Our adaptations of the great out-of-copyright detectives — Raffles the gentleman thief, the blind Max Carrados, Lady Molly of Scotland Yard, Arsène Lupin and Father Brown. Every author credited.
49 stories · every one free to listen to
A. J. Raffles
A European monarch has sent Queen Victoria a gift: a pearl of quite extraordinary value, travelling home by steamer under discreet guard. The whole affair has been managed with enormous care and almost no publicity.
by E. W. Hornung
57 minNo. 253
Dr Thorndyke
It begins in a crowd on Oxford Street, waiting for one of those processions that benevolent institutions periodically inflict upon London traffic. A man dies in the press of people.
by R. Austin Freeman
59 minNo. 251
Lady Molly of Scotland Yard
The newspaper-reading public called it the Somersetshire Outrage, and to this day, as far as the public is concerned, it was never properly explained at all. A young shop assistant named Jane Turner is found in her lodgings at Weston, tied to a chair with a rope, a shawl over her head, half-slipping to the floor.
by Baroness Orczy
46 minNo. 249
Max Carrados
It begins with Max Carrados greeting his friend Carlyle at the door and remarking that he has a mystery about him somewhere. He can hear it in the man's step. The mystery is a railway disaster.
by Ernest Bramah
1 hr 7 minNo. 247
A. J. Raffles
Two cases tonight from the gentleman thief who has drawn more requests than anybody else in the Archive. WILFUL MURDER is the darkest thing in the whole collection. Bunny warns us at the outset that most of their robberies will not bear telling at length.
by E. W. Hornung
1 hr 13 minNo. 246
Loveday Brooke
Somebody has got hold of Miss Loveday Brooke's private address, which she had given strict orders was to be handed to nobody at all. Her holiday lasts precisely as long as it takes to read the note.
by Catherine Louisa Pirkis
55 minNo. 244
Dr Thorndyke
A bell rings in the small hours, and Dr Jervis finds himself doing the one thing he thought he had left behind when he gave up medicine for the law: answering an urgent summons in the dark.
by R. Austin Freeman
1 hr 5 minNo. 242
Max Carrados
Mr Carlyle arrives at The Turrets in the very best possible spirits: white spats, a gardenia in the buttonhole, and the bustling importance of a man who is certain he has brought his friend a straightforward piece of business.
by Ernest Bramah
1 hr 4 minNo. 240
Violet Strange
A will has vanished. Not stolen from a safe. Not burned in a grate. Simply gone — from a house where it must still be, leaving a family facing ruin and a set of children whose entire future turns on a single sheet of paper that nobody can find.
by Anna Katharine Green
1 hr 1 minNo. 239
Loveday Brooke
Two things have happened to the Hawke household, and Loveday Brooke's chief is convinced that only one of them is worth anybody's time. A young lady has lost a valuable necklace and wishes the matter hushed up.
by C. L. Pirkis
55 minNo. 236
Max Carrados
Tonight, the case widely held to be the finest Max Carrados ever appeared in — and one of the most quietly frightening stories of its decade. A young naval lieutenant comes to the blind detective with something he cannot prove and cannot forget.
by Ernest Bramah
55 minNo. 235
Dr Thorndyke
More from the detective who joined the Archive last night: Dr. John Thorndyke, created by R. Austin Freeman in 1909 — a medical man and a barrister, and the first true forensic scientist in detective fiction.
by R. Austin Freeman
48 minNo. 233
Dr Thorndyke
Tonight the Archive opens on a detective it has never opened before — and one who changed crime fiction more than almost anyone who came after Sherlock Holmes. Dr. John Thorndyke, created by R.
by R. Austin Freeman
43 minNo. 232
Lady Molly of Scotland Yard
Eight miniatures on ivory. Ten thousand pounds. And a house where nobody came and nobody went. Old Mr. Frewin, the art dealer, has spent two years pinned to an invalid chair at Blatchley House, near Brighton.
by Baroness Orczy
42 minNo. 230
A. J. Raffles
Tonight, the story that answers a question we left hanging. When we opened the Raffles stories with "The Ides of March," he mentioned, almost in passing, an unreported incident on a certain cricket tour — and then refused to say another word about it.
by E. W. Hornung
38 minNo. 223
A double bill for the blind detective — two more cases from Ernest Bramah. THE GAME PLAYED IN THE DARK By some distance the most famous Carrados story ever written.
