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 a broadcaster dies of a fever, his widow telephones Baker Street because Scotland Yard has stopped listening. Yet the Yard's own inspector turns up at her door after midnight. Who is uneasy about a death everyone is calling natural?

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

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

London, November 1976. Holmes is buried in his commonplace books, sentencing letters about missing tortoises, when the telephone brings a woman's voice from a hospital in south London. Beverley Lazarov's husband, a broadcaster of forty-nine, has died after four days of fever, and Scotland Yard has told her that grief always wants a villain. Holmes hesitates, but Watson's question, why the Yard should pronounce on a fever at all, sends them out into the night. Past one in the morning Mrs Lazarov shows them the room where her husband lay and the chair where she sat beside him, and tells them about the man she married: someone who left his homeland a decade ago and made a weekly programme that was listened to far beyond London. Before long Inspector Lestrade arrives in the rain, sent, he admits, by a call from the Foreign Office rather than by any worry of his own. The hospital's verdict is blood poisoning, cause unknown, and the post-mortem is yet to come. Lestrade dismisses the widow's fears as the habit of people who have fled a hard country. Holmes is not so sure. Whose unease brought a Scotland Yard inspector out to a fever death in the small hours?

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 a broadcaster, his widow, his colleagues, hotel staff, 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 hospital, the broadcasting house and the hotel 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: Baker Street and south London — 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 Paste Pots and Unanswered Post
2:51 A Narrow House After One
4:26 A Knock in the Hall
5:42 The Kitchen at Dead of Night
6:55 Morning Rush, River Wind
8:16 The Newsroom Falls Silent
9:59 The Sickroom, Curtains Drawn
11:53 The Dark Studio Lamp
13:25 Behind the Porters' Desk
14:48 Coffee Among the Potted Palms
15:45 A Cramped Room, Short Patience
16:45 Carbolic and Stewed Tea
18:19 Waiting in the Hotel Lobby
19:45 Marble Hall, Hurrying Feet
21:25 A Second Visit to the Hotel
22:55 Waiting Under the Palms
24:10 The Lift Doors Open
26:20 Home to Baker Street