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 widow telephones Baker Street after dark to say someone has taken her husband out of his grave, and the man she asks for was his friend. Who would steal the one thing, as Watson puts it, that no one on earth could sell?

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

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

On a wet April evening in 1976, Holmes is clearing the post in Baker Street when a telephone call comes from a widow he counts as a friend. Someone has taken her husband out of his grave in a Swiss village. Holmes fears grief will cloud his judgment, but he flies out with Watson. At the white manor among the vineyards, she tells them the sexton found the slab laid on the grass and the grave empty. A man rang that same afternoon, before any newspaper had the story, and promised to name a price. When he rings again, an inspector of the cantonal police listens on the extension. The caller demands four hundred thousand francs over the noise of a passing train, and the trace ends at a railway-station kiosk. At the churchyard, Holmes reads one set of shoulders at work and a coffin lifted straight up on tackle. The inspector points to fresh tyre tracks from a garage van in the lakeside town. The garage owner keeps the manor's cars, knows the road blind, and is badly in debt. He protests that half the district owes money. With the caller promising to ring again, who is on the other end of the line?

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 widow and her children, the garage men of a small town, the churchyard sexton, 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 manor, the garage and the village churchyard 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 the canton of Vaud — April 1976.

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 April in Baker Street
2:48 The White Manor Above the Vineyards
4:22 A Voice Beneath a Passing Train
5:40 Six Feet of Wet Clay
7:02 The Garage Behind the Station
8:31 The Glass Office and the Ledger
9:57 Questions Before Eight in the Morning
11:16 Beneath the Workshop's Bare Bulb
12:34 Coffee on the Hotel Terrace
13:43 Dusk on the Garage Forecourt
15:25 Waiting by the Telephone at Eight
17:11 A Midnight Call by the Embers
18:31 Cold Coffee at the Police Post
20:24 A Walk Along the Quay
21:34 First Light Among the Ramps
23:24 The Barred Room at Ten
25:24 Home Again in Baker Street

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