Vienna Files
Post-war noir in four-power Vienna
- 8episodes
- 3 h 43 minof drama
- 1945–1957setting years
Vienna, 1945 to 1955: a city of ruins and requisitioned palaces, divided among four occupying powers, where a missing file or an unplaced telephone call can cost someone everything. August Brenner, a consulting detective, and his friend Dr. Theodor Fuchs, who tells each story, take cases the authorities cannot or will not handle.
The stories are loosely inspired by real cases from occupied Austria. Every name, place and figure is changed and the solution is invented, so these are fictions, never reports of what happened.
The writing, voices, music, sound effects and artwork are AI-generated, and a human listens to and revises every episode. How it is made.
Episodes in Vienna Files
The Sapphire Below
A countess's note, written on the back of an American menu, slides under a Vienna detective's door before dawn: she buried her jewel box beneath her own house when the Russians came, and this week the Allies dug it up and opened it at the Hotel Imperial. It was empty. Who emptied it, and where is her mother's sapphire?
Four Hundred Names
In Vienna, a police switchboard operator tells the detective August Brenner that her chief took a call from a Russian interpreter on a bad line and walked to Soviet headquarters on the Ring. They opened the gate for him, and he has not come out. Upstairs the word 'defected' is already typed. Did he defect, or was he sent for?
The Road to Italy
A note under a Vienna dressmaker's door says her brother Anton, who went away three weeks ago for fear of the Russians, is safe in Italy. It has no envelope and no stamp, it is signed with his name, and its hand slopes and runs, though Anton printed every letter in square capitals. Who wrote it?
Plated, Of No Value
In the Vienna rain a woman finds her mother's Sabbath candlesticks on a market stall: silver that left her family's flat on a train which the Americans now hold under guard. The stallholder will say only that Vienna sells and she holds the scales. Who sold her the silver?
The Grave in the Wood
Four witnesses were summoned to Vienna to testify about a night of killing in the Burgenland. One lies face down at the edge of a wood and another died in a burning farmhouse. Who is silencing them, and can Brenner reach the last two alive?
Letters From The Belvara
A sealed letter bearing the delegation's stamp, though no delegate admits to writing it, is carried through the rain to a Vienna detective. Who put the footballers' families on the road west under that stamp?
The Planks That Talked
What became of a family's household that was meant to follow them to Shanghai, and why does it turn up in a Vienna auction room just before the hammer falls?
The Midnight Steamer
Who slipped Julian Crewe a warning before his Monday-at-ten interview, and why would a colonel hire a private detective rather than trust a single member of his own staff?
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