by Ernest Bramah
1 hr 53 minNo. 222
Lady Molly of Scotland Yard
A second double bill for Lady Molly of Scotland Yard — two of Baroness Orczy's strongest cases, and two of the furthest she ever lets her heroine go. THE IRISH-TWEED COAT It begins with an Englishman dead in Sicily.
by Baroness Orczy
1 hr 25 minNo. 220
Loveday Brooke
A double bill tonight, and our longest case of the fortnight: two complete mysteries for Miss Loveday Brooke, the quiet, plainly dressed professional of the Lynch Court agency. MISSING!
by C. L. Pirkis
1 hr 59 minNo. 218
Sherlock Holmes
A young doctor with a brilliant degree and no money is offered an arrangement too generous to refuse: a fine house in Brook Street, a practice fully furnished, and a silent partner who asks only for a share of the takings and a room of his own.
by Arthur Conan Doyle
43 minNo. 216
A. J. Raffles
A double bill tonight from the gentleman thief you asked for more than any other: A. J. Raffles, by E. W. Hornung — Conan Doyle's own brother-in-law, who dedicated the collection to him.
by E. W. Hornung
1 hr 23 minNo. 215
Max Carrados
The whole case turns on one insignificant fact: Max Carrados happened to call on his friend, the inquiry agent Louis Carlyle, at the exact moment Carlyle was leaving for the safe deposit in Lucas Street, Piccadilly.
by Ernest Bramah
1 hr 18 minNo. 213
Lady Molly of Scotland Yard
A double bill tonight: two complete cases for Lady Molly, the brilliant head of the Female Department of Scotland Yard.
by Baroness Orczy
1 hr 27 minNo. 211
Father Brown
A small, rich inventor named Isidore Smythe is being threatened by a rival he cannot see. Letters appear inside a locked flat. Words are scrawled across a shop window while a room full of people sit a few feet away.
by G. K. Chesterton
44 minNo. 209
Violet Strange
A box of embroidered linen arrives with the wrong name upon it. A limousine draws up outside a house of mourning. And the silliest little belle of the season walks into a murder room and begins, very sweetly, to count the marks upon the floor.
by Anna Katharine Green
53 minNo. 208
Arsène Lupin
The transatlantic steamship La Provence is four days out from France and bound for New York when her wireless brings a message that turns the crossing into a trap: Arsène Lupin is on board.
by Maurice Leblanc
35 minNo. 206
A. J. Raffles
Tonight, for once, we are not on the side of the law. A desperate young man has lost more at the card table than he can possibly pay. Ruined, ashamed, and out of options, he goes to the one man he still believes might save him: A.
by E. W. Hornung
53 minNo. 204
Max Carrados
Tonight the Archive opens on a detective unlike any other: a man who solves his cases entirely without sight.
by Ernest Bramah
42 minNo. 202
Loveday Brooke
On Christmas Eve, £30,000 worth of jewellery vanishes from Craigen Court. Someone inside the great house unfastened a stained-glass window, Lady Cathrow's safe was left unlocked, and the thief departed after chalking a mocking message across its empty door: TO BE LET, UNFURNISHED.
by Catherine Louisa Pirkis
1 hr 2 minNo. 200
Father Brown
At the Vernon Hotel, twelve gentlemen sit down to the annual dinner of an absurdly exclusive club called The Twelve True Fishermen — twelve members, twelve seats, and a set of silver fish knives and forks so precious the club is half-defined by them.
by G. K. Chesterton
53 minNo. 198
Lady Molly of Scotland Yard
It begins with something the newspapers swore was impossible: a man who simply vanishes. On a foggy February afternoon, Mr. Leonard Marvell walks out into the London streets and is never seen again — no body, no ransom, no trace.
by Baroness Orczy
48 minNo. 196
Sherlock Holmes
The most famous racehorse in England has vanished, and his trainer lies dead on the moor. Days before the Wessex Cup, Silver Blaze, the favourite, disappears from his stable at King's Pyland on Dartmoor.
by Arthur Conan Doyle
57 minNo. 194
Lady Molly of Scotland Yard
On a busy afternoon in Regent Street, in a crowded Viennese tea-room loud with chattering women and clinking china, a young gentleman named Mark Culledon is poisoned in his cup of chocolate.
by Baroness Orczy
54 minNo. 192
Sherlock Holmes
For three hundred years an old English family has recited the same strange riddle, word for word, father to son — a catechism of questions and answers that no Musgrave has ever thought to question.
