The Club Falls Quiet
16:35 Midnight in Baker Street
17:35 Three Days at the Gunsmith's
18:52 Under the Roped-Off Tree
20:04 Down in the Cells
21:37 A Taxi Through the Lamplight
22:36 An Hour Before Opening
24:13 The Green-Shaded Lamp
25:47 A Fortnight Later

#MonoNoirRadioDrama #SherlockHolmes #AudioDrama

A mother flies through the night from New York to Baker Street, leaving her son unburied, to insist that his death in a dark upstairs hall was no mere tragedy. Why does she trust a London detective over the police who have already named it an accident?

Listen as a podcast, with full transcripts: https://mono-noir.transistor.fm/

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

On the last Monday of December 1957, a woman in a travelling coat climbs the stairs at Baker Street. Rosamund Ferris has flown through the night from New York, leaving her son Maddox unburied at his house in Cedar Cove, Long Island. He was shot dead in the upstairs hall by his wife, Lorna, who says she fired at a prowler she had feared for months. Holmes calls it grief and refuses to cross an ocean for a cold trail, until Watson reminds him what the journey has cost her. At the house, the shutters are drawn against a crowd of newsmen, and the sleepless widow, in black, tells the detectives to look wherever they like. Upstairs, an inspector of the county police reads out her signed statement: a noise on the roof, a shotgun by the bed, a tall figure in the dark hall, both barrels. Holmes notes where the shot struck the doorframe. Across the yard, the family chauffeur, dismissed after twenty years by a note left on the car seat, is packing his trunk and says he will not wear black for his employer. Holmes has taken the case, but what exactly is he meant to find?

From the series Sherlock Holmes — The New Cases: a real crime of the 1950s reimagined as a classic Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast, with sound design and a light score that stays under the story.

Loosely inspired by a real event of the 1950s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including the wealthy family, their household staff, the villagers, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Where a real city, state, public body or newspaper is mentioned, its part in this story is invented; the village, the estate and its telephone exchange named in it are invented too. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: London and Cedar Cove, Long Island — December 1957.

Writer v2.7 — the studio's newest writing process: the plot is planned and checked by an AI story editor, then each act is drafted with the whole story in view and edited before a word is voiced — and then cast and performed with our new casting and voice direction.

Chapters:
0:00 Rain on Baker Street
2:32 Past the Newsmen's Cameras
3:52 The Hall Between Two Doors
5:46 The Chauffeur's Rooms Above
7:06 One Lamp After Midnight
8:47 The Inspector's Private Theory
10:02 Up the Ladder to the Slates
11:23 The Dead Man's Room
12:37 A Cold Pipe at the Harbour Inn
13:39 The Widow Receives Callers
15:10 Hosing Down the Packard
16:33 Past Eleven at the Switchboard
17:55 Foghorn Before Dawn
19:10 First Light at the Cells
20:56 Gathering on the Upper Landing
23:12 Newsmen at the Gate
24:35 A Cable to Baker Street

#MonoNoirRadioDrama #SherlockHolmes #AudioDrama

Was the Kincaid heir kidnapped — or did he stage it?

Listen as a podcast, with full transcripts: https://mono-noir.transistor.fm/

London, September 1977. A telephone call drags Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson out of a sweltering Baker Street and across the Atlantic to an estate in Purchase, New York, where the son and heir of a great American fortune has vanished, a ransom tape in his own voice demands that his father pay, and the house is full of troopers, bankers and suspicion.

From the series Sherlock Holmes — The New Cases: a real 1970s crime reimagined as a classic Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast with an original score and sound design.

Loosely inspired by a real 1970s New York kidnapping. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including the missing son, his family, the suspects and the police — are invented for drama. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or agency.

Setting: London, and Purchase and White Plains, New York — September 1977.

Directed Edition: the same story, newly performed line by line with a directing pass for every voice: each actor's delivery is chosen for the moment, from a dry aside to a held breath.

Writer v2.7 — the studio's newest writing process: the plot is planned and checked by an AI story editor, then each act is drafted with the whole story in view and edited before a word is voiced.

Chapters:
0:00 A Long Hot Summer at Baker Street
2:43 The Gates at Purchase
4:17 The Stable Yard
5:43 Kincaid's Study
7:07 The State Police Command Van
8:25 The Ransom Tape in the Drawing Room
9:50 Gavin's Bedroom
11:16 Two Canvas Bags
13:03 A Trooper's Car at Three in the Morning
14:59 The Guest Room in the Dark
16:02 Morning at the Paddock Rail
17:41 The Drawing Room Again
19:05 A Bare Green Room in Westchester
20:33 Thursday Night in White Plains
21:52 Past Midnight at the Paddock
23:03 First Light at Purchase
24:48 Sunlight and Coffee in the Kitchen
26:59 Home to Baker Street

#MonoNoirRadioDrama #AudioDrama

A village doctor and his housekeeper lie dead in a Bavarian villa on Good Friday, and the police have called it a shooting followed by a suicide. Why does the doctor's son fly to Baker Street, begging Holmes to come before the funeral?

Listen as a podcast, with full transcripts: https://mono-noir.transistor.fm/

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

On Good Friday evening, April 3, 1962, London drizzles outside Baker Street when a young engineer arrives straight from the airport, refusing a chair and refusing a brandy. His father, a country doctor at Lindenau in Bavaria, is dead, and he wants Sherlock Holmes there before the burial. Holmes first declines, having no standing with a foreign police force, but Watson reminds him that an engineer trusts measurements, not feelings, and the son has already kept seats for both men on the morning flight. At the doctor's villa, Inspector Kraft of the Bavarian police explains what he found: the housekeeper, Gerda, lying in the study doorway, and the doctor in his chair with his own licensed pistol in his hand. The file, he says, is closed. Holmes reads a scorched lamp shade and places the death after dark on Thursday, yet the inspector will not share the surgeon's findings with the son. Downstairs, the doctor's nurse still answers the door to patients, and his longtime companion writes funeral cards, while the son insists that the housekeeper who carried him as a child was never harmed by his father. What has this grieving household not yet said?

From the series Sherlock Holmes — The New Cases: a real crime of the 1960s reimagined as a classic Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast, with sound design and a light score that stays under the story.

Loosely inspired by a real event of the 1960s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including the doctor's household, the villagers, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Where a real city, state, public body or newspaper is mentioned, its part in this story is invented; the village, the villa and the post office named in it are invented too. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: London and Lindenau — April 1962.

Writer v2.7 — the studio's newest writing process: the plot is planned and checked by an AI story editor, then each act is drafted with the whole story in view and edited before a word is voiced — and then cast and performed with our new casting and voice direction.

Chapters:
0:00 Good Friday in Baker Street
2:33 The Doctor's Study at Lindenau
4:29 Lilies and Wet Ink
6:11 A Message Under the Door
8:03 Pipe Smoke Above the Garage
9:37 Instruments Laid Out in Silence
10:54 Questions in the Surgery
12:34 A Night at the Inn
13:48 Easter Morning, Eight O'Clock
15:12 Dusk on the Terrace
16:16 Funeral Cards by Lamplight
17:26 Papers Boxed on the Floor
19:00 Back to the Surgery
20:36 Two Kinds of Paper
22:14 Past Midnight at the Window
23:41 The Last Envelopes
25:34 Baker Street by the Fire

#MonoNoirRadioDrama #SherlockHolmes #AudioDrama

On a wet June evening in 1949, Inspector Lestrade climbs to Baker Street clutching a sodden parcel he will not set down, hours after a passer-by was shot dead in Marlow Street. Why has Scotland Yard come to Holmes for something other than a name?

Listen as a podcast, with full transcripts: https://mono-noir.transistor.fm/

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

London, the last days of June 1949. Dr Watson is rehearsing a best man's speech by the fire at Baker Street when Inspector Lestrade arrives, rain-soaked and carrying a parcel he refuses to put down. A passer-by was shot dead in Marlow Street that afternoon, and Lestrade has come not for a name, since the Yard has been offered plenty of those, but for Holmes. At Dunmore's, a jeweller's shop, a young cashier describes three masked men with scarves to the eyes, one laying a revolver across her counter, and an old shopman who hurled his stool at them. The till was ignored. The men went straight for a safe the manager swears is never opened by day, yet it stood open when they walked in. Nearby, in Hallam House on the corner of Tottenham Court Road, the hall porter tells of a brave motorcyclist who laid his machine across the raiders' path, and of the masked man who fired and then ran into the building. Lestrade asks Holmes and Watson to keep silent about what was found there. Holmes begins to wonder who knew when that safe would stand open, and who has been left out of the story so far.

From the series Sherlock Holmes — The New Cases: a real crime of the 1940s reimagined as a classic Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast, with sound design and a light score that stays under the story.

Loosely inspired by a real event of the 1940s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including shop workers, a hall porter, passers-by, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Where a real city, state, public body or newspaper is mentioned, its part in this story is invented; the jeweller's shop, the office building and the streets named in it are invented too. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: Baker Street and Marlow Street — June 1949.

Writer v2.7 — the studio's newest writing process: the plot is planned and checked by an AI story editor, then each act is drafted with the whole story in view and edited before a word is voiced — and then cast and performed with our new casting and voice direction.

Chapters:
0:00 Rain on Baker Street
2:28 Broken Glass in Marlow Street
4:26 The Corner of Tottenham Court Road
6:13 A Landing Under a Weak Bulb
7:27 A Promise of Silence
8:50 Darkness on the Front Steps
10:14 Three Puzzles on a Wet Morning
11:17 Boards Across the Window
13:05 Back Through the Iron Gate
14:26 A Journey Through Wet Streets
16:11 Lestrade Meets Us Below
17:49 Smoke, Talk and Thirsty Men
19:10 An Inspector's Early Vigil
20:45 An Unwelcome Early Call
22:34 Questions Without Comfortable Answers
24:17 Tea by the Baker Street Fire

#MonoNoirRadioDrama #SherlockHolmes #AudioDrama

Who emptied the embassy's code room while smoke filled the upper floors?

Listen as a podcast, with full transcripts: https://mono-noir.transistor.fm/

London, October 1979. On a wet Tuesday night a cipher clerk from the American Embassy in Moscow pushes her way up to Baker Street. In August a fire swept the embassy's upper floors; when the smoke cleared, a code cabinet she had left open was found empty, and a State Department board sitting in London on Monday means to send her home in disgrace. The officer who had the watch that night has a suspect of his own in mind, and the only clue is a single black kid glove from a Bond Street maker, found beside the cabinet.

From the series Sherlock Holmes — The New Cases: a real Cold War case of the 1970s reimagined as a classic Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast, with sound design and a light score that stays under the story.

Loosely inspired by real events. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including the embassy staff, the diplomats, the Soviet officials and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: London — autumn 1979.

Directed Edition: the same story, newly performed line by line with a directing pass for every voice: each actor's delivery is chosen for the moment, from a dry aside to a held breath.

Writer v2.7 — the studio's newest writing process: the plot is planned and checked by an AI story editor, then each act is drafted with the whole story in view and edited before a word is voiced.

Chapters:
0:00 A Final Demand at Baker Street
2:54 The Door on the Chain
4:29 Four Flights of Back Stairs
5:52 A Creased Yellow Sheet
7:30 The Green Safe
9:18 A Fresh Ribbon on the List
10:46 The Interpreter's Answer
12:25 Fogged Windows on the Hill
13:43 A Hand of Patience
14:40 News Off the Moscow Plane
16:28 A Coat Worn Indoors
18:07 Friday's Aerovost
19:17 The Interview Room
20:52 The Late Yes
22:23 The Station Yard at Five
23:16 First Light, Engine Running
24:44 Rain in Her Hair
26:02 A Gas Fire Without a Quarrel

#MonoNoirRadioDrama #AudioDrama

Why would nineteen strangers walk into police headquarters and swear that they killed the same man? S01E02 of Special Matters, a continuing noir superhero audio drama from the Mono Noir Super Series. New here? Start with the pilot, S01E01, The Man in the Harbor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euQ1l6eKjg4

Listen as a podcast, with full transcripts: https://mono-noir.transistor.fm/

Boston, November 1950. At twenty minutes to six on a Tuesday morning, a sacristan unlocks a chapel vestry and finds a dead man sitting in her chair. By nine o'clock, nineteen strangers have come to police headquarters and confessed to killing him. Nell Harrow, the policewoman at the basement desk for the cases nobody else will file, counts their weapons. Jonah, the man with no pulse who hears every heartbeat in a room, counts their hearts. The numbers will not agree.

