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Novella Noir | Audio Dramas

Novella Noir

Novella Noir — where short-form fiction casts long shadows. Original, gritty audio dramas inspired by classic noir. In these stories, morality blurs, justice is crooked, and no one walks away clean. If you’re drawn to doomed souls, dark cities, and tragic choices, you’re in the right place. These are tales where the only truth is the one you can’t escape.

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20 episodes
Avg 32 min
English

Episodes 20

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S8 · E3
May 1 · 32 min
Novella Noir | Night Correspondent | Noir Audio Drama
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: false identities, buried ratline networks, and a truth too dangerous for any editor to touch. But the most damaging revelation isn't what Cahill uncovers about the past. It's what he discovers about himself.
S8 · E4
May 1 · 37 min
Novella Noir | Night Shift | Noir Audio Drama
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 had something to say that morning, and Vic told him to come back tomorrow. Now someone is rewriting what tomorrow looks like — and Vic's own lungs are keeping score.
S8 · E5
May 1 · 31 min
Novella Noir | Overnight Rate | Noir Audio Drama
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 won't just cost her the job. The city has been conducting business in the margins of her careful, quiet work for years, and now it knows she knows. She has one move. One morning. And nowhere near enough locks on her door.
S8 · E6
May 1 · 27 min
Novella Noir | Pawnbroker's Receipt | Noir Audio Drama
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 that his shop, his records, his twenty-two years of careful ink, have been telling a story he never authored. Someone built something inside his books. And now that they're finished with it, they don't need the building anymore.
S11 · E6
May 1 · 28 min
Novella Noir | Wartime Relief | Noir Audio Drama
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 else entirely — a pattern beneath the paperwork, a hand that signs where it shouldn't, money moving in the dark toward destinations nobody official will explain. And at the bottom of it, a file with her own name on it. The machinery is bigger than she is. She knew that before she started pulling threads. She pulled them anyway.
S9 · E1
May 1 · 32 min
Novella Noir | Relief Printer | Noir Audio Drama
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 the registration, what he reads stops him cold. By morning, six hundred copies could be on doorsteps across the city — and every piece of paperwork in the building has only one name on it. His.
S9 · E2
May 1 · 38 min
Novella Noir | Scenic Route | Noir Audio Drama
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, waiting to explain something Ray isn't going to want to hear. By the time Ray understands the job he actually took, his truck is gone and the road home has closed behind him.
S9 · E3
May 1 · 33 min
Novella Noir | Second Opinion | Noir Audio Drama
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 dead man started unraveling six months before her. The deeper she goes, the less certain she becomes — about the system, about the people running it. About her mother.
S9 · E4
May 1 · 34 min
Novella Noir | Smoke Signal | Noir Audio Drama
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. Now she's back in the ruins, working against her own conclusions, in a building that's mostly gone, in a town that doesn't want answers. And she's starting to understand that the woman who brought her here needed her for reasons she hasn't been told.
S9 · E5
May 1 · 29 min
Novella Noir | Surveyor's Assistant | Noir Audio Drama
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 shipping day to Singapore is in four days. Marsh has spent twelve years believing that a line on a map should tell the truth. Now someone is offering him the chance to prove it. He should know better than to take it.
S9 · E6
May 1 · 32 min
Novella Noir | The Appraiser | Noir Audio Drama
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 work, the collection is exactly what it appears to be: substantial, legitimate, impeccably documented. Then, on the second day, he finds one small bronze that shouldn't exist. Someone has been waiting nine years for Martin Crale to find it.
S10 · E1
May 1 · 30 min
Novella Noir | The Canvasser | Noir Audio Drama
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 campaign story. It's older than that, and uglier, and by the time he understands the shape of it, the shape already has him inside it. Some doors, once opened, only lock from the outside.
S10 · E2
May 1 · 34 min
Novella Noir | The Cartographer | Noir Audio Drama
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 ever laid eyes on them. Frank starts pulling at the thread, the way careful men do. He doesn't yet understand that the thread is attached to him.
S10 · E3
May 1 · 29 min
Novella Noir | The Embalmer | Noir Audio Drama
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 August, with a sheriff who owns the parish and a grieving woman who may not be what she seems, Calvin must decide how much a man's silence is worth — and what it costs to finally break it.
S10 · E4
May 1 · 32 min
Novella Noir | The Radioman | Noir Audio Drama
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 small enough to walk in forty minutes, with no allies and no safe channel, he begins pulling at a thread that runs deeper than his rank, his station, or his faith in the uniform. Some signals, once received, cannot be unheard.
S10 · E5
May 1 · 31 min
Novella Noir | The Referral | Noir Audio Drama
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 before tomorrow morning. The Referral is a story about the architecture of comfortable lies, and the specific courage it takes to pull one brick.
S10 · E6
May 1 · 35 min
Novella Noir | The Reprint | Noir Audio Drama
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 very respectable man has spent twenty years making sure that certain debts never come due. Eddie knows he should walk away. He also knows he won't.
S11 · E1
May 1 · 30 min
Novella Noir | The Signature | Noir Audio Drama
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 that could save him is locked behind the very family he's been made to rob, and the woman who hired him is three moves ahead of every play he has left. The truth won't set him free. It'll bury him.
S11 · E2
May 1 · 42 min
Novella Noir | The Stringer | Noir Audio Drama
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 trusted might be the most dangerous thing of all. In a city that has learned to manage its own wounds, knowing what happened and being able to prove it are two very different problems.
S11 · E3
May 1 · 26 min
Novella Noir | The Tenant | Noir Audio Drama
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 particular gravity. They attract the wrong kind of attention. As the trial date for her husband's killer approaches, Margaret begins to wonder whether her memory is her own — or whether someone has been quietly, expertly, rearranging the furniture of her mind.

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