Episode Details

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

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

Read the story and the full transcript: https://matezz.com/episodes/phones-in-a-basket-holmes-la/