From the series Special Matters, the first of the Mono Noir Super Series: a continuing, episodic superhero audio drama in which the same characters return, grow and carry what happened into every new case. This is S01E02; the story continues in order. About fifty-three minutes, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast with an original score and sound design.

An original work of fiction. All names, characters and dialogue are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character, including the police, the clergy and the doctors, are invented for drama. Where a real city, neighborhood, street, church, newspaper or public body is mentioned, its part in this story is invented; the Cocoanut Grove fire of 1942 is a real event, remembered here with respect, and no character in this story is a real person. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution.

Setting: Boston, November 1950 — with Bay Village and Berkeley Street.

Chapters:
0:00 A Dead Man in the Vestry
4:16 Nineteen Confessions
8:58 The Basement Desk
11:43 St. Florian's Again
16:47 The Show-Up Room
20:48 A Night in the Cell
25:59 Wednesday, Ten in the Morning
31:11 Wednesday, Near Six
36:55 Evening Mass
38:51 After the Mass
45:05 Cold Coffee at Headquarters
48:10 Thursday, Ten in the Morning
50:38 Thursday, Dusk

#MonoNoirRadioDrama #SuperheroAudioDrama #AudioDrama

Who blew up a yacht moored inside a quiet California harbour, with two people aboard, at eleven o'clock on a Saturday night?

Listen as a podcast, with full transcripts: https://mono-noir.transistor.fm/

London, May 1949. Long past midnight, in a city barely thawed from the cruellest winter anyone can remember, an underwriter from Lloyd's hammers at the Baker Street letter-box. A yacht he insured has been bombed inside a California harbour, the one place yachts are kept so that nothing can wreck them. An alarm clock was wired to the charge, thirty sticks of dynamite never went off, and the owner and his wife are dead. Holmes and Watson cross an ocean and a continent to the waterfront, where the couple's grieving daughter watched the yacht burn from the shore, and where the man from Lloyd's has his own reasons for wanting someone to blame.

From the series Sherlock Holmes — The New Cases: a real 1940s crime reimagined as a classic Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast, with sound design and a light original score.

Loosely inspired by a real California crime of the 1940s. All character names, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including the victims' family and those close to them, the witnesses, the investigators, the police and the insurers — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. It is not the outcome of the real case, in which no one was ever convicted, and no character in this story represents or accuses any real person. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution.

Setting: London and Newport Beach, California — May 1949.

Directed Edition: the same story, newly performed line by line with a directing pass for every voice: each actor's delivery is chosen for the moment, from a dry aside to a held breath.

Writer v2.7 — the studio's newest writing process: the plot is planned and checked by an AI story editor, then each act is drafted with the whole story in view and edited before a word is voiced.

Chapters:
0:00 A Violin Past Midnight
2:51 The Blackened Deck
4:37 The White Dinghy at Balboa
5:54 The Property Room
7:12 The Underwriter's Sums
8:32 A Room at the Pelican Inn
9:48 Hamburgers on the Boardwalk
11:20 Alone in the Stern
12:27 Across a Scarred Table
13:58 Streetlamps Coming On
14:54 A Pipe on the Verandah
15:59 Under a Bare Bulb
17:22 Every Car on the Waterfront
18:30 Noon in the Inspector's Office
20:51 A Shuttered Hatch
22:44 Three Entries by Candlelight
23:51 Eight O'Clock on the Planks
25:24 A Real Coal Fire at Last

#MonoNoirRadioDrama #AudioDrama

The whole island has already decided who killed Sir Gideon. Did his son-in-law really do it?

Listen as a podcast, with full transcripts: https://mono-noir.transistor.fm/

London, September 1945. A censored cable from Nassau reaches Baker Street: Sir Gideon lies dead in his scorched bed in his house above the beach, and his daughter Celia begs Holmes to come at once and save her husband. Fabre, the son-in-law her father called a fortune hunter, spent the night of the storm alone on his boat, and the Inspector holds a tumbler from the dead man's night table with Fabre's fingerprints on it. Holmes promises Celia only one thing: to find what is true, even if the truth should hang him.

From the series Sherlock Holmes — The New Cases: a real 1940s crime reimagined as a classic Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast, with sound design and a light original score.

Loosely inspired by a real 1940s murder case. All character names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including the victim, his family, his business associates, the colonial authorities, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. No real person is suggested to have committed, planned or concealed any crime, fraud or wrongdoing. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution.

Setting: London and Nassau, the Bahamas — September 1945.

Directed Edition: the same story, newly performed line by line with a directing pass for every voice: each actor's delivery is chosen for the moment, from a dry aside to a held breath.

Writer v2.7 — the studio's newest writing process: the plot is planned and checked by an AI story editor, then each act is drafted with the whole story in view and edited before a word is voiced.

Chapters:
0:00 A Chess Problem at Baker Street
2:40 Four Days and Three Aeroplanes
4:08 The Veranda Above the Beach
5:43 Crystal for the Mourners
6:58 Carbolic and Pipe Smoke
8:30 The Last Cell on the Passage
10:12 The Charge Room
11:31 Pigeon Peas at the Kitchen Table
12:38 Among the Hibiscus
13:34 After the Burial
14:59 Typed Pages on the Gravel
16:30 Mourners at Sundown
18:07 Full Dark on the Harbour
20:05 Coffee at the Scrubbed Table
21:51 Tree Frogs on the Lawn
22:56 Ten O'Clock on the Veranda
25:10 Rain on Baker Street

#MonoNoirRadioDrama #AudioDrama

Did the vanished section head drown in the Rhine, or is he still alive?

Listen as a podcast, with full transcripts: https://mono-noir.transistor.fm/

Cologne, 1987. A section head of a West German security service has vanished. His coat lies folded on the Rhine embankment, his car stands locked with no keys, and police divers are dragging the river. His oldest friend, the service's Director, flies to Baker Street with one request: prove the man is only dead. Every agent the service runs in the East passes across that missing man's desk.

From the series Sherlock Holmes — The New Cases: a real Cold War case of the 1980s reimagined as a classic Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast with an original score and sound design.

Loosely inspired by a real West German Cold War case of the 1980s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including the intelligence officers, their staff, the police and the prosecutors — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution.

Setting: London and Cologne, West Germany — 1987.

Directed Edition: the same story, newly performed line by line with a directing pass for every voice: each actor's delivery is chosen for the moment, from a dry aside to a held breath.

Writer v2.7 — the studio's newest writing process: the plot is planned and checked by an AI story editor, then each act is drafted with the whole story in view and edited before a word is voiced.

Chapters:
0:00 Clocks Out of Step at Baker Street
2:44 A Locked Door in Cologne
4:27 Divers on the Rhine
5:45 The Blue Opel on the Embankment
6:43 Three Days of Dragging
8:10 The Secretary's Vigil
9:54 The Parcels Counter
11:14 A Telex at Police Headquarters
12:26 The Police Pound
13:46 The Corridor at Night
15:31 The Telephone on Engel's Desk
16:58 A Cold Compartment
18:01 The Road at Dawn
19:28 Wind Over Concrete
21:10 Lenz's Empty Office
22:14 Close on Midnight
23:54 Grey Light at the Window
25:40 Every Clock in Step

#MonoNoirRadioDrama #AudioDrama

Did the widow of Loudun really poison thirteen of her own?

Listen as a podcast, with full transcripts: https://mono-noir.transistor.fm/

Poitiers, 1952. A clerk of the court slips across the Channel on the night boat to beg Sherlock Holmes for help: a widow from Loudun is on trial for her life, accused of poisoning thirteen of her own family, and the town has already condemned her. Thirteen graves have been opened, thirteen jars sealed for the chemist in Marseille — and the clerk cannot believe the case his own court is building.

From the series Sherlock Holmes — The New Cases: a real 1950s crime reimagined as a classic Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast with an original score and sound design.

Inspired by a real French poisoning trial of the early 1950s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictionalized; the words, actions and motives of every character — including the accused, the witnesses, the investigators and the court — are invented for drama. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution.

Setting: London, Loudun and Poitiers, France — April 1952.

Directed Edition: the same story, newly performed line by line with a directing pass for every voice: each actor's delivery is chosen for the moment, from a dry aside to a held breath.

Writer v2.7 — the studio's newest writing process: the plot is planned and checked by an AI story editor, then each act is drafted with the whole story in view and edited before a word is voiced.

Chapters:
0:00 Friar's Balsam at Baker Street
2:47 The Cemetery Keeper of Loudun
4:38 The Widow's Cell at Poitiers
6:06 Thirteen Jars Under Seal
7:40 The Passage Behind the Dock
8:50 Inspector Coste's File
10:26 A Pawn Ticket at the Courtroom Doors
11:46 The Widow Keeps Her Silence
13:21 The Witnesses' Room
14:56 Coffee Across the Square
16:10 The Chemist from Marseille
17:44 Back Among the Brown Parcels
19:21 Lamplight in Coste's Office
21:11 A Third Visit to the Cell
22:55 Holmes Alone in the Dark Courtroom
23:55 Before the Morning Session
25:47 Coffee in Coste's Office

#MonoNoirRadioDrama #AudioDrama

Who bound and strangled the millionaire in his Larkin Avenue bedroom?

Listen as a podcast, with full transcripts: https://mono-noir.transistor.fm/

London, March 1956. A crackling transatlantic call reaches Baker Street: a young New York model named Dolly says her friend Victor, a Larkin Avenue millionaire, is dead in his own house, and she needs Sherlock Holmes there before the police make up their minds about her. The next day, unshaven from the flight, Holmes and Watson are standing in the dead man's bedroom.

From the series Sherlock Holmes — The New Cases: a real 1950s crime reimagined as a classic Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast with an original score and sound design.

Loosely inspired by a real 1950s New York murder. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including the victim, the women in his life, his household and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution.

Setting: London and New York — March 1956.

Directed Edition: the same story, newly performed line by line with a directing pass for every voice: each actor's delivery is chosen for the moment, from a dry aside to a held breath.

Writer v2.7 — the studio's newest writing process: the plot is planned and checked by an AI story editor, then each act is drafted with the whole story in view and edited before a word is voiced.

Chapters:
0:00 A Call Across the Atlantic
2:40 The Bedroom on Larkin Avenue
4:21 The Silent Ticker
6:04 Above the East River
7:31 A Showroom on Seventh Avenue
9:16 Lilies in the Front Hall
10:29 The Ticker Chatters Again
12:30 A Room on West Forty-Ninth Street
13:54 Midnight on Central Park South
15:03 Behind the Fitting-Room Curtain
16:29 Green Paint and a Bolted Table
17:57 Burke's Office at Centre Street
19:22 The White Room at Sutton Place
21:03 An Hour Before Dawn
22:19 Packing Cases on Larkin Avenue
23:58 Blinds Down at Centre Street
25:22 A Cable at Baker Street

#MonoNoirRadioDrama #AudioDrama

A federal agent is threatened over a man the county swears it never booked, and the recordings he made inside the jail have vanished with him. Who wanted him gone before his tapes could reach a federal court?

