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 historic gallery is about to close over a Pollock the lab calls a fake, and its director has sent for a detective she cannot be sure will clear her. Who made the painting, and who gains if the Harlan falls?

Read the story and the full transcript: https://matezz.com/episodes/the-pale-squares-holmes-nyc/

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

A new edition of “The Garage Masterpieces”, rewritten from the ground up.

Brooklyn, a sleety Thursday evening in February 2014. Holmes has turned the dining table into a corkboard of unsolved deaths when Captain Okafor of Homicide, off duty, climbs the stoop with a favor to ask. The Harlan Gallery, founded in 1851, is being sued by a buyer who paid twenty-two million dollars for a Pollock the lab now calls a fake. Its director, Celeste, wants a detective who might prove her wrong. Holmes objects that nobody has died, and that the dead on his corkboard have waited long enough, but Watson talks him into his coat. At the Harlan, pale squares mark the walls where paintings once hung, and the staff has been let go. Celeste explains that the Pollock came from a private collector who inherited his pictures from his father, and whose name only her dealer knows. His single letter to the gallery in fifteen years is all she can offer. Then police arrive with a warrant and a dolly to carry off the collector's remaining canvases, and Okafor admits he has been lent to the district attorney's art-fraud squad. Celeste feels she was brought a watcher, not a helper. By morning the dealer, Delia, has driven in from Long Island with lilies, and she will not give up her client's name. Who is the collector nobody has met?

From the series Holmes NYC: a real New York crime reimagined as a modern Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast with an original score and sound design.

Loosely inspired by a real New York case of the 2010s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including gallery directors, art dealers, painters, collectors, 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 squad room 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: New York City, 2014 — with Brooklyn and Long Island.

Writer v2.7.0.55 — our 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 Sleet and Noodles on Flatbush
2:42 Bronze Doors After Ten
4:14 A Dolly Across the Gallery
5:41 Burnt Coffee, Past Midnight
7:21 Lilies on the Director's Desk
9:00 The Storeroom Behind the Office
10:23 Counting Nights From a Parked Car
11:42 Warm Pastries Under Bare Walls
13:01 A Corner of the Table
14:00 Arrest Beneath the Empty Hooks
15:48 A Visitor in a Paint-Flecked Parka
17:47 Keys Borrowed From the Precinct
19:10 A Bench in the Corridor
20:33 A Property Envelope on the Desk
22:20 Return to the Bare Walls
24:12 The Alley Door Opens
26:15 Brooklyn, Well Past Two

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