Episode Details

This radio drama uses AI-generated writing, voices, music, sound effects and artwork. All spoken performances in this edition use ElevenLabs V4.

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

Read the story and the full transcript: https://matezz.com/episodes/forty-and-a-half-holmes-nyc/