Listen as a podcast, with full transcripts: https://mono-noir.transistor.fm/

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

On a wet January night in 2015, Holmes is on the porch of a converted craftsman above Echo Park, stripping a dying porch light, while Watson tallies his Silver Lake clinic's books. A knock at the door brings Ruth Calloway, an FBI agent. Two sheriff's deputies came to her home in Pasco Heights and warned her that she would be arrested if she kept looking for a man the county insists was never booked. That man is Tobias Ward, her informant inside the county jail. He documented intake photographs, medical notes and a use-of-force report signed twice, and then dropped off the county's books. His last call to her was a single low-voiced remark that he had counted wrong. Watson fears making an enemy of the largest sheriff's office in the country. Holmes points out that nobody posts guards around a man who doesn't exist. At the FBI field office in Westwood, Calloway explains that Ward carried a recorder the size of a car key and mailed out about two hundred hours of tape, one folder a week, until a jail shakedown exposed him. His property is logged, but there is no receiving signature and no destination. Who moved him, and on whose order?

From the series Holmes LA: a real Los Angeles crime reimagined as a modern Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast with an original score and sound design.

Loosely inspired by a real Los Angeles case of the 2010s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including a jail booking clerk, sheriff's captains and deputies, a federal agent, a police lieutenant, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Where a real city, state, public body or newspaper is mentioned, its part in this story is invented; the county jail, the sheriff's department and the federal field office named in it are invented too. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: Los Angeles, January 2015 — with Echo Park, Westwood, Pasco Heights, the Twin Spires jail and the sheriff's headquarters at Larkmont.

Chapters:
0:00 Rain on the Echo Park Porch
3:41 Morning at the Westwood Field Office
5:28 Past One at Twin Spires
7:14 A Drawer Emptied Overnight
8:39 A Late Telephone Call Home
10:11 Fluorescent Light at Larkmont
12:04 Who Watched Her Door
13:44 Long Past Dark by the Lamp
15:13 Afternoon Waiting on the Telephone
16:48 The Booking Floor After Midnight
18:06 Corridors of the Records Annex
19:22 The Hill House, Late Again
21:16 Subpoenaed Paper in Westwood
23:01 Back to Larkmont, Order in Hand
24:20 The Marble Rail Outside Court
25:58 Last Entry from the Craftsman

#MonoNoirRadioDrama #SherlockHolmes #AudioDrama

A rain-soaked bank cashier arrives at Baker Street with a dead chairman's confession that names every theft, yet stops a hundred million dollars short of what the bank lost. Who gains when a confession cannot add up?

Listen as a podcast, with full transcripts: https://mono-noir.transistor.fm/

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

London, June 1985. Holmes has filled Baker Street with the reek of coal-tar, and Watson is sulking beside an open window, when a drenched visitor appears on the step. He is the chief cashier of a collapsed foreign bank, now auditing its ruins for the liquidators. The bank's chairman has been found hanged beneath Tolland Bridge, and a signed confession was left at his lodging. The liquidators want the file closed within the week. The cashier brings transfer books and a sealed envelope, and one objection: the confession stops a hundred million dollars short of the loss. Holmes insists on reading the books before the letter. Days later he and Watson go to the bank's London agency, where the audit is being packed into boxes and the chairman's courier fetches slips and keys for them. Then Inspector Lestrade takes them to the scaffolding beneath the bridge, where the watchman heard a ladder creak at midnight and nothing after. The Yard calls it suicide and considers the matter settled. Holmes does not. If the dead man confessed so carefully, why does his arithmetic fail where the ledgers do not?

From the series Sherlock Holmes — The New Cases: a real crime of the 1980s reimagined as a classic Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast, with sound design and a light score that stays under the story.

Loosely inspired by a real event of the 1980s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including bankers, clerks, couriers, a lodging-house keeper, liquidators, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Where a real city, state, public body or newspaper is mentioned, its part in this story is invented; the bank, its London agency and the lodging house named in it are invented too. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: London and Varenza — June 1985.

Chapters:
0:00 Coal-Tar and a Midnight Caller
3:57 The Agency Packs Its Ledgers
5:49 Midnight Beneath the Scaffolding
7:22 The Lodging House Parlour
9:22 Sorting the Pouch at Baker Street
10:48 Lamplight and the Last Ledger
12:41 The Inspector Closes His File
16:00 Shears Over a Sealed Cord
17:44 Rain and Two Loose Facts
19:13 A Request at Scotland Yard
20:59 Crates Nailed for Varenza
22:56 Morning Notes at Baker Street
24:33 Beneath the Scaffolding at Dawn
26:30 The Confession Read Aloud
28:55 Evening Tea at Baker Street

#MonoNoirRadioDrama #SherlockHolmes #AudioDrama

What became of the Member of Parliament who vanished from a Miami beach?

Listen as a podcast, with full transcripts: https://mono-noir.transistor.fm/

London, October 1974. A Member of Parliament is missing, his clothes left folded on a Miami beach, and the newspapers have already drowned him. His wife asks Sherlock Holmes only one thing: not how her husband died, but what became of him.

From the series Sherlock Holmes — The New Cases: a real 1970s mystery reimagined as a classic Sherlock Holmes radio drama, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast with an original score and sound design.

Loosely inspired by a real 1970s British case. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including the missing man, his wife, the people he knew and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Where a real city or public body is mentioned, its part in this story is invented. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: London, the Black Country and beyond — autumn 1974.

Directed Edition: the same story, newly performed line by line with a directing pass for every voice: each actor's delivery is chosen for the moment, from a dry aside to a held breath.

Writer v2.7 — the studio's newest writing process: the plot is planned and checked by an AI story editor, then each act is drafted with the whole story in view and edited before a word is voiced.

Chapters:
0:00 A Telephone Call in the Fog
2:42 The House on a Kensington Square
4:28 A Church Hall in Walsall
6:05 Lestrade's Office at Scotland Yard
7:49 The Green Leather Desk
9:27 Tea at Baker Street
10:49 Mrs Rudge's Parlour
12:32 Holly on the Hill
13:51 Lestrade in the Drawing Room
15:34 A Night Flight
16:42 Behind the Brass Doors
18:27 A Thursday at the Counter
19:51 Four in the Morning
21:20 Lestrade Arrives, Unshaven
23:03 Behind the Teller's Grille
24:57 A New Carpet at Baker Street

#MonoNoirRadioDrama #SherlockHolmes #AudioDrama

Hours after Saturday's race at Gum Flats, the chief steward of the Moreton Turf Club flies halfway round the world to Baker Street, insisting the result cannot be allowed to stand. What happened in that race that a steward would cross the world rather than trust his own stewards' room?

Listen as a podcast, with full transcripts: https://mono-noir.transistor.fm/

On a sweltering Sunday near midnight in November 1986, Holmes and Watson are interrupted at Baker Street by Kincaid, chief steward of the Moreton Turf Club, who has flown straight from Brisbane with a brown-paper bundle he will not set down. A race was run at Gum Flats on Saturday afternoon, and he cannot let its result stand. Holmes at first declines, but Kincaid's odd manner and his refusal even to sit win the detectives over, and they follow him to Queensland. At the weighing room, Inspector Rutherford of the Queensland Police is under pressure: bookmakers face a payout of three million dollars, and the Minister wants someone charged by Monday. In the suburb of Hendra, the suspended trainer Loretta has lost her licence and her credit, her neighbour Varley is cataloguing her horses for a sale on Thursday, and her strapper Trish, unpaid for weeks, is barely civil to anyone. One stable box stands swept bare. Everyone at Hendra has a grievance, a debt or a reason to keep quiet, and Holmes has only a stable yard to go on. Who in this tidy, ruined yard is keeping a secret, and what does Kincaid fear he will find among his own officials?

From the series Sherlock Holmes — The New Cases: a real crime of the 1980s reimagined as a classic Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast, with sound design and a light score that stays under the story.

Loosely inspired by a real event of the 1980s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including the racing stewards and officials, the trainers and stable hands, the bookmakers, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Where a real city, state, public body or newspaper is mentioned, its part in this story is invented; the racecourse, the turf club and the stables named in it are invented too. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: London and Brisbane — November 1986.

Directed Edition: the same story, newly performed line by line with a directing pass for every voice: each actor's delivery is chosen for the moment, from a dry aside to a held breath.

Writer v2.7 — the studio's newest writing process: the plot is planned and checked by an AI story editor, then each act is drafted with the whole story in view and edited before a word is voiced.

Chapters:
0:00 Midnight at Baker Street
2:48 The Weighing Room at Gum Flats
4:21 Hendra, Over the Back Fence
5:53 The Chief Steward's Office
7:38 Dusk in the Tack Room
9:07 Trish at the Wash Bay
10:24 Among the Chaff Bags
12:02 Morning Behind the Stewards' Stand
13:33 Sale Morning at Hendra
15:15 Empty Seats, Silent Track
16:23 The Watch-house Charge Desk
18:12 Nightfall in Kincaid's Office
19:35 The Winning Post, Thin Moon
20:51 Friday Morning, Eight O'Clock
22:35 A Stud Book from Sydney
25:13 Rain at Last on Baker Street

#MonoNoirRadioDrama #SherlockHolmes #AudioDrama

A historic gallery is about to close over a Pollock the lab calls a fake, and its director has sent for a detective she cannot be sure will clear her. Who made the painting, and who gains if the Harlan falls?

Listen as a podcast, with full transcripts: https://mono-noir.transistor.fm/

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

A new edition of “The Garage Masterpieces”, rewritten from the ground up.

Brooklyn, a sleety Thursday evening in February 2014. Holmes has turned the dining table into a corkboard of unsolved deaths when Captain Okafor of Homicide, off duty, climbs the stoop with a favor to ask. The Harlan Gallery, founded in 1851, is being sued by a buyer who paid twenty-two million dollars for a Pollock the lab now calls a fake. Its director, Celeste, wants a detective who might prove her wrong. Holmes objects that nobody has died, and that the dead on his corkboard have waited long enough, but Watson talks him into his coat. At the Harlan, pale squares mark the walls where paintings once hung, and the staff has been let go. Celeste explains that the Pollock came from a private collector who inherited his pictures from his father, and whose name only her dealer knows. His single letter to the gallery in fifteen years is all she can offer. Then police arrive with a warrant and a dolly to carry off the collector's remaining canvases, and Okafor admits he has been lent to the district attorney's art-fraud squad. Celeste feels she was brought a watcher, not a helper. By morning the dealer, Delia, has driven in from Long Island with lilies, and she will not give up her client's name. Who is the collector nobody has met?

From the series Holmes NYC: a real New York crime reimagined as a modern Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast with an original score and sound design.

Loosely inspired by a real New York case of the 2010s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including gallery directors, art dealers, painters, collectors, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Where a real city, state, public body or newspaper is mentioned, its part in this story is invented; the gallery and the squad room named in it are invented too. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: New York City, 2014 — with Brooklyn and Long Island.

Writer v2.7.0.55 — our newest writing process: the plot is planned and checked by an AI story editor, then each act is drafted with the whole story in view and edited before a word is voiced — and then cast and performed with our new casting and voice direction.

Chapters:
0:00 Sleet and Noodles on Flatbush
2:42 Bronze Doors After Ten
4:14 A Dolly Across the Gallery
5:41 Burnt Coffee, Past Midnight
7:21 Lilies on the Director's Desk
9:00 The Storeroom Behind the Office
10:23 Counting Nights From a Parked Car
11:42 Warm Pastries Under Bare Walls
13:01 A Corner of the Table
14:00 Arrest Beneath the Empty Hooks
15:48 A Visitor in a Paint-Flecked Parka
17:47 Keys Borrowed From the Precinct
19:10 A Bench in the Corridor
20:33 A Property Envelope on the Desk
22:20 Return to the Bare Walls
24:12 The Alley Door Opens
26:15 Brooklyn, Well Past Two

#MonoNoirRadioDrama #SherlockHolmes #AudioDrama

How does a man drown in a dry room bolted from the inside? PILOT · S01E01 of Special Matters, a continuing noir superhero audio drama from the Mono Noir Super Series. Start here.

