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 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?

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

🎭 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