by Arthur Conan Doyle
50 minNo. 189
Sherlock Holmes
A governess named Violet Hunter comes to Baker Street with an offer she cannot understand. A wealthy, jovial gentleman wishes to hire her at an extravagant salary — but on the strangest of conditions.
by Arthur Conan Doyle
1 hr 5 minNo. 187
Father Brown
Valentin, the most celebrated detective in Europe, has crossed to England on the trail of Flambeau — the giant, brilliant, and seemingly unstoppable master thief the whole continent is hunting.
by G. K. Chesterton
53 minNo. 185
Lady Molly of Scotland Yard
A sleepy Kentish village. A young woman found dead in the mud. A vanished sister. A country-house pond hiding a truth the police cannot make sense of.
47 minNo. 183
Sherlock Holmes
Sent to fetch a friend from a riverside opium den, Dr. Watson stumbles instead upon Sherlock Holmes himself — in disguise, and deep in one of the strangest cases of his career. A respectable gentleman named Neville St.
by Arthur Conan Doyle
1 hr 1 minNo. 180
Violet Strange
Content note: This 1915 mystery involves the death of a young child as part of its plot. It's presented unabridged and without graphic detail, but listeners who find that subject distressing may prefer to skip this one.
by Anna Katharine Green
49 minNo. 178
Arsène Lupin
At the Château de Thibermesnil on the Normandy coast, a boastful banker entertains his dinner guests with two prized secrets: a centuries-old hidden passage no one has ever been able to find, and a great hall packed with the treasures his family gathered over hundreds of years.
by Maurice Leblanc
58 minNo. 176
Father Brown
Aristide Valentin, the most celebrated detective in Europe, throws a dinner party at his Paris mansion — a house whose garden is sealed on every side by a high, spiked, unscalable wall, with a single guarded exit.
by G. K. Chesterton
53 minNo. 174
Sherlock Holmes
"It was the band!
by Arthur Conan Doyle
1 hr 2 minNo. 172
Martin Hewitt
The finest cameo in the world — a sardonyx of three colours carved in the first century and the size of a man's hand — is bought for five thousand pounds and promised to the British Museum, until two nights before it leaves the dealer's safe thieves come down through a trap-door in the roof, force three locked doors, and the treasure simply vanishes; the police are baffled, the dealer is ruined, and Martin Hewitt, the calm smiling investigator London called the heir to Sherlock Holmes, takes the case and appears for once in his career to fail completely — yet Hewitt did not fail, for he found the truth at the bottom of that empty desk and chose to keep it buried, in a quiet and ingenious tale of forgery, reputation, and a detective generous enough to let a guilty man keep his secret; this is Arthur Morrison's Martin Hewitt, created for The Strand Magazine to fill the void when Sherlock Holmes plunged over the Reichenbach Falls and illustrated by the very artist who drew Holmes, from Martin Hewitt, Investigator, presented complete and unabridged, exactly as Arthur Morrison wrote it, from the Midnight Archive — Nocturnal Tales' library of the classic detective stories that built the genre.
by Arthur Morrison
55 minNo. 170
Violet Strange
For the first time in her life Violet Strange takes a case not for money but for a face — across a crowded musicale she sees a young man marked by a sorrow so deep it stops her heart mid-beat, Roger Upjohn, heir to an old Massachusetts family and the most whispered-about name in society, whose beautiful cold-hearted wife was found dead in her bed of heart failure, the doctors said, though the bruises blackening her wrists told another story and the gossip never stopped; now Roger comes to Violet with a confession, a plea, and a secret hidden in the rocks along his family's coast — an old grotto fitted for gambling and ruin, and now said to be haunted by a spectre no one can explain — and to clear an innocent man she must go where the police never looked, into the grotto and into a grief long mistaken for guilt; this is the work of Anna Katharine Green, the American novelist often called the mother of the detective novel who was writing best-sellers a decade before Sherlock Holmes, and her most beguiling creation the society debutante no one suspects, from The Golden Slipper and Other Problems for Violet Strange, presented complete and unabridged, exactly as Anna Katharine Green wrote it more than a century ago, from the Midnight Archive — Nocturnal Tales' library of the classic detective stories that built the genre.