Listen as a podcast, with full transcripts: https://mono-noir.transistor.fm/

Boston, November 1950. A young dockside lookout is found drowned in his own bedroom, with the door bolted from the inside and not a drop of water on the floor, the bed or the rug. The case lands on the basement desk of Nell Harrow, the policewoman who gets the cases Homicide will not touch. Her strangest lead is a tall, bald, dripping man seen on the end of Long Wharf, a man who never blinks. When she finds him there, he has no name, no memory of who he is, no pulse, and a way of hearing every heartbeat around him. The Captain wants a man, not a ghost, and a court will only take what can be proved.

From the series Special Matters, the first of the Mono Noir Super Series: a continuing, episodic superhero audio drama in which the same characters return, grow and carry what happened into every new case. This is the pilot, S01E01, so start here. About fifty minutes, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast with an original score and sound design.

An original work of fiction. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character, including the police, the doctors, the judge, the lawyer and the dockworkers, are invented for drama. Where a real city, neighborhood, street, wharf, newspaper, hospital, court or public body is mentioned, its part in this story is invented. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution.

Setting: Boston, November 1950 — with Long Wharf and Charlestown.

Chapters:
0:00 A Dry Room
1:52 Wet Comes Down Here
3:41 Under the Glass
5:10 Two Women and a Kettle
7:07 The Yard on Atlantic Avenue
9:07 The End of Long Wharf
10:23 Does Not Dry
11:47 Warm Is a Kind of Sound
13:27 A Visitor at Three
15:07 Varro by the Stove
17:08 Four Things on a Desk
19:04 Three Questions
20:56 The Midnight Newspaper
22:31 One in the Morning
23:57 The Cold Room
25:30 The Small Hours
26:35 Six Feet by Eight
27:52 The Lockup
29:03 What to Call Him
31:22 Hinges Rot
32:41 The Monday Meeting
35:12 Low Water
36:58 A Knock on Tuesday
39:11 Nell's Notebook
40:34 The Inquest Opens
42:36 The Afternoon Session
44:57 The Courthouse Corridor
46:40 Friday in Court
48:36 Long Wharf at Dusk

#MonoNoirRadioDrama #SuperheroAudioDrama #AudioDrama

On a thundery September evening in 1982, a secretary telephones Baker Street: Chief Ojo has been seized from the pavement outside his own front door, in full view of her office window. Why would kidnappers work so openly, with a witness looking on?

Listen as a podcast, with full transcripts: https://mono-noir.transistor.fm/

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

London, September 1982. Sherlock Holmes is deep in a chemical experiment, and Dr Watson is struggling with a wedding reply, when the telephone rings. The caller is the private secretary to Chief Ojo, an African statesman living in Bayswater. She saw him taken from the pavement outside his house, and she begs Holmes to come at once. Holmes would rather leave a street abduction to the police, but Watson's remark that the kidnappers did not care who saw them changes his mind. In Bayswater, the secretary shows them the Chief's broken spectacles lying in the gutter, crushed by a tyre. Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard is already in the study, with ports and airports warned and the Foreign Office pressing him for quiet and quick results. An unfinished letter to the Chief's wife shows that he walked out for a newspaper every evening at six. From her window the secretary tells what she saw: a yellow van with its engine running, three men on the pavement, and a gloved hand reaching from the dark interior. Someone shouted for 'the Doctor' and his needle. Who was in that van, and who is the Doctor?

From the series Sherlock Holmes — The New Cases: a real crime of the 1980s reimagined as a classic Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast, with sound design and a light score that stays under the story.

Loosely inspired by a real event of the 1980s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including a visiting chief and his household, a driver, a customs officer, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Where a real city, state, public body or newspaper is mentioned, its part in this story is invented; the Bayswater house, the airport and the hospital named in it are invented too. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: Baker Street and Bayswater — September 1982.

Writer v2.7 — the studio's newest writing process: the plot is planned and checked by an AI story editor, then each act is drafted with the whole story in view and edited before a word is voiced — and then cast and performed with our new casting and voice direction.

Chapters:
0:00 A Thundery September at Baker Street
2:57 Spectacles in the Gutter
4:10 The Study and the Unfinished Letter
5:50 A Window Above the Front Door
7:30 Brandy in the Hall
8:59 Headlamps Under the Mews Arch
10:21 The Driver's Statement
11:42 Amber Light on the Stucco
12:43 A Torch Beside the Daimler
14:32 A Long Drive East
16:09 The Officer's Itch
17:11 Four Faces in the Torchlight
18:31 Small Hours in Bayswater
19:55 A Green Room Below Stairs
21:25 Before Dawn, Beneath the Lamp
22:38 First Light Under the Roof
24:30 The Kettle Comes to the Boil
26:09 Some Days On, Back at Baker Street

#MonoNoirRadioDrama #SherlockHolmes #AudioDrama

On Easter Eve 1941, a woman walks from Stepney to Baker Street to say her sister went out after dark on Good Friday and never came home. What took a woman out into the blackout on the one night when London stood still?

Listen as a podcast, with full transcripts: https://mono-noir.transistor.fm/

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

On Easter Eve, 1941, Holmes and Watson are passing a quiet evening at Baker Street, wagering a shilling on the weather, when a visitor slips up through Mrs Hudson's kitchen. Naomi has walked from Stepney to report that her sister Esther went out after dark on Good Friday and has not come home. The police have taken the name, and Holmes is inclined to leave it with them until Watson points out how strange the hour is: shops shut, chapels empty, no buses worth the name. They take the case, and a week's searching comes to nothing. Fifteen months later, Holmes and Watson are called to the cellar of a bombed Methodist chapel in Kennington. There the local air-raid warden, Rudge, shows them a flagstone that demolition men lifted that morning, and the grave-shaped hollow beneath it holds a woman's body. Inspector Lestrade is ready to call it enemy action, but the warden insists he searched every stone in that cellar after the bomb fell and found nobody. At the Southwark mortuary, Naomi identifies a green coat whose hem she once mended by hand. It was the coat Esther wore when she went out to collect an old debt. Her pockets are empty. Who laid her beneath that stone, and why did the warden keep so careful a record of the cellar?

From the series Sherlock Holmes — The New Cases: a real crime of the 1940s reimagined as a classic Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast, with sound design and a light score that stays under the story.

Loosely inspired by a real event of the 1940s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including the wardens, watchers and cleaners of a London lane, a family from Stepney, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Where a real city, state, public body or newspaper is mentioned, its part in this story is invented; the chapel, the solicitors' office and the lane named in it are invented too. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: Baker Street and Kennington — March 1941.

Writer v2.7 — the studio's newest writing process: the plot is planned and checked by an AI story editor, then each act is drafted with the whole story in view and edited before a word is voiced — and then cast and performed with our new casting and voice direction.

Chapters:
0:00 Easter Eve at Baker Street
2:45 Beneath the Bombed Chapel
4:47 The Southwark Viewing Room
6:35 A Warden's Hut on Kennington Lane
7:55 Lantern Light Below the Chapel
9:25 The Solicitors' Fire-Watch Post
11:26 Sandbags Above Kennington Lane
12:35 Questions in the Warden's Hut
14:03 Dawn on the Office Step
15:19 Tea and Theories at Baker Street
16:28 Cold Hours in the Cells
17:51 Dusk on the Office Stairs
18:54 Morning at the Police Station
20:14 Behind the Greengrocer's Shutters
21:53 Twilight Beside the Flagstone
22:48 The Fire-Watch Post Once More
24:14 Sugar and a Sunday Suit

#MonoNoirRadioDrama #SherlockHolmes #AudioDrama

A nanny goes down to a Belgravia basement to make a pot of tea and never comes back up. Her mother rings Baker Street before the police have finished with the house. Who was waiting on the dark kitchen stair?

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

On a sleet-soaked Friday in December 1976, Holmes and Watson are scrubbing a scorch from the Baker Street carpet when a telephone call comes in from a woman who will not leave her address. Her daughter, a nanny, was killed in a Belgravia house the night before, and she wants the truth while someone is still willing to tell it. Holmes declines to answer, since half of Scotland Yard is already in Belgravia, but he and Watson set out anyway. In a tall white house they find Inspector Lestrade, who did not send for them. The nanny went down to the basement and never returned. The mistress of the house went after her, was beaten on the unlit stairs, broke free and ran to a nearby public house, where she named her husband aloud. The husband has reappeared at his solicitor's with a stranger's name on his lips and no account of his night, and his gambling friends all repeat the same story. In the nanny's attic room, among a child's drawings of a zoo, Holmes asks who she was. Then the pursuit leads to a Mayfair gaming club. Where did the master of the house spend Thursday night?

From the series Sherlock Holmes — The New Cases: a real crime of the 1970s reimagined as a classic Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast, with sound design and a light score that stays under the story.

Loosely inspired by a real event of the 1970s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including a nanny and her mother, a nobleman and his family, a club manager and his members, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Where a real city, state, public body or newspaper is mentioned, its part in this story is invented; the gaming club, the public house and the hospital named in it are invented too. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: Baker Street and Belgravia — December 1976.

Writer v2.7 — the studio's newest writing process: the plot is planned and checked by an AI story editor, then each act is drafted with the whole story in view and edited before a word is voiced — and then cast and performed with our new casting and voice direction.

Chapters:
0:00 Sleet and Scorch at Baker Street
2:33 A White House in Belgravia
4:32 The Room Under the Slates
5:55 The Head of the Basement Stairs
7:23 Past Midnight at the Mercer
8:59 Behind the Baize Door
10:32 A Corner Shop in Croydon
12:17 Twice in One Day
13:21 The Marble Hall Again
14:40 Grey Dawn at Folkestone
16:20 Walking the Quay
17:07 The Baccarat Room Falls Silent
18:51 Early Monday in Croydon
20:04 A Face Across the Counter
21:51 A Cold Room at the Yard
22:51 Back Up the Mercer's Stair
24:35 Baker Street, Two Evenings Later

Within hours of his wife's death, a doctor in Ohio puts an overseas call through to Baker Street and asks Sherlock Holmes to come before "the Cleveland papers decide what happened." Why is a grieving husband racing the newspapers instead of the police?

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

London, August 1956. It is a close, thundery Sunday evening; rationing has only just ended, and Mrs Hudson has celebrated with an extravagance of bacon. Holmes, idle and peevish for a week, is scraping at his violin, and Watson sits by the open window dreading the third telephone call of the evening from a frightened retired bandmaster, when the line that rings instead is an overseas one from Ohio. A doctor named Grant says his wife Helen was killed that morning in their house on Shore Road, and he wants Holmes there before the papers have decided what happened. By noon the next day Holmes and Watson are standing at a white frame house above the lake, with flashbulbs popping on the lawn, where a heavy man in shirtsleeves fills the doorway: a homicide inspector who has been trying since yesterday to question the husband and who greets them as the family's hired Englishman, sure they were hired to explain the evidence away. Grant lies propped on his pillows in a private room at the family's hospital; the papers are already asking pointed questions about him, and his brother, a surgeon, cuts him off mid-sentence. Next door, a neighbour of nine years, who sleeps with her window open on hot nights, has a good deal to say. Holmes has crossed an ocean for one answer: what woke Grant that night?

From the series Sherlock Holmes — The New Cases: a real crime of the 1950s reimagined as a classic Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast, with sound design and a light score that stays under the story.

Loosely inspired by a real event of the 1950s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including the victim, her husband, his brother, the neighbours, the doctors and staff of the hospital, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Where a real city, state, public body or newspaper is mentioned, its part in this story is invented; the lakeside town, its hospital and its streets are invented too. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: London and Ohio — August 1956.

Writer v2.7 — the studio's newest writing process: the plot is planned and checked by an AI story editor, then each act is drafted with the whole story in view and edited before a word is voiced — and then cast and performed with our new casting and voice direction.

