Novella Noir | Audio Dramas

ESPIONAGE NOIR Brussels, 1974. Frank Cahill is a veteran foreign correspondent running a dying wire bureau on borrowed time and cheaper Scotch. When a manila envelope lands on his desk containing photographs of a man who has been dead for five years, he senses something he hasn't felt in years — a story worth chasing. What follows pulls him deep into the hidden architecture of postwar Europe:...

INDUSTRIAL NOIR  The press never stopped at Harlow Metalworks. Neither did the coughing.  Vic Crane has supervised the night shift for eleven years — long enough to know when to look away, long enough that looking away has become its own kind of expertise. When a man goes into the die cavity at 2:16 AM, it's a tragedy. It happens. Metal and men have always had an understanding.  But a dead man...

PROCEDURAL NOIR Mara Voss counts other people's money in the dark. Eight years on the overnight shift at a dying savings bank, running reconciliations nobody reads, flagging variances nobody acts on — invisible by design, invisible by habit. Then one sleepless November morning, chasing a forty-seven dollar discrepancy, she opens a file partition she was never meant to find. What's inside w...

URBAN NOIR Morris Engel is a pawnbroker who trusts numbers above all else. His ledgers are meticulous, his records precise, his shop on the Port Carver waterfront a monument to quiet, orderly transactions. When a well-dressed widow arrives to redeem her dead husband's watch — pawned three weeks after his death — Morris does what he always does: he writes it down. What he doesn't know is th...

PROCEDURAL NOIR Washington, 1944. Margaret Voss keeps the war at a careful distance — in ledger columns, in disbursement codes, in the arithmetic of other people's grief. She is good at her job. She is precise. She does not look for trouble.  But the numbers are wrong, and Margaret Voss has never been able to leave a wrong number alone.  What begins as a clerical discrepancy becomes something...

POLITICAL NOIR Frank Latta runs the night press at a dying Depression-era newspaper — one man doing three men's work, holding on by his fingernails while the world sheds jobs like dead skin. When the night editor hands him a private print job after hours, he doesn't ask questions. A man with a sick kid and a dwindling wage doesn't have that luxury. But when he pulls the proof to check...

PARANOID NOIR Ray Caulfield is a bail bondsman running on bourbon and bad math. When a routine skip-trace sends him eight hours into the Nevada desert chasing a two-bit jumped bail, he expects a fast turnaround and a twelve-hundred-dollar check. What he finds in Harrow — population three hundred and some, no cell signal, one diner — is a skip who isn't running. A man sitting calmly over coffee...

MEDICAL NOIR Mara Voss has spent eleven years reading the truth inside human bodies — light and shadow, clean and corrupted. She's good at her job. She doesn't ask questions she isn't paid to answer.  Then she starts noticing a pattern in the scans, and the pattern looks like a lie.  In the basement of a glass tower where medicine and money share a floor, Mara pulls on a thread that a...

RURAL NOIR Del Marsh has spent twenty-three years reading fire. She knows what ash remembers, what char reveals, what an origin point looks like when the cause is exactly what it appears to be. With eleven months until retirement, she arrives at a burned-out Oregon sawmill to close a straightforward case — and closes it. Report filed. Job done.  Then a single photograph lands on her kitchen table....

HISTORICAL NOIR Malaya, 1924. Thomas Marsh draws maps for the British colonial survey office — clean lines, precise work, no questions asked. It's a living. Then a quiet woman from the documentation desk lays two sheets of paper on his drafting table and shows him where his lines have been redrawn. Whole villages, mapped out of existence. The original plates sit locked in the archive. The ship...

ART CRIME NOIR Martin Crale has spent thirty-one years handling other people's beautiful things. He knows the difference between what an object is and what it claims to be. It's the only skill that matters in his trade — and the one that has never been quite enough to protect him.  When a prestigious country estate engagement brings him north to catalogue a dead collector's life's ...

POLITICAL NOIR Three weeks before the vote, Ray Maddox works a dying ward with a clipboard and a flask, knocking on doors that don't want to open. It's the lowest rung of political work — unglamorous, thankless, invisible. But one block on Morrow Street doesn't add up, and Ray has never been able to leave a wrong number alone. What he finds when he follows the thread isn't a campai...

