Episode Details

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

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

Read the story and the full transcript: https://matezz.com/episodes/the-case-of-the-empty-socket-sherlock-holmes-the-new-cases/