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 will in a dead billionaire's name turns up on a lobby desk in Salt Lake City, and the man it makes rich begs the police to burn it before he will so much as call a lawyer. Why would an heir refuse a fortune before he has even read the page?

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

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

In the wet June of 1974, a crackling long-distance call reaches Baker Street from an inspector of the Salt Lake City police. A will has surfaced in the name of the late billionaire Victor Crane, and it makes his former aide, Walter Ashby, a rich man. Ashby will not go near a lawyer until Sherlock Holmes has seen it, so Holmes and Dr Watson cross the ocean. In Utah they find reporters crowding the lobby of a church office tower, where the receptionist, Bernice, who found the envelope on her desk, says that everyone believes she put it there. At police headquarters, Inspector Gallagher shows them an office papered with forty claimed wills, yet this one stands apart. It leaves a sixteenth of the fortune to a young pump attendant in a farm town an hour north, and a sixteenth to Ashby. Ashby insists the document is not Crane's and wants it destroyed. At the gas station, the pump attendant, Lyle, tells Holmes how he once gave a bleeding old man a lift through the desert, and the station's owner, Ramona, who once kept Crane's house, demands to read the will for herself. Gallagher swears it has never left his safe. Who wrote the will, and why does the man it enriches fear it?

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 billionaire's former aide, a church receptionist, a gas-station owner, a young pump attendant, 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 office tower, the gas station and the motel 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 — June 1974.

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 Wet Night at Baker Street
2:52 Flashbulbs Around the Lobby Desk
4:07 Forty Wills and One Exception
5:40 Farms Beneath the Mountains
7:25 A Motel Room by the Freeway
8:43 The Examiners Deliver Their Verdict
9:52 Questions at the Lobby Desk
11:37 A Cupboard of an Office
13:03 Fuel for the Drive South
14:06 A Visit Across County Lines
15:23 Dusk on the Northern Freeway
16:25 Three Pages Under Lamplight
18:10 Before the Doors Open
19:56 Noon at Police Headquarters
21:59 Past Midnight, Violin Silent
23:06 First Light on the Forecourt
24:47 The Room with One Window
26:34 Rain Again at Baker Street