Chapters:
0:00 A Thundery Sunday and a Bandmaster's Heart
2:52 A White Frame House Above the Water
4:20 A Private Room at the Family's Hospital
5:48 Ward Lamps Burning Low
7:08 A Strip of Lawn to the Neighbour's Porch
8:32 Standing Beside the Daybed
10:00 Scorched Coffee in the Neighbour's Kitchen
11:26 Weathered Steps Down the Bluff
13:03 Wet Stones at the Water's Edge
13:56 Holding a Brother Together
15:11 Thunder Along the Lake at Nightfall
16:23 The Morning of the Funeral
17:49 An Empty Place at the Graveside
18:55 A Rattling Fan at Police Headquarters
20:25 Holmes Awake on a Corridor Bench
21:24 A Crowded Room at Breakfast
22:48 Carbolic and Steam, Two Flights Down
24:07 A Wheelchair in the Corridor
25:29 A Week Later in Baker Street

Someone has stripped the vault of a Nice bank of twenty-nine million francs and posted the bank's English clerk a photograph of the wreckage, with one word on the back: Merci. An inspector of the Police Judiciaire carries it to Baker Street and lays it face down on Holmes's table. Why would a thief go to the trouble of thanking the clerk?

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

London, July 1978. It has not rained for weeks, Regent's Park has burnt the colour of toast under a hosepipe ban, and Holmes, idle since spring, is firing at the far wall while Watson counts the holes in pencil for Mrs Hudson's bill, when a man who has been standing in the doorway, long enough to count the shots, lays a photograph face down on the table. He is an inspector of the Police Judiciaire in Nice, he says the vault of the Banque Mercantile has been robbed, and he has already bought the seats for the first flight in the morning. Holmes calls a bank robbery the plainest crime there is — until Watson turns the photograph over. By the next noon they are under the palms of Nice, in a shuttered banking hall where every bench is taken by a depositor whose box has been emptied. The bank's English clerk, who takes its depositors down to their boxes, tells what the post brought him: a picture of the gutted boxes and, across the wall behind them, the thief's motto — without guns, without anger, without cruelty. A widow whose late husband's ring lay in her box holds the clerk to blame. In the old town, in a tall ochre house where he has two rooms, a frightened concierge keeps the lodge at the foot of the stair and a shopkeeper downstairs insists the clerk needs a brandy, while the inspector waits on the edge of the clerk's bed among the shirts. And down in the vault, under armed guard, three hundred and sixty boxes stand open like sardine tins.

From the series Sherlock Holmes — The New Cases: a real crime of the 1970s reimagined as a classic Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast, with sound design and a light score that stays under the story.

Loosely inspired by a real event of 1978. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including the vault clerk and the bank's staff, its depositors, the thief and his associates, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Where a real city, place or public body is mentioned, its part in this story is invented; the bank and the newspaper named in it are invented too. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: London and Nice — July 1978.

Writer v2.7 — the studio's newest writing process: the plot is planned and checked by an AI story editor, then each act is drafted with the whole story in view and edited before a word is voiced — and then cast and performed with our new casting and voice direction.

Chapters:
0:00 Counting Bullet Holes in a Heatwave
2:19 The Shuttered Banking Hall
4:21 A Tall Ochre House in the Old Town
5:59 The Inspector Among the Shirts
7:10 Down the Vault Stair
8:45 A Ceiling Fan That Would Not Turn
10:15 Shelling Beans at the Lodge Window
11:29 Back at the Counter in His Bank Tie
13:08 Warm Pernod on the Hotel Terrace
14:18 A Saucer of Milk at the Lodge
16:00 A Velvet Stool Under Hot Lamps
17:21 Friday, White and Airless
18:45 A Stiff Envelope, Unopened
20:45 Daybreak Over the Baie des Anges
21:54 A Bolt Drawn Back
24:00 Stopped Dead on the Bottom Step
25:59 A Telegram from Nice

Who slipped Julian Crewe a warning before his Monday-at-ten interview, and why would a colonel hire a private detective rather than trust a single member of his own staff?

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

A new edition of “The Midnight Ferry”, rewritten from the ground up.

Vienna, spring 1953. An envelope with no sender lands on a private detective's mat: twenty pounds in notes, a pass made out to him as interpreter, and a plain-paper note from a colonel who says a man in his charge has vanished and that he trusts none of his staff. At the occupation headquarters, the colonel explains. Julian Crewe, a political-division officer long suspected by his superiors of working for the other side, was due to be questioned at his desk on Monday at ten. He never came, and neither did his closest friend and colleague, Larkin. Someone inside the building must have warned them. The detective and his friend Dr. Fuchs, who narrates, visit Crewe's apartment house, where the concierge insists she polished everything on Monday morning and that nobody passed her lodge. They also visit an inspector at the district police station, who lent a constable for the search of the flat. Back at headquarters, the signals ledger shows a telephone call placed from the cipher room on Friday evening, and the young clerk on duty swears he never made it. Who was on the other end of that line, and why will the clerk not say?

From the series Vienna Files: a real Austrian crime reimagined as a post-war noir radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast with an original score and sound design.

Loosely inspired by a real Austrian case of the 1950s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including occupation officers, a cipher clerk, a concierge, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Where a real city, state, public body or newspaper is mentioned, its part in this story is invented; the headquarters, the apartment house and the card room named in it are invented too. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: Vienna, Spring 1953 — with an occupation headquarters in a palace, a quiet apartment house, a police station and a river landing.

Writer v2.7.0.55 — our newest writing process: the plot is planned and checked by an AI story editor, then each act is drafted with the whole story in view and edited before a word is voiced — and then cast and performed with our new casting and voice direction.

Chapters:
0:00 An Envelope Without a Sender
1:24 The Colonel's Gilded Room
3:28 A Concierge and Her Keys
5:35 Carbolic and Stale Coffee
7:22 The Evening's Signal Ledger
8:54 A Folder on the Desk
10:44 Two Pencilled Notes
11:42 The Charge Sheet Waits
13:19 Gin at the Officers' Mess
14:56 Coffee in the Lodge
16:48 A Corridor Gone Dark
18:10 The Cells Beneath the Wing
20:04 A Walk on the Gravel
21:34 Dusk, and a Summons
23:59 The Last Search
26:14 Weeks Later, Upstairs

A parcel from Beijing is stopped at JFK under a green tag, and the supervisor who signed the hold has vanished. Who needed that shipment held, and who needed it to fly?

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

March 2017. In a Brooklyn brownstone with dead radiators, Holmes is charting the super's broken promises on graph paper when Paige Winters, a customs supervisor at JFK, arrives straight from the airport. A screener named Rosa Delgado pulled a parcel off the Beijing freight line, and a green tag put it on manual hold. It is diplomatic cargo, and Washington will ask questions in forty-eight hours. The hold carries the name of Winters's own supervisor, Marcus Ellery, who has since vanished. Winters took the tag before anyone upstairs could file it, and Holmes promptly takes it from her, reading a nervous man in the dents along its edge. That night Holmes and Watson cross the cargo docks. Delgado is frightened for her job, and the last man who asked questions left his car idling and never came back for it. In a quiet break room she describes what she watched on the ramp monitor: a hooded figure in a station coat and thin gloves, carrying the parcel away alone. The next morning they sit down with Lily Chen, the Meridian Pacific station manager, who pours oolong and wants the shipment cleared before Washington calls again. Why would anyone take such trouble over one parcel, and where has Ellery gone?

From the series Holmes NYC: a real New York crime reimagined as a modern Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast with an original score and sound design.

Loosely inspired by a real New York case of the 2010s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including customs officers, airline staff, diplomats, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Where a real city, state, public body or newspaper is mentioned, its part in this story is invented; the airline, its cargo office and the airport's docks named in it are invented too. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: New York City, March 2017 — with Brooklyn, Queens and JFK Airport.

Chapters:
0:00 A Cold Night in Brooklyn
2:44 Midnight on the Cargo Docks
4:34 Ten Minutes in the Break Room
6:58 Oolong at the Airline Office
8:31 Paperwork by the Dead Radiators
10:13 A Customs Folder, No Rain
11:52 Ink Under the Lamp
13:44 The Colonel and the Captain
15:44 Wet Concrete, Beijing Flight Waiting
17:40 Cold Pipes After Midnight
19:00 Morning at the Station Office
20:49 Pacing the Consulting Rooms
22:36 Moretti Waits by the Door
23:48 Back to the Cargo Dock
25:36 The Last Entry in the Log

Hours after a broadcaster dies of a fever, his widow telephones Baker Street because Scotland Yard has stopped listening. Yet the Yard's own inspector turns up at her door after midnight. Who is uneasy about a death everyone is calling natural?

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

London, November 1976. Holmes is buried in his commonplace books, sentencing letters about missing tortoises, when the telephone brings a woman's voice from a hospital in south London. Beverley Lazarov's husband, a broadcaster of forty-nine, has died after four days of fever, and Scotland Yard has told her that grief always wants a villain. Holmes hesitates, but Watson's question, why the Yard should pronounce on a fever at all, sends them out into the night. Past one in the morning Mrs Lazarov shows them the room where her husband lay and the chair where she sat beside him, and tells them about the man she married: someone who left his homeland a decade ago and made a weekly programme that was listened to far beyond London. Before long Inspector Lestrade arrives in the rain, sent, he admits, by a call from the Foreign Office rather than by any worry of his own. The hospital's verdict is blood poisoning, cause unknown, and the post-mortem is yet to come. Lestrade dismisses the widow's fears as the habit of people who have fled a hard country. Holmes is not so sure. Whose unease brought a Scotland Yard inspector out to a fever death in the small hours?

From the series Sherlock Holmes — The New Cases: a real crime of the 1970s reimagined as a classic Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast, with sound design and a light score that stays under the story.

Loosely inspired by a real event of the 1970s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including a broadcaster, his widow, his colleagues, hotel staff, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Where a real city, state, public body or newspaper is mentioned, its part in this story is invented; the hospital, the broadcasting house and the hotel named in it are invented too. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: Baker Street and south London — November 1976.

Writer v2.7 — the studio's newest writing process: the plot is planned and checked by an AI story editor, then each act is drafted with the whole story in view and edited before a word is voiced — and then cast and performed with our new casting and voice direction.

Chapters:
0:00 Paste Pots and Unanswered Post
2:51 A Narrow House After One
4:26 A Knock in the Hall
5:42 The Kitchen at Dead of Night
6:55 Morning Rush, River Wind
8:16 The Newsroom Falls Silent
9:59 The Sickroom, Curtains Drawn
11:53 The Dark Studio Lamp
13:25 Behind the Porters' Desk
14:48 Coffee Among the Potted Palms
15:45 A Cramped Room, Short Patience
16:45 Carbolic and Stewed Tea
18:19 Waiting in the Hotel Lobby
19:45 Marble Hall, Hurrying Feet
21:25 A Second Visit to the Hotel
22:55 Waiting Under the Palms
24:10 The Lift Doors Open
26:20 Home to Baker Street

A will in a dead billionaire's name turns up on a lobby desk in Salt Lake City, and the man it makes rich begs the police to burn it before he will so much as call a lawyer. Why would an heir refuse a fortune before he has even read the page?

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

In the wet June of 1974, a crackling long-distance call reaches Baker Street from an inspector of the Salt Lake City police. A will has surfaced in the name of the late billionaire Victor Crane, and it makes his former aide, Walter Ashby, a rich man. Ashby will not go near a lawyer until Sherlock Holmes has seen it, so Holmes and Dr Watson cross the ocean. In Utah they find reporters crowding the lobby of a church office tower, where the receptionist, Bernice, who found the envelope on her desk, says that everyone believes she put it there. At police headquarters, Inspector Gallagher shows them an office papered with forty claimed wills, yet this one stands apart. It leaves a sixteenth of the fortune to a young pump attendant in a farm town an hour north, and a sixteenth to Ashby. Ashby insists the document is not Crane's and wants it destroyed. At the gas station, the pump attendant, Lyle, tells Holmes how he once gave a bleeding old man a lift through the desert, and the station's owner, Ramona, who once kept Crane's house, demands to read the will for herself. Gallagher swears it has never left his safe. Who wrote the will, and why does the man it enriches fear it?

