Episode Details

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

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?

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

🎭 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