Episode Details

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

Her daughter's letter home from Bavaria says everything is fine. So why is her mother sure that something is wrong?

Listen as a podcast, with full transcripts: https://mono-noir.transistor.fm/

Stories, transcripts and the schedule: https://matezz.com

Prague, 1992. A school cook, her kitchen apron still on under her coat, comes to the back office of a bookshop in Malá Strana. Her daughter Jitka went west to Bavaria with her young man, swearing she would write the day they arrived, and a letter did come: cheerful, typed, saying every word a mother wants to hear. The police shrugged and gave it back. Antonín Zima reads it aloud and starts to agree with her: everything in it is right, and that is what's wrong.

From the series Velvet Shadows: a real 1990s Czech crime reimagined as a post-communist Prague noir radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast, with sound design and a light original score that stays out of the story's way.

Loosely inspired by a real Czech case of the 1990s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including the missing couple, their families, the landlady, the suspects and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution.

Setting: winter 1992, Prague.

Directed Edition: the same story, newly performed line by line with a directing pass for every voice: each actor's delivery is chosen for the moment, from a dry aside to a held breath.

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.

Chapters:
0:00 The Back Office in Malá Strana
2:06 Four Floors and No Lift
3:54 The Kapitán Keeps His Coat On
5:38 Soup for Three Hundred in Nusle
7:07 Three Empty Rooms in Žižkov
8:48 The Copper Pot at Two O'Clock
10:29 A Heater Under the Kapitán's Desk
12:26 A Door on a Chain
14:02 Picks Under One Bare Bulb
15:35 Flat Beer on Kovářská Street
16:39 Outside the Landlady's House
18:02 Coffee as Thick as Mortar
19:48 When the Stair Light Goes Out
20:49 A Thursday in Žižkov
22:48 A Kitchen with a Cold Stove
25:01 The Chair She Once Refused

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