From the series Sherlock Holmes — The New Cases: a real crime of the 1970s reimagined as a classic Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast, with sound design and a light score that stays under the story.

Loosely inspired by a real event of the 1970s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including a billionaire's former aide, a church receptionist, a gas-station owner, a young pump attendant, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Where a real city, state, public body or newspaper is mentioned, its part in this story is invented; the office tower, the gas station and the motel named in it are invented too. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: London and Salt Lake City — June 1974.

Writer v2.7 — the studio's newest writing process: the plot is planned and checked by an AI story editor, then each act is drafted with the whole story in view and edited before a word is voiced — and then cast and performed with our new casting and voice direction.

Chapters:
0:00 A Wet Night at Baker Street
2:52 Flashbulbs Around the Lobby Desk
4:07 Forty Wills and One Exception
5:40 Farms Beneath the Mountains
7:25 A Motel Room by the Freeway
8:43 The Examiners Deliver Their Verdict
9:52 Questions at the Lobby Desk
11:37 A Cupboard of an Office
13:03 Fuel for the Drive South
14:06 A Visit Across County Lines
15:23 Dusk on the Northern Freeway
16:25 Three Pages Under Lamplight
18:10 Before the Doors Open
19:56 Noon at Police Headquarters
21:59 Past Midnight, Violin Silent
23:06 First Light on the Forecourt
24:47 The Room with One Window
26:34 Rain Again at Baker Street

Nine days after the Admiral vanishes from a London gallery wall, a letter reaches a Fleet Street night desk demanding £210,000 for pensioners' television licences, and Scotland Yard calls it the work of a crank. Why would a thief who wants the money announce himself to a newsroom?

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

In the last days of September 1963, Sherlock Holmes is so bored that he is carving the Queen's initials into the Baker Street plaster with Watson's old service revolver when a night editor of Pennant Press arrives with a claim. Someone has written to her desk saying he holds the Admiral, the celebrated portrait missing from the Harcourt Gallery since dawn on the twenty-first. The Yard calls it a crank's work, and she has until midnight to decide whether to print. Holmes scorns hoaxes but cannot leave this one alone. At the gallery, Inspector Lestrade and an old warder show them a bare nail where the portrait hung, and Lestrade reads out the letter's demand of two hundred and ten thousand pounds, to be spent on pensioners' television licences. Along the next wall a queue files past the empty space, a young copyist works at her easel, and the visitors gossip about the thief. That night the newsroom hands the original letter to the Inspector, and Holmes and Watson follow it to Scotland Yard. There a forced lavatory window and an alarm that never rang raise a question: who knew the house well enough to choose that hour?

From the series Sherlock Holmes — The New Cases: a real crime of the 1960s reimagined as a classic Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast, with sound design and a light score that stays under the story.

Loosely inspired by a real event of the 1960s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including the gallery warders, the copyists, the visitors, the newspaper staff, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Where a real city, state, public body or newspaper is mentioned, its part in this story is invented; the gallery and the newspaper named in it are invented too. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: Baker Street and the Harcourt Gallery — September 1963.

Writer v2.7 — the studio's newest writing process: the plot is planned and checked by an AI story editor, then each act is drafted with the whole story in view and edited before a word is voiced — and then cast and performed with our new casting and voice direction.

Chapters:
0:00 A Tuesday in Baker Street
2:47 The Bare Nail at Harcourt
4:24 The Copyist's Corner
6:07 Midnight on Fleet Street
7:44 A Green-Shaded Lamp at the Yard
8:56 The Copyists' Cupboard
10:15 Beneath the Back Stairs
11:41 The Trestle Table Reckoning
13:16 Afternoon Among the Easels
14:40 Behind the Cupboard Door
15:57 Doubts on the Gallery Steps
16:48 A Basement at St Cheswick Row
18:07 A Locker Emptied in Silence
19:30 The Cupboard Opened at Last
21:16 Lamps Coming On at Dusk
22:26 Ten O'Clock at the Easel
23:54 The Empty Wall, Once More
25:42 The Evening Paper at Baker Street

A day after his brother is shot dead in Rio de Janeiro, a man calls at Baker Street and begs Sherlock Holmes to act where he officially may not, afraid the killer will "walk free." Why does he fear a killer who has not yet been found?

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

In the wet June of 1954, Dr Watson is losing a quarrel with his tax return when a visitor from an embassy calls at Baker Street: Tomás Almeida, the very man Watson beat at billiards that afternoon. Tomás's brother Rubens was shot dead in Rio de Janeiro the night before, and Tomás fears the killer will walk free. Holmes balks at a client who may not officially ask, and at a scene half a world away, yet the odd phrasing nags at him, and soon he and Watson are flying south. On a black hillside above the lagoon, Inspector Figueiredo shows them where Rubens's car was found, its lamps dark and its engine cold, his wallet and watch untouched. Someone, Holmes judges, was expected. Tomás has already settled on a name: Isabel, an eighteen-year-old with no family, whom Rubens meant to marry. In a tall pink boarding house in Botafogo, the widowed owner, her grandson, an Air Force lieutenant, and the grieving girl receive the investigators, and the inspector's own evidence begins to point her way. Is Tomás seeking justice for his brother, or only someone to blame?

From the series Sherlock Holmes — The New Cases: a real crime of the 1950s reimagined as a classic Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast, with sound design and a light score that stays under the story.

Loosely inspired by a real event of the 1950s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including a widowed landlady, her family and lodgers, a nightclub singer, a bank clerk, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Where a real city, state, public body or newspaper is mentioned, its part in this story is invented; the boarding house, the nightclub and the lagoon road named in it are invented too. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: London and Rio de Janeiro — June 1954.

Writer v2.7 — the studio's newest writing process: the plot is planned and checked by an AI story editor, then each act is drafted with the whole story in view and edited before a word is voiced — and then cast and performed with our new casting and voice direction.

Chapters:
0:00 Rain and Returns in Baker Street
2:39 A Dark Hillside Above the Lagoon
4:14 The Pink House in Botafogo
5:58 Midday at Police Headquarters
7:33 The Yard Beneath the Tin Awning
8:37 Questions in the Widow's Parlour
9:46 A Letter from London
11:26 A Warrant at the Pink House
12:51 Columns on the Copacabana Terrace
13:59 Dusk at the Garden Gate
15:29 Midnight in the Cells
16:46 First Light Behind Bars
18:38 The Hall and the Staircase
20:05 A Trunk and a Black Dress
21:36 Back on the Midnight Hill
22:47 Evening Callers on the Veranda
24:25 Night Falls on the Veranda
26:05 Baker Street Under Rain Again

What sent the Marenna to the bottom in two minutes, and why has an insurance director flown through the night to put the question to Sherlock Holmes?

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

January 1977. In the sleet outside Baker Street, an insurance director named Frau Liebenau waits for Sherlock Holmes with an urgent request. A cargo ship, the Marenna, has gone down with six of her crew, and her board wants Holmes in Vienna on the morning flight. Holmes distrusts any insurer who is looking for a reason not to pay, but a director who flies through the night instead of sending an adjuster is plainly worried. In Vienna, Inspector Gruber of the police tells them the ship was gone in two minutes, that survivors heard a bang forward of the bridge, and that two ministers' offices have already telephoned the insurer on behalf of the owner, Herr Falk. Falk is a celebrated pastry cook whose salon draws ministers' wives. He receives Holmes and Watson graciously, describes a very costly cargo declared in full, and sends them to the harbour at Porto Vesca, where his crates waited a week before loading. There a nervous night watchman will speak only once the carabiniere is out of earshot. What does he know about those crates, and why is he so afraid of being named?

From the series Sherlock Holmes — The New Cases: a real crime of the 1970s reimagined as a classic Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast, with sound design and a light score that stays under the story.

Loosely inspired by a real event of the 1970s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including an insurance director, a confectioner, a harbour watchman, a clockmaker, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Where a real city, state, public body or newspaper is mentioned, its part in this story is invented; the insurance company, the confectioner's shop and the harbour town named in it are invented too. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: London and Vienna — January 1977.

Writer v2.7 — the studio's newest writing process: the plot is planned and checked by an AI story editor, then each act is drafted with the whole story in view and edited before a word is voiced — and then cast and performed with our new casting and voice direction.

Chapters:
0:00 Sleet and Unpaid Debts on Baker Street
2:43 Inspector Gruber's Corner Office
4:36 A Salon of Gilt and Chestnut
6:22 The Fish Quay After Dark
8:29 A Telegraph Form Left Unsent
9:35 The Crane Office Ledger
10:41 Fourteen Keys Along the Quay
12:25 An Empty Berth and a Policy Clause
14:22 The Night Express North
15:17 Sekt After Closing Time
16:49 Up the Stair to the Workshop
18:31 The Insurer's Top Floor
19:54 A Cap Crushed in Both Hands
21:45 Past Midnight with the Notebook
23:05 Almost Six at the Salon
25:02 A Statement Sworn at the Desk
26:35 A Telegram by the Hearth

A baby girl is found alive in her cot, fed and crying, while her parents lie dead half a mile down a New Zealand country road. A cable reaches Baker Street asking Holmes not to clear a man, but to say who fed the child. Who tended her through that night?

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

On a warm June evening in 1970, while Watson is threatening to leave Baker Street over Holmes's two-in-the-morning violin, Mrs Hudson brings up a reply-paid cable from Karaka Flat, New Zealand. It comes from Elaine Bannerman, whose husband has been arrested after a neighbouring couple were found shot in their home. She does not ask Holmes to prove her husband innocent. She asks him to find out who fed the neighbours' baby. Four days and three aeroplanes later, Holmes and Watson stand in her muddy stockyard as she sells off half her herd to pay the lawyers, while the district keeps its distance from her. Half a mile down the road, an inspector of the Auckland CIB shows them the padlocked house, the stripped bed and the empty cot next door. In a Waimaru cell they meet a hollow-faced man with a bad chest, who insists he never left his bed on the night in question. At the Bannerman kitchen table, his wife admits she was asleep before nine and cannot swear to anything. Where was Bannerman that Friday night, and why did his wife ask the wrong question?

From the series Sherlock Holmes — The New Cases: a real crime of the 1970s reimagined as a classic Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast, with sound design and a light score that stays under the story.

Loosely inspired by a real event of the 1970s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including the country families, the district nurse, the neighbours, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Where a real city, state, public body or newspaper is mentioned, its part in this story is invented; the farms, the township and its police station named in it are invented too. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: London and Karaka Flat — June 1970.

Writer v2.7 — the studio's newest writing process: the plot is planned and checked by an AI story editor, then each act is drafted with the whole story in view and edited before a word is voiced — and then cast and performed with our new casting and voice direction.

Chapters:
0:00 A Cable at Baker Street
2:40 Mud and Cattle at Karaka Flat
4:19 The Padlocked House on the Road
5:58 A Weatherboard Station at Waimaru
7:11 A Cell and a Hollow Man
8:47 The Kitchen Table at Dusk
10:17 The Nurse's Rooms at Waimaru
11:40 A Green Morris on the Road
12:49 A Lamp in the Harcourt Rooms
14:17 Cattle in the Bannerman Yards
16:00 Sale Day at Waimaru
17:27 Back Inside the Padlocked House
19:03 Back at the Waimaru Station
20:28 Past Midnight Above the Draper's
21:29 Morning Below the Waimaru Bridge
23:20 An Inquiry Room at Noon
25:10 Tea Again at Baker Street

Hours after his wife dies in a parcel blast on their own porch, a Utah widower rings Baker Street and begs Sherlock Holmes to come before the police settle on the people who lost their money with him. Why does a grieving man turn away the answer he has been given?

