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 night nurse in Houston telephones Baker Street the day a young woman dies, asking Sherlock Holmes to come before the burial; by breakfast the dead woman's father has sent his own lawyer across the Atlantic to ask for Holmes too. Houston has police and pathologists of its own, so why do they want a London detective?

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

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

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

London, May 1967. The city has not seen a dry pavement in a fortnight, the gas fire in the sitting room at Baker Street ticks like a patient clock, and Watson, who has laboured an hour over his club's chess problem, is told by Holmes, after a single glance, to give up the queen. Then the telephone rings with the hiss of a transatlantic line. Sister Avril, a night nurse ringing from Houston, Texas, has not been to bed: a young woman she nursed died that morning, and she would like Holmes there before they bury her. She is not kin and not police, and Holmes will not cross an ocean on one nurse's unease, until Watson points out that hardened nurses do not telephone London over one patient. At breakfast Mrs Hudson brings up Edmund Thaw, wet to the knees and off the night flight from Houston, an attorney who acts for the father of Delphine Frayne, the young woman who died; he has brought the nurse's complaint and a bakery bill from her kitchen table. In Houston, Holmes and Watson are received in a drawing room curtained against the afternoon, where a lamp burns above her portrait because, her husband says, she hated a dark room; in a small clinic's ward of six beds, one stripped bare; in a bakery shuttered for the night, where Hollis Pike lets them in by the side door; and at police headquarters, where Inspector Vance introduces himself as "Vance, homicide." Bette Larch, the dead woman's companion of twelve years, asks Holmes to go gentle with her. Holmes has crossed an ocean with a nurse's complaint, a bakery bill and one question from the dead woman's father: why?

From the series Sherlock Holmes — The New Cases: a real crime of the 1960s 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 1960s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including the dead woman, her husband, her father and his lawyers, her friends, the doctors and nurses who treated her, 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 family home, the clinic, the bakery 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 Houston, Texas — May 1967.

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 May Evening and a Chess Problem
2:42 Breakfast and a Caller Wet to the Knees
4:29 A Drawing Room Curtained Agai