Episode Details

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

Nine days after the Admiral vanishes from a London gallery wall, a letter reaches a Fleet Street night desk demanding £210,000 for pensioners' television licences, and Scotland Yard calls it the work of a crank. Why would a thief who wants the money announce himself to a newsroom?

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

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

In the last days of September 1963, Sherlock Holmes is so bored that he is carving the Queen's initials into the Baker Street plaster with Watson's old service revolver when a night editor of Pennant Press arrives with a claim. Someone has written to her desk saying he holds the Admiral, the celebrated portrait missing from the Harcourt Gallery since dawn on the twenty-first. The Yard calls it a crank's work, and she has until midnight to decide whether to print. Holmes scorns hoaxes but cannot leave this one alone. At the gallery, Inspector Lestrade and an old warder show them a bare nail where the portrait hung, and Lestrade reads out the letter's demand of two hundred and ten thousand pounds, to be spent on pensioners' television licences. Along the next wall a queue files past the empty space, a young copyist works at her easel, and the visitors gossip about the thief. That night the newsroom hands the original letter to the Inspector, and Holmes and Watson follow it to Scotland Yard. There a forced lavatory window and an alarm that never rang raise a question: who knew the house well enough to choose that hour?

From the series Sherlock Holmes — The New Cases: a real crime of the 1960s 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 1960s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including the gallery warders, the copyists, the visitors, the newspaper 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 gallery and the newspaper 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 the Harcourt Gallery — September 1963.

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 Tuesday in Baker Street
2:47 The Bare Nail at Harcourt
4:24 The Copyist's Corner
6:07 Midnight on Fleet Street
7:44 A Green-Shaded Lamp at the Yard
8:56 The Copyists' Cupboard
10:15 Beneath the Back Stairs
11:41 The Trestle Table Reckoning
13:16 Afternoon Among the Easels
14:40 Behind the Cupboard Door
15:57 Doubts on the Gallery Steps
16:48 A Basement at St Cheswick Row
18:07 A Locker Emptied in Silence
19:30 The Cupboard Opened at Last
21:16 Lamps Coming On at Dusk
22:26 Ten O'Clock at the Easel
23:54 The Empty Wall, Once More
25:42 The Evening Paper at Baker Street