Word for Word · Holmes LA

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

A producer's lawyers quote a woman's unfinished memoir back to her, word for word, though no one has ever seen those pages. Who has been reading what she has not yet published?

Read the story and the full transcript: https://matezz.com/episodes/word-for-word-holmes-la/

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

A new edition of “The Black Cube of Beverly Hills”, rewritten from the ground up.

September 2016. Holmes and Watson are logging cars rerouted up their Echo Park hill when a pickup stops at their curb. Its driver, Grace, carries a letter from a producer's lawyers. The second paragraph quotes her own sentences back at her, word for word, from a memoir she is still writing and has shown to nobody. Watson objects that a legal threat is a job for an attorney, but he and Holmes follow her up into Laurel Canyon, to a bungalow where a piano and a sideboard have already been sold to pay for lawyers. A year ago the producer made sure nobody in town would hire her again, and the memoir is all she has left. There they meet Teague, a magazine reporter who has spent a year collecting accounts from nine women about the same man, none willing to be named, while his editor has spiked three drafts. Grace recalls a polished Englishwoman from a London fund who offered forty-five thousand dollars for one speech and left a heavy, engraved business card. Twice they met in a dim hotel bar, and the second time Grace left her chapters on the table. The next morning, Holmes and Watson go to the magazine's marble lobby on Wilshire. Who is reading what Grace has not yet published?

From the series Holmes LA: a real Los Angeles crime reimagined as a modern Sherlock Holmes radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast with an original score and sound design.

Loosely inspired by a real Los Angeles case of the 2010s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including a memoirist, a magazine reporter, an editor, a producer and his lawyers, 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 magazine, the hotel bar and the diner 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: Los Angeles, September 2016 — with Echo Park, Laurel Canyon, Wilshire Boulevard and a hotel bar across town.

Writer v2.7.0.55 — our 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 Hill Full of Rerouted Cars
2:38 Pale Squares on the Walls
3:57 A Reporter at the Side Door
5:14 The Card from London
6:42 Dust on the Windowsill
8:50 Marble and Echo on Wilshire
10:19 Breakfast on a Car Hood
11:38 Heels on the Ramp
13:09 A Saab at the Meter
14:16 Tube Lights at the Station
15:29 Accusations in the Lobby
17:19 Boxing Up a Desk
18:48 After Hours on the Fourth Floor
20:07 Eight O'Clock in the Glass Office
22:06 Two Sentences in a Parked Car
23:07 Back Beneath the Street
24:40 The Lobby Clock Nears Noon
26:49 Evening Beneath the Ceiling Fan

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