by Anna Katharine Green
59 minNo. 168
Arsène Lupin
A warning note slipped into a locked apartment, a metal playing card — the seven of hearts — pierced with seven small holes, and a stranger who breaks in to investigate only to shoot himself before he can speak: so begins one of the strangest cases in the Arsène Lupin canon, as the narrator is drawn into a mystery he never asked for and learns his home was once owned by Louis Lacombe, a vanished inventor who built a weaponised submarine and a hidden vault sealed by a code only those metal cards can unlock; a murdered engineer, stolen war plans, a banker with a secret, and a vault concealed in a mosaic floor — threads no single man should be able to follow, unless that man is Arsène Lupin, gentleman burglar and master of disguise, who has been standing in the room the whole time under another name; this is Maurice Leblanc's great creation, the thief cleverer than the police and always three moves ahead, France's answer to Sherlock Holmes, from The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar, presented complete and unabridged, exactly as Maurice Leblanc wrote it, from the Midnight Archive — Nocturnal Tales' library of the classic detective stories that built the genre.
by Maurice Leblanc
1 hr 11 minNo. 165
Violet Strange
By night Violet Strange glitters through New York's most exclusive ballrooms — a petite, fashionable debutante no one would ever take seriously, which is exactly what makes her so dangerous, for in secret she is a paid investigator hired for the cases the police cannot touch; her new problem is a delicious one: a string of jewels keeps vanishing at society receptions, corals and diamonds and a sapphire pendant that once belonged to Marie Antoinette, the thefts trailing the same handsome family of girls from house to house until cruel suspicion settles on one innocent daughter, and to catch the real thief Violet must set a trap baited with a single golden slipper; this is the work of the woman who came before Sherlock Holmes — Anna Katharine Green, often called the mother of the detective novel, who was writing best-sellers a decade before Conan Doyle reached Baker Street and whom both Doyle and Agatha Christie openly admired — from The Golden Slipper and Other Problems for Violet Strange, presented complete and unabridged, exactly as Anna Katharine Green wrote it more than a century ago, from the Midnight Archive — Nocturnal Tales' library of the classic detective stories that built the genre.
by Anna Katharine Green
47 minNo. 163
Sherlock Holmes
A pawnbroker with flaming red hair answers a newspaper advertisement and finds himself hired by the mysterious Red-Headed League, paid four pounds a week to copy out the encyclopaedia under one absurd condition — that he never leave the office during working hours — until one morning a card on the door announces the League dissolved and no such society ever known to exist; when Jabez Wilson brings his ridiculous tale to 221B Baker Street, Sherlock Holmes sees what his bewildered client cannot: behind the farce lies one of the most cunning crimes he has ever been asked to prevent, and the answer has been hiding beneath everyone's feet the whole time; ranked by Conan Doyle himself among his finest Holmes stories and a perfect showcase of the detective's method, where the most laughable clue conceals the most serious danger, first printed in The Strand Magazine in August 1891 and collected in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, presented complete and unabridged, exactly as Arthur Conan Doyle wrote it, from the Midnight Archive — Nocturnal Tales' library of the classic detective stories that built the genre.
by Arthur Conan Doyle
1 hrNo. 161
Sherlock Holmes
To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman — when a masked stranger calls at 221B Baker Street after dark claiming to be the agent of a European royal house, Holmes sees through the disguise before the man finishes his first sentence: the King of Bohemia is about to marry, and a single photograph in the hands of Irene Adler, an opera singer with a brain of the first order and the face of the most beautiful of women, could shatter the engagement and shake a throne; armed with disguises, a smoke rocket, and the cold certainty that no one has ever beaten him, Holmes sets out to recover the photograph — and meets the only adversary who ever saw through him in return; this is the very first Sherlock Holmes short story ever published, the case that made Doyle's detective the most famous in the world and the only case Holmes lost, first printed in The Strand Magazine in July 1891 and collected in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, presented complete and unabridged, exactly as Arthur Conan Doyle wrote it, from the Midnight Archive — Nocturnal Tales' library of the classic detective stories that built the genre.
by Arthur Conan Doyle
58 minNo. 159
Hercule Poirot
DESCRIPTIONStockholm is a city where winter enforces discipline—and manners enforce silence. When Hercule Poirot and Captain Hastings attend an elegant dinner at the Löwenström townhouse, the evening is meant to be refined, orderly, and forgettable in the way wealth prefers.
by Good Manners
45 minNo. 87
Miss Marple
DESCRIPTIONChristmas Eve at Rutherford Hall should have meant candlelight, wreaths, and goodwill. Instead, it brings anonymous threats, a sudden death, and a pair of identical holly wreaths — one fresh, one quietly wilting — whose presence seems to spread fear through the household like frost along a windowpane.
54 minNo. 82