PROCEDURAL NOIR Oklahoma, 1936. The land is dying and so is everything that depends on it. Frank Dolan is a government surveyor doing dull, honest work in dust-bowl country — measuring parcels, filing reports, moving on. Then a weathered farmer tells him something quiet and damning: three of the properties he's mapped don't exist. No families. No sellers. No record anyone in the county has...

SOUTHERN NOIR Calvin Pruett has embalmed four hundred souls in Catahoula Parish, and the dead have never once talked back. He's built his life on that silence — on the agreement between a discreet man and a town that prefers its secrets kept. Then a nameless drifter arrives on a county burial order, and the body tells Calvin something the paperwork refuses to. In the suffocating Louisiana Augu...

WARTIME NOIR Pacific, 1944. Petty Officer Frank Decker's job is to listen — and on a dead frequency, in the small hours, he hears something he wasn't supposed to. The transmission is clean, encrypted with Allied protocols, and routed to coordinates that don't exist on any briefing chart. His commanding officer tells him he misread the data. Decker knows he didn't. On a coral atoll...

INSTITUTIONAL NOIR A routine compliance review. Four hours. A paralegal, a cold file, and a man who has spent seventeen years in prison for a crime the paperwork suggests he didn't commit. The evidence is right there in the original file — it always was. The question was never whether someone buried it. The question is what happens now that she's found it, and who has the most to lose befo...

INSTITUTIONAL NOIR Eddie Crale has been burying stories for years. It's what you do when the paper is dying, and the editor is careful and the city has long since decided what gets printed. Then an envelope lands on his desk — no return address, three documents, and a photograph of a man with a scar beneath his left ear. The story is real. The evidence is clean. And somewhere in this city, a v...

PROCEDURAL NOIR A forensic document examiner takes a lucrative contract to authenticate a billionaire's final signature on an amended will. The work is meticulous. The conclusion is sound. He signs his name and cashes the cheque.  Three weeks later, a second document lands on his desk — and everything he thought he knew turns to ash.  Now his name is on a billion-dollar theft, the one tool tha...

NEO-NOIR Ray Maddox follows the police scanner through the small hours, selling crime scene photographs to whoever will still pay for them. He has no illusions about the work — until two frames shot through a gap in a perimeter tape show him something that wasn't on the scanner and won't appear in any report. Now he has a pattern, a photo editor he trusts, and the creeping suspicion that being tru...

DOMESTIC NOIR When Margaret Crale rents her basement to a quiet, courteous stranger, she tells herself it's practical. The mortgage doesn't care about grief. Callum Voss pays three months upfront in cash, keeps impeccable hours, and asks for almost nothing — except, perhaps, her certainty. Because Margaret carries a secret about the night her husband died, and secrets, she's learning, have a parti...

INSTITUTIONAL NOIR Broadway, 1950s. The curtain rises. Something is wrong.  Frank Calhoun has managed forty-three productions in twenty-two years. He knows every creak in the Meridian's floorboards, every fault line in its crumbling glamour. He knows Dorothy Vale's performance the way you know a scar — by its exact shape, its particular history.  Tonight, the woman on that stage is not Dor...

NEO-NOIR Cal Morrow lives clean. No lease, no partner, no questions asked — just a white Transit van, a tool roll, and a phone that rings at 2 a.m. When a woman with good shoes and a careful voice calls him out to a luxury apartment on the river, he opens the door in four minutes. She tips well. He drives away. Simple.  Then he realises he left a tool inside.  What he finds when he goes back will...

NEO NOIR Miles Carver used to read people for a living — until the Bureau decided he'd read one wrong. Now he's scraping rent together teaching corporate executives how to spot a liar. The new class is sharp. Hungry. They hang on every word like it matters.  It does.  Somewhere in the room, someone is watching him the way he used to watch suspects. Maybe more than one someone. Carver spent...

BUREAUCRATIC NOIR  Mara Voss has spent sixteen years making other people's words disappear — heard in one language, rendered in another, leaving no trace. She is a professional. She is discreet. She is, by design, invisible.  When a closed-door trade negotiation hires her at a rate too good to question, she brings everything she has: fluency, precision, and silence. But on the second day, she...

MEDICAL NOIR Walter Cass keeps the books clean. That is his job, his purpose, the architecture of an otherwise unremarkable life. He is not a medical man — he has never pretended to be. But when a dead man's paperwork crosses his desk and something in the signature sits slightly, wrongly off, Walter notices. He always notices. The question that will cost him everything is not what he sees, but...