Episode Details

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

Someone has stripped the vault of a Nice bank of twenty-nine million francs and posted the bank's English clerk a photograph of the wreckage, with one word on the back: Merci. An inspector of the Police Judiciaire carries it to Baker Street and lays it face down on Holmes's table. Why would a thief go to the trouble of thanking the clerk?

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

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

London, July 1978. It has not rained for weeks, Regent's Park has burnt the colour of toast under a hosepipe ban, and Holmes, idle since spring, is firing at the far wall while Watson counts the holes in pencil for Mrs Hudson's bill, when a man who has been standing in the doorway, long enough to count the shots, lays a photograph face down on the table. He is an inspector of the Police Judiciaire in Nice, he says the vault of the Banque Mercantile has been robbed, and he has already bought the seats for the first flight in the morning. Holmes calls a bank robbery the plainest crime there is — until Watson turns the photograph over. By the next noon they are under the palms of Nice, in a shuttered banking hall where every bench is taken by a depositor whose box has been emptied. The bank's English clerk, who takes its depositors down to their boxes, tells what the post brought him: a picture of the gutted boxes and, across the wall behind them, the thief's motto — without guns, without anger, without cruelty. A widow whose late husband's ring lay in her box holds the clerk to blame. In the old town, in a tall ochre house where he has two rooms, a frightened concierge keeps the lodge at the foot of the stair and a shopkeeper downstairs insists the clerk needs a brandy, while the inspector waits on the edge of the clerk's bed among the shirts. And down in the vault, under armed guard, three hundred and sixty boxes stand open like sardine tins.

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 1978. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including the vault clerk and the bank's staff, its depositors, the thief and his associates, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Where a real city, place or public body is mentioned, its part in this story is invented; the bank 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: London and Nice — July 1978.

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 Counting Bullet Holes in a Heatwave
2:19 The Shuttered Banking Hall
4:21 A Tall Ochre House in the Old Town
5:59 The Inspector Among the Shirts
7:10 Down the Vault Stair
8:45 A Ceiling Fan That Would Not Turn
10:15 Shelling Beans at the Lodge Window
11:29 Back at the Counter in His Bank Tie
13:08 Warm Pernod on the Hotel Terrace
14:18 A Saucer of Milk at the Lodg