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

On a wet December evening in 1987, a telephone call from Salt Lake City interrupts a chess problem in Baker Street. Walter Calder, formerly a partner in an investment firm that collapsed two years earlier, says his wife Ruth was killed at home that morning when a parcel addressed to him exploded in her hands. The police already believe the culprit is one of the ruined investors, and Calder insists they are wrong. Holmes and Watson cross the Atlantic and find the porch scorched and the front steps gone. They learn that Calder's former partner, Neil Talbot, died the same morning from a similar parcel delivered to his office. An inspector named Brandt grudgingly gives them five minutes and shows them a short, unsigned note written in a deliberately disguised hand. Only a handful of people have seen it, and he wants it kept that way. Holmes and Watson then meet a secretary shaken by what she saw, and a diner owner who lost twenty-two years of savings and makes no secret of her bitterness. Two parcels reached two doors on one morning, yet who knew both men well enough to choose them?

From the series Sherlock Holmes — The New Cases: a real crime of the 1980s reimagined as a classic Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast, with sound design and a light score that stays under the story.

Loosely inspired by a real event of the 1980s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including the widower, the investors, the office staff, the diner owner, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Where a real city, state, public body or newspaper is mentioned, its part in this story is invented; the investment firm, the diner and the newspapers named in it are invented too. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: London and Salt Lake City — December 1987.

Writer v2.7 — the studio's newest writing process: the plot is planned and checked by an AI story editor, then each act is drafted with the whole story in view and edited before a word is voiced — and then cast and performed with our new casting and voice direction.

Chapters:
0:00 Rain on Baker Street
2:44 A Porch Without Its Steps
4:02 An Office Door off Its Hinge
5:55 Five Minutes with the Inspector
7:20 A Long Night at the Kitchen Table
8:30 Coffee at a Corner Diner
9:56 A Secretary Retraces Her Morning
11:44 The Breakfast Rush Interrupted
13:17 An Hour After the Arrest
14:39 Pacing the Gravel at Dusk
15:41 Five O'Clock on the Stairs
16:57 Night in an Interview Room
18:29 Breakfast at Six
19:31 Plywood and Brown Half-Light
21:02 Dusk on the Pavement
22:14 Three Visitors After Dark
24:04 A Cold Morning Below Ground
26:20 Home to Baker Street

A ship that could not sink is towed into harbour with not a soul aboard: her lamps still switched on, coats still on their hooks, both her clocks stopped at the same minute. Twenty-two people sailed in her, and none came home. Was it the sea that took them — and why would anyone abandon a ship that would not go down?

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

London, 1954. After a sour, idle week, Holmes has just picked out a loyal monogram in bullet holes above the mantel when a frantic wife races up the Baker Street stair with her taxi still running in the rain. A ship has been towed into Dunmore with nobody aboard, and her husband sailed in her. Holmes will not sell her a villain — the sea drowns people without anyone's help — but Watson points out what she said: towed. Four days of aeroplanes later they are in the heat of Dunmore, where an unhurried Inspector of the Dunmore Police has twenty-two families meeting every boat and an inquiry sitting within the fortnight, and he must give it more than the sea. A Clydeside surveyor who reads from his book and deals in no guesses, the agent who booked the voyage and will not come within ten yards of the gangway, a genial trader flown in for the inquiry, and the Inspector himself, who has already chosen his suspect, all have something to tell them — and the inquiry will not wait.

From the series Sherlock Holmes — The New Cases: a real mystery of the 1950s reimagined as a classic Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast, with sound design and a light score that stays under the story.

Loosely inspired by a real event of the 1950s. All characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including the ship's master, her crew and passengers, her agent, the traders and officials, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Everything this story suggests about what happened at sea is invented. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act, or of any neglect, shown here.

Setting: London and the islands — autumn 1954.

Writer v2.7 — the studio's newest writing process: the plot is planned and checked by an AI story editor, then each act is drafted with the whole story in view and edited before a word is voiced — and then cast and performed with our new casting and voice direction.

Chapters:
0:00 A Taxi with the Meter Running
2:46 The Inspector at Dunmore
4:04 Aboard the Empty Ship
5:41 Down the Iron Ladder
7:03 The Agent on the Wharf
8:25 The Underwriters' Reply
9:29 The Surveyor's Office
11:17 Whisky at the Hotel
12:32 Noon at the Wharf
13:52 A Passport Is Taken
15:17 Midnight on the Verandah
16:28 A Call to London
18:07 A Corner Table
19:19 Back in the Inspector's Office
21:11 Pacing the Deck
22:21 Down Below Again
23:56 The Cells Beneath the Station
25:35 Tea and a Cable from Dunmore

Threatening letters in block capitals, a ewe's head spiked on a farm gate — and then a bomb beneath the driver's seat of a sheep farmer's car. Who planted it?

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

London, one spring in the 1980s. Holmes has spent a fortnight indoors with the miners' strike and his tobacco ash, and he has just won a bottle of port on a hailstorm when the telephone rings: a woman on a hospital trolley telephone, her coins running out, begs him to come west that very night. Next morning, at a bedside in Bristol, Holmes and Watson meet Ann, a farmer's wife whose legs were shattered when the bomb went off, and her husband, who walks them down to the gate and the scorched verge. In the hills beyond, they find an older neighbour whose flock went for slaughter when the farmer sold the field he grazed, and who swore before a full pub that he'd see him blown to kingdom come; an exhausted Irish farmhand who will not say where she spent the night before the bomb; and a county inspector who reads slowly, reads everything, and wants his case closed.

From the series Sherlock Holmes — The New Cases: a real crime of the 1980s reimagined as a classic Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast, with sound design and a light score that stays under the story.

Loosely inspired by a real event of the 1980s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including the farmer and his wife, their neighbours, the farmhand, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so are the clues and the investigation that solve the mystery. Bristol is a real city; its part in this story is invented. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: London and the English West Country — a spring in the 1980s.

Writer v2.7 — the studio's newest writing process: the plot is planned and checked by an AI story editor, then each act is drafted with the whole story in view and edited before a word is voiced — and then cast and performed with our new casting and voice direction.

Chapters:
0:00 Hail on the Sash
2:44 A Bedside in Bristol
4:15 The Gate at the Foot of the Lane
5:28 Hens in the Cobbled Yard
6:36 A Buff Folder at the Station
7:55 Empty Pens Over the Hill
9:38 Evening on the Ward
11:15 A Room Under the Eaves
12:31 A Knock Before Six
13:58 A Statement at Noon
15:12 A Bench Outside the Ward
16:15 The Owl and the Church Clock
17:58 Steam and Frying Fat
19:36 A Handshake on the Station Step
21:16 The Blackened Verge
22:30 A Scrubbed Kitchen
24:05 Under the Strip Light
25:58 A Bottle of Port

A bank's chief cashier swears that a voice all India knows from the wireless telephoned him and ordered fifty lakh rupees sent off in one steel trunk — and the office it seemed to speak for says no call was ever made. Was there a call at all, and if there was, whose voice was on the line?

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

London, May 1971. The country has just gone decimal, Holmes declines to be introduced to the new pence, and Mrs Hudson's bill for a hearthrug eaten by his acids lies on the table when a young medical student runs up the stair out of the rain. That morning her father was the most trusted man in his bank in New Delhi; by nightfall he needs his name cleared. In the Delhi heat Holmes and Watson find a fortune gone and a cashier who swears he only obeyed orders, an inspector who has let his chief suspect go home only to follow him, a deputy cashier who trained the man promoted over her head, a cheerful canteen man who keeps the police in tea, a daughter who has already chosen her culprit — and a password about a camel, an umbrella and a black hat.

From the series Sherlock Holmes — The New Cases: a real crime of the 1970s reimagined as a classic Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast, with sound design and a light score that stays under the story.

Loosely inspired by a real event of 1971. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including the bank's cashiers and staff, the caller, the office the voice claimed to speak for, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Where a real bank, institution or place is mentioned, its part in this story is invented. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, no public figure is shown saying or doing anything in this story, and no real individual, bank, organisation or government is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: London and New Delhi — May 1971.

Writer v2.7 — the studio's newest writing process: the plot is planned and checked by an AI story editor, then each act is drafted with the whole story in view and edited before a word is voiced — and then cast and performed with our new casting and voice direction.

Chapters:
0:00 New Pence at Baker Street
2:35 A Cool Welcome in Delhi
4:08 Behind the Grille
5:37 Behind Closed Shutters
7:17 The Inspector's File
8:28 Twelve Years at the Counter
9:45 A Doctor's Diagnosis
11:02 A Password on the Church Steps
12:52 The Doorman's Register
14:09 Who Saw Her Leave?
15:26 Balloon-Sellers at Dusk
16:26 A Scene at the Counter
17:57 Across the Inspector's Desk
19:36 After Closing Time
21:35 Sleepless on the Verandah
22:34 A Dim Stone Hall
24:00 Back at the Bank
25:32 An Evening Upstairs
27:16 A Cable from Delhi

How could a telegram from Moscow quote a promise a young dancer had written in only one place — a sealed letter he left at his Paris hotel desk?

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

London, May 1960. A gale is moaning in the Baker Street chimney when a call comes through from Paris: the young star of a Soviet ballet company on tour begs Holmes for help, says he is afraid he will never reach London — and the line goes dead. In Paris, Holmes and Watson find him watched at every hour, each late night noted down in a little book, and learn of a letter he left sealed at the hotel desk for his mother, promising her a blue shawl. The next morning, as the company sets off for London, he is handed a ticket home and a telegram: his mother is gravely ill — and she wants the blue shawl he promised. A sour night clerk, a devoted Parisian friend and the company's own watchful administrator all had their chance at that desk, and two governments are waiting to see what the French police will do.

From the series Sherlock Holmes — The New Cases: a real Cold War event of the 1960s reimagined as a classic Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast, with sound design and a light score that stays under the story.

Loosely inspired by a real Cold War event. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including the dancers and their friends, the ballet company and its officials, the hotel staff, the diplomats and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: London and Paris — 1960.

Writer v2.7 — the studio's newest writing process: the plot is planned and checked by an AI story editor, then each act is drafted with the whole story in view and edited before a word is voiced — and then cast and performed with our new casting and voice direction.

Updated edition — re-recorded with refined voices, levels and details.

Chapters:
0:00 A Coat That Won't Button
2:47 Backstage at the Theatre
4:08 Midnight at the Hotel Desk
5:26 Among the Chimney Pots
7:04 A Telegram at the Gate
8:57 A Stamp on the Company's Bill
10:05 The Key to Thirty-Two
11:15 Pipe Smoke off the Customs Hall
13:02 The Green Waiting Room
14:11 Lamps Along the Runways
15:09 A Cold Pipe at Eleven
16:55 Sorting the Night's Letters
17:59 An Office Like a Wardrobe
19:26 A Black Citroën Before Dawn
21:44 A Grey Sky Over the Runways
23:08 First Light at the Moscow Gate
24:24 A Crowded Office
26:49 Treacle Tart and Rain

Who would shoot a quiet hotel waiter dead beside his pregnant wife — and why has she scrawled across the newspaper report, “This is not my husband”?

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

A new edition of “The Bracken Halt Affair”, rewritten from the ground up.

London, July 1973. Baker Street is wilting in a heat wave and Holmes is quarrelling with a carriage clock when a letter arrives straight off the Oslo flight. A young wife, heavily pregnant, writes that her husband was shot dead beside her in Norway. He was a waiter at a lakeside hotel, killed at a bus stop as the couple came home from the cinema. In the little town by the lake, Holmes and Watson find a cot with one rail still unfixed, a savings tin emptied by a loan to the dead man's oldest friend, and a friend who swears he slept the whole night through. A protective hotel manageress, a Scottish guest over for the fishing, and an inspector with foreigners in his cells and no appetite for a scandal all have something to say about the quiet waiter — and the police already have a theory that fits every piece.

From the series Sherlock Holmes — The New Cases: a real crime of the 1970s reimagined as a classic Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast, with sound design and a light score that stays under the story.

Loosely inspired by a real event of 1973. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including the murdered man and his widow, their friends, the hotel's staff and guests, the foreign visitors, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, organisation, government or security service is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: London and a lakeside town in Norway — July 1973.

