Paris After Dark · Moscow Rules

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

On a winter night in Moscow, old Sedov climbs five floors to the detective Maksim Volkov's door and will come no further than the mat. After the party for his eightieth birthday, something else was in the frame of his father's Tolmachev, and the police only laughed. Half the building was in his flat that night. What became of the painting?

🎧 Full episode · full-cast radio drama, 28 min. Moscow Rules: a modern spy and detective audio drama set in Moscow, performed by a full cast.
Hörspiel · audiokniha · rozhlasová hra (English audio, English captions)

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

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

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

Moscow, winter 2011. One evening after nine the bell goes at the Chistye Prudy flat of the detective Maksim Volkov, and he and his chronicler, Doctor Grigori Melnik, find an old man on the mat who will come no further. Sedov has climbed five floors in the dark, and says that if he sits down in a warm room he will not get up again. For forty years Tolmachev's picture of Paris at night, the boulevard, the lamps and the rain on the cabs, hung on his wall; since the party for his eightieth birthday, he says, something else has been in its frame, and the police who took it away laughed at him. Next morning, in his study on Frunzenskaya, a room of books to the ceiling with an empty frame on the wall, his granddaughter Tatyana watches from the doorway like a sentry. Half the building was in the flat that night, looking at the cake. His friend Rudin arrives to console him, and on the landing Tatyana names a stallholder at the Krymsky Val painters' market, Lidiya, whose name Sedov will not have said at his table. At the Khamovniki precinct Major Zhuk keeps Volkov and the doctor forty minutes on a corridor bench, then says that nothing she can prove was stolen. An empty frame, a flat full of neighbours and a major who only smiled: what happened on the night of the party?

From the series Moscow Rules: a real post-Soviet event reimagined as a modern detective radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast with an original score and sound design.

Loosely inspired by a real Russian case of the 2010s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including collectors and their families, friends, neighbours and guests, painters and art dealers, market stallholders and traders, police officers and investigators, officials and officers of the state, and anyone suspected or accused of wrongdoing — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Where a real city, district, street, market, police precinct or public body is mentioned, its part in this story is invented; the painter, the painting and the offices 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: Moscow — winter 2011.

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 Five Floors Up, an Old Man on the Mat
2:17 Books to the Ceiling, a Granddaughter in the Doorway
4:03 A Cork Drawn at Sedov's Kitchen Table
5:46 A Cigarette Under One Bare Bulb
7:30 Forty Minutes on the Corridor Bench
9:09 Across the River, Wrapped in a Tablecloth
10:56 A Wet Coat in Sedov's Narrow Hall
12:40 Hat on His Knees in the Major's Office
14:25 Sleet Along the Embankment
15:14 An Armchair Turned to the Empty Frame
17:12 The Evening Sedov Slept at Last
18:51 Still in Both Her Coats
20:35 Up to the Study That Afternoon
22:23 Past Midnight, the Old Man Would Not Sleep
23:42 By Noon, the Frame Has Its Audience Again
25:47 The Windows Steamed Blind, and Sedov Sits

#MonoNoirRadioDrama #NoirMystery #AudioDrama