Episode Details

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

Four witnesses were summoned to Vienna to testify about a night of killing in the Burgenland. One lies face down at the edge of a wood and another died in a burning farmhouse. Who is silencing them, and can Brenner reach the last two alive?

Read the story and the full transcript: https://matezz.com/episodes/the-grave-in-the-wood-vienna-files/

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

Vienna, autumn 1946. In his rooms on the Herrengasse, the private detective August Brenner is sorting the files of a dead court, his chronicler Theodor reading aloud beside him, when Poldi, a clerk of the reborn people's court, knocks with a problem. She has served four summonses on witnesses in the Burgenland village of Hohenthal. Two days later she found the gunsmith Kranzler face down at the edge of the wood, a spent cartridge by his head, which she pocketed as the court's exhibit. A chambermaid's farmhouse has burned with her inside it, and the two remaining witnesses will not open their doors. Brenner takes the file. Kranzler's own statement, given in Vienna, describes pistols he prepared for the guests of a party in March. At the village inn the landlord Wastl claims to know nothing, then admits that Kranzler sat nervous that last evening, watching the road, before he crossed toward the trees at dusk. Inspector Marek of the Vienna police walks the burial wood with them. Officially one hundred and eighty Hungarian labourers lie there, shot in March, but the parish whispers of a second grave and nobody will give a number. With two witnesses dead and two behind shut doors, what did Kranzler go into the wood to find, and can anyone still be made to speak?

From the series Vienna Files: a real Austrian crime reimagined as a post-war noir radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast with an original score and sound design.

Loosely inspired by a real Austrian case of the 1940s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including a private detective, a court clerk, an innkeeper, a cook, the guests of a shooting party, 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 village of Hohenthal, its inn, its castle and its wood 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: Vienna, October 1946 — with Hohenthal in the Burgenland.

Chapters:
0:00 A Dead Court's Cold Docket
1:44 A Clerk With a Summons
4:14 Kranzler's Statement Read Aloud
5:58 Beer and Silence at Hohenthal
7:45 Walking the Burial Wood
9:33 An Evening Below Stairs
11:29 Four Around the Lamplit Table
12:51 The Taproom Door Bolts Shut
15:02 Two Facts and No Hand
16:48 The Ledger in the Cabinet
18:43 The Register Under Lock
20:13 Schnapps Beside the Scrubbed Table
22:06 Cold Tea and the Chronicle
23:19 The Innkeeper Unbolts Again
25:25 A Wire to Hohenthal
27:28 Last Questions by Lamplight
28:57 Snow Over the Courtyard

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