The Case of the Raspberry Halves · Sherlock Holmes — The New Cases

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

A New York defence lawyer flies the Atlantic in winter to fetch Sherlock Holmes for her client, a building superintendent whose tenants drop bottles on his stoop and whose wife's own brother swears he is a spy. With the trial only weeks off, what could a London detective find that no cable could carry?

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

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

London, February 1952. Holmes and Watson walk home through the cold rain from a recital, and Watson, who has nursed a chess problem all week, is still sore that Holmes solved it at a glance in the interval. The lamp Holmes left lit is out, and a woman is sitting in Holmes's own chair, the Persian slipper on her knee, with ash enough to say she has waited the better part of an hour. She is Ortega, who practises law in Manhattan; her client goes before a New York jury within weeks, and she has flown the Atlantic in winter because she needs Holmes there before the jury is sworn. Holmes says a case already in the courts is counsel's business, until Watson points out that counsel does not cross an ocean for anything a cable could fetch. At eight in the morning Ortega's hired car sets them down at a tenement where the superintendent, Kessel, is sweeping broken glass from his stoop: a milk bottle, dropped from well above, every morning since the papers ran his picture, and a word chalked across his door that will not come off. His wife is upstairs, crying; her kid brother, whom she raised, is in jail swearing that her husband is a spy. Five flights up, behind a door that opens only the width of a chain, the brother's wife, Nadine, has learned every groan of the stairs since they took her husband. Inspector Burke, who says it is the Bureau's case and not his, allows the defence ten minutes with the exhibits: two halves of a card, torn by hand in a zigzag, that fit together like a jigsaw. Then he walks Holmes and Watson across to the prisoner, Tolliver, who has told his story twelve times until the words are worn smooth, and who asks only that they leave Nadine out of it. Holmes has crossed an ocean with a lawyer's urgency, a tenement at war with its own superintendent, two halves of a card and a prisoner who will let no one near his wife.

From the series Sherlock Holmes — The New Cases: a real crime of the 1950s 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 1950s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including the man accused, his wife, her brother and his wife, their neighbours, the lawyers on both sides, the federal agents and prosecutors, 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 tenement 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 New York — February 1952.

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 February and a Chess Problem
2:21 Glass on the Tenement Stoop at Eight in the Morning
4:02 A Door on Its Chain, Five Flights Up
5:23 Radiator Dust and Wet Overcoats at Police Headquarters
7:16 A Room of Green Paint and One Barred Window
8:54 A Dark Stairwell and a Paper Sack of Shopping
10:16 Midnight at the Back Table of a Delicatessen
11:24 Past the Coal Heap and the Boiler
13:00 Back in the Green Room Before Ten
14:35 An Evening Watch in the Tenement Hallway
15:44 A Police Car Under the Street Lamp
17:10 One Desk Lamp in Burke's Office Near Midnight
18:25 Past One in the Morning Below Burke's Office
20:17 An Hour Before Dawn Above the River
21:41 Back to the Stoop at Seven
23:31 Five of Us Under a Low Green Bulb
25:55 Home to Rain on the Baker Street Windows

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