Writer v2.7 — the studio's newest writing process: the plot is planned and checked by an AI story editor, then each act is drafted with the whole story in view and edited before a word is voiced — and then cast and performed with our new casting and voice direction.

Chapters:
0:00 Two Clocks on the Mantel
2:39 A Cot with Three Sides
4:14 Breakfast at the Window Tables
5:52 Behind the Inspector's Blind
7:37 An Empty Savings Tin
8:55 Football, or Money?
9:54 The Inspector's Theory
11:30 Coins Before Payday
13:07 A Room Nobody Answered
14:35 Whisky Above the Lake
15:49 Midnight on the Shingle
16:52 Under the Back Seat
18:22 Ingrid Remembers the Night
20:13 Down to the Cells
22:01 Back to the Stone Rail
23:06 Two Thousand Kroner
24:46 Waiting for the Late Bus
27:20 A Telegram by the Toast Rack

Thirty crates went home to Moscow, and the socket in the radar nose came back empty. Who took the great valve from the Soviet jet at Hyakuri?

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

A new edition of “The Ghost Interceptor”, rewritten from the ground up.

London, November 1976. Rain is drumming on Baker Street when Inspector Lestrade arrives with an American engineer who has carried an envelope all the way from Japan and will put it in no hand but Holmes's. Weeks earlier a Soviet pilot flew his country's most secret interceptor into Japan; the jet was taken apart, studied, and shipped home in thirty crates — and Moscow has found the socket of its great radar valve empty, the clamp undone, not broken. Now the Soviets are crying theft, Moscow wants a name, and the Foreign Office wants it settled before Britain takes the blame. At Hyakuri Air Base, Holmes and Watson find a padlock fitted only after the complaint, a night guard whose logbook records a telephone call at eleven asking for the side door to be left unlocked, an engineer who rages that the aircraft should never have gone home, and a cheerful British radar man packing his papers into tea chests. Everyone had a reason to be near that aircraft — and somebody has more to hide than a valve.

From the series Sherlock Holmes — The New Cases: a real Cold War event of the 1970s reimagined as a classic Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast, with sound design and a light score that stays under the story.

Loosely inspired by a real event of 1976. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including the engineers and technicians, the base staff, the diplomats, the press and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. The theft at the heart of this story is invented; nothing here describes what actually happened to the real aircraft or the people who examined it. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: London and Japan — November 1976.

Writer v2.7 — the studio's newest writing process: the plot is planned and checked by an AI story editor, then each act is drafted with the whole story in view and edited before a word is voiced — and then cast and performed with our new casting and voice direction.

Chapters:
0:00 Letters on the Fire
2:32 A New Padlock at Hyakuri
4:13 Tea Chests After Midnight
5:44 Green Tea in the Guardhouse
7:04 A Taxi at the Main Gate
8:11 The Steel Side Door
9:43 Bare Concrete at Noon
11:12 The Paymaster's Ledger
12:44 A Gilt Room at the Soviet Embassy
14:41 A Visitor Off the Aeroplane
16:32 Tea Among Silent Lathes
17:55 A Trunk Call to Japan
19:29 Lamps Along the Embankment
20:31 A Second Line to Japan
22:21 Rain on Whitehall
23:15 The Best Chair at the Yard
25:26 Baker Street by Lamplight

Half a million pounds of motorists' claims money has vanished from a collapsed insurer, and the auditor who signed its accounts begs Sherlock Holmes to prove him not innocent, but merely a fool. Where did the money go?

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

A new edition of “The Sealed Move”, rewritten from the ground up.

London, July 1966. The city talks of nothing but the World Cup and the wage freeze, Holmes has been idle all week, and the moths have eaten the morning coat Watson means to wear to a friend's wedding when a man who has stood an hour on the Baker Street step at last comes up the stair. He was the auditor of a motor insurer that has just collapsed, leaving its policyholders without a penny of cover. In February, he says, the manager of a bank abroad telephoned to swear the money was there to the pound, and he signed the accounts on that word; now half a million pounds is gone, and the morning papers are ready to call him a thief. In a claims hall of forty empty desks and telephones nobody answers, Holmes and Watson meet a young Welsh clerk who boxes up claims she cannot pay and writes back to the motorists night after night, a greengrocer selling her scales to pay for a smash, a chairman who says he never read a balance sheet in his life, and a Scotland Yard inspector who wants a thief — because a fool won't do.

From the series Sherlock Holmes — The New Cases: a real crime of the 1960s reimagined as a classic Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast, with sound design and a light score that stays under the story.

Loosely inspired by a real event of 1966. The characters, their names and their dialogue are fictional, and the events of this story are fictionalized; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including the insurer's chairman, its auditor and its staff, the policyholders, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Where a real company, bank or place is mentioned, its part in this story is invented. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: London — July 1966.

Writer v2.7 — the studio's newest writing process: the plot is planned and checked by an AI story editor, then each act is drafted with the whole story in view and edited before a word is voiced — and then cast and performed with our new casting and voice direction.

Chapters:
0:00 Moths in the Wedding Coat
2:35 The Claims Hall
4:07 Plums and Brass Scales
5:30 A Drink with the Chairman
6:56 Tea Chests in the Boardroom
8:40 One Lamp Still Lit
10:04 Pencil in the Cash Book
11:25 A Hard Chair at the Yard
12:55 Supper in Baker Street
14:00 Brown Tape and Two Constables
15:48 The Cells Beneath the Yard
17:26 Two Rooms and a Gas Ring
18:59 Morning in Lestrade's Office
21:10 Tugs on the Ebb
22:08 A Tea Tray Nobody Ordered
23:49 Across the Hall
25:42 The Evening Paper

The phones went into a bread basket at the door — so how did a foreign envoy know, before breakfast the next morning, what the senator had decided at her private dinner?

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

A new edition of “The Obituary at Seven”, rewritten from the ground up.

Los Angeles, June 2021. Holmes is on the sofa above Echo Park, objecting to a neighbour's pitch for a streaming series about him, when a senator's chief of staff rings in a whisper from a church: a private dinner in Hancock Park has leaked. The senator had gathered her inner circle to decide, among friends and with the phones collected at the door, what to do about a frozen fighter-jet sale she had praised in a speech she didn't write — and by morning the envoy pressing that sale was already objecting. Her campaign chairman, her speechwriter of eleven years and her chief of staff, who carries a sealed resignation letter in her jacket, all sat at that table. A whisper on the porch, a deadline of Friday and a police lieutenant lent out to a federal leak inquiry turn a family supper into a hunt for the one guest who sold it.

From the series Holmes LA: a story loosely inspired by a real case of the 2020s, reimagined as a modern Sherlock Holmes radio mystery set in Los Angeles, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast, with sound design and a light score that stays under the story.

Loosely inspired by a real case of 2021. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including the senator and her staff, her campaign chairman, the envoy and the government he represents, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. The real-life case that inspired it ended without any conviction. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, government or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: Los Angeles — June 2021.

Writer v2.7 — the studio's newest writing process: the plot is planned and checked by an AI story editor, then each act is drafted with the whole story in view and edited before a word is voiced — and then cast and performed with our new casting and voice direction.

Chapters:
0:00 A Whisper from a Church
2:27 A Dining Room Stripped Bare
4:23 The Senator's Study
6:25 Last Night's Dinner, Retold
7:59 Under the Jacaranda
9:10 The Porch Swing
10:53 A Lieutenant in the Pantry
12:46 Draft Twelve in the Sunroom
14:11 Sprinklers at Dusk
15:14 One in the Morning, Echo Park
16:22 A Meeting Called for Ten
18:26 Cold Toast by the Hall Light
20:02 A Cardboard Box at Midnight
22:21 The Yellow Bulb by the Door
23:25 Six in the Study
26:15 A Statement on the Coffee Table

A monthly statement shows four thousand shares bought at a price the stock never touched. Who put a number the market never paid on a client's statement?

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

A new edition of an earlier Holmes NYC episode, rewritten from the ground up.

Brooklyn, December 2008. Sleet is ticking on the bay window, the radio is counting the autumn's bank failures, and Watson's Christmas tree is losing a war with Holmes's cold-case corkboard when a picture message arrives from a stranger standing on their own front step. Elliot, a young trader from a Midtown tower, has crossed the river at night because he needs an outsider to tell him he is wrong. His own November statement from his father's fund shows a trade at a price the stock never reached. He already has a suspect: the man who runs the statement room, passed over for the partnership Elliot has just been given, and seen slipping a clerk an envelope of cash every payday. A loyal clerk with a wrist brace and a post log she cannot stop ticking, a founder about to put his son's name on the door, and a homicide captain lent to the fraud squad and resenting every minute of it all have a part in the hunt for one wrong number.

From the series Holmes NYC: a real crime of the 2000s reimagined as a modern Sherlock Holmes radio mystery set in New York, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast, with sound design and a light score that stays under the story.

Loosely inspired by a real case of 2008. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including the firm's family, its staff and clients, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. A few figures reported at the time appear only as background; the firm's people, its inner workings and the clues in this story are invented. Nothing in this story describes what any real person did, said, knew or intended. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: Brooklyn and Midtown Manhattan — December 2008.

Writer v2.7 — the studio's newest writing process: the plot is planned and checked by an AI story editor, then each act is drafted with the whole story in view and edited before a word is voiced — and then cast and performed with our new casting and voice direction.

Chapters:
0:00 A Picture Message in the Sleet
2:39 Forty Traders in the Red
4:01 A Partnership Announced
5:47 Behind the Lowered Blinds
7:26 Mail Sacks Like Sandbags
8:42 A Basement off Times Square
10:01 The Post Log After Hours
11:22 Five Index Cards
12:41 Coffee with the Captain
14:33 The First Sack of the Morning
16:09 Twine and Small Change
17:07 Twenty to Ten, Three Witnesses
18:50 Hard Chairs at Police Plaza
20:50 The Printer Stops
22:23 Past Midnight in the Lobby
23:27 A Closed Door Before Eight
26:09 The Fir in the Window

A woman living alone in Rome is strangled in her flat, and the London claims man whose company insured her can find nothing wrong with the claim. So why can't he bring himself to sign it? Who killed her?

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

London, autumn 1959. Rain has fallen all week, Holmes has been idle a fortnight and is shooting a loyal E.R. into Mrs Hudson's wallpaper, and Watson is drafting yet another apology when the telephone rings: a claims man in the kiosk across the road asks to come up. A lady his company insured for a fortune has been strangled in her Rome flat, and although the claim is perfectly in order, he cannot sign it. By noon next day Holmes and Watson are in Rome with a patient inspector who has a burglary that walked past the silver, a door nobody forced, a loyal young maid with her own key and a secret she will not give up, a doorbell dead for six months that rang the morning after, and a husband six hundred kilometres away in Milan who wants the girl charged.

From the series Sherlock Holmes — The New Cases: a real crime of the 1950s reimagined as a classic Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast, with sound design and a light score that stays under the story.

Loosely inspired by a real crime of the 1950s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including the victim, her husband and her family, her household, the insurers, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: London, Rome and Milan — autumn 1959.

Writer v2.7 — the studio's newest writing process: the plot is planned and checked by an AI story editor, then each act is drafted with the whole story in view and edited before a word is voiced — and then cast and performed with our new casting and voice direction.

Chapters:
0:00 Powder Smoke in Baker Street
2:50 An Office Loud with a Fan
4:50 A Young Woman on the Step
6:22 Red Seals on the Door
8:00 The Shuttered Hall
8:59 Out on the Landing
10:37 A Gale Through Every Drawer
12:27 Clean Plates and a Cold Stove
14:06 A Whitewashed Cell
15:29 North to Milan
16:25 A Back Office Smelling of Cigars
17:24 The Builder's Yard
18:54 Flour on His Turn-ups
20:41 A Borrowed Office
21:52 Back Above the Yard
23:47 One Barred Window
25:44 Baker Street, Three Evenings Later