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 manager and his secretary fly halfway round the world to fetch Sherlock Holmes to Sydney, where a stranger on the telephone kept an airliner circling in the sky until three hundred and fifty thousand dollars was paid in a dark lane. Who could make an entire airline obey a voice?

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

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

In the wet July of 1973, Holmes and Watson are interrupted at Baker Street, mid-quarrel over an empty revolver and a ruined ceiling, by a secretary named Belinda. She works for the manager of Norvale, an Australian airline, and her employer waits below in a taxi with the meter running. He has flown across the world to take Holmes back to Sydney that very night. Thirty hours later the two Englishmen stand beside a drilled-open luggage locker with the manager, Mr Allard, and a blunt inspector of the bomb squad. A caller who named himself Mr Grey had claimed that one bomb sat in that locker and another aboard a passenger jet, set to explode if the aircraft descended below a certain height. The jet circled for hours, burning fuel, while Norvale's staff chalked up the dwindling figures and answered frantic families. Allard then drove alone to a lane between shuttered wool stores and passed the ransom through a stranger's car window in a canvas bag. The aircraft was searched seat by seat and nothing was found, yet the locker bomb was real. Holmes walks the empty lane and the crisis room and studies the inspector's guarded manner. Mr Grey has the money and has vanished. Who could have known enough about Norvale's night to shape it so exactly?

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 airline managers and secretaries, crisis-room staff, flight crews, 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 airline, its head office, the airport and the streets 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 Sydney — July 1973.

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 in Baker Street
2:38 Before the Drilled Locker
4:09 The Crisis Room Above the Square
5:22 A Dark Lane Between Wool Stores
6:52 Pipe Smoke at Police Headquarters
8:15 A Door Closed on the Typing Pool
9:17 Words by the Lifts
10:14 The Board Sits on Monday
11:34 Beneath Police Headquarters
13:14 A Notebook and a Late Window
14:06 A Dealer's Docket from Parramatta Road
15:33 Waiting Beside the Telephones
16:54 Tea in the Crew Room
18:39 A Summons to Allard's Office
20:44 An Afternoon in the Vehicle Yard
22:06 A Long Night of Rereading
23:18 Gathered Round t