In Stage two of the Lost Detectives project Carol Adlam wrote two audio drama scripts, and one libretto experimental piece. These were designed for performance under pandemic conditions. You can hear her discussing these in episodes 1 and 3 of the Lost Detectives podcast.
Today in 1864
A 45-minute radio drama script by Carol Adlam. In this free adaptation of a ‘lost’ classic of nineteenth-century Russian crime fiction (Nikolai Timofeev’s hugely popular ‘true crime’ case notes, Notes of an Investigator, 1872), the BBC’s flagship Today Programme reports live from reform-era Russia in 1864. The programme is guest-edited by celebrity detective ‘Tim’ Timofeev, whose moral certainties are undone as the live trial of a young woman he has arrested ends tragically. Reports come in from the radio troika of prison escapes, gambling dens, and arson, interspersed by familiar features such as Tweet of the Day (the Siberian Grouse), the shipping forecast, and interviews with Fedor Dostoevskii and dashing steeplechase jockey Count Vronskii. Meanwhile the live trial unfolds of Marianna Bodresova, a young woman who has been arrested for the crime of attempted suicide. Marianna’s eventual confession implicates the wider community and the legal system itself in a tale of inter-generational incest.
A sample is available below.
Curare
A 45-minute radio drama script by Carol Adlam, inspired by Aleksandr Shkliarevskii’s A Secret Investigation (1881). Curare is a hallucinatory crime story set in the St Petersburg Medical Academy in nineteenth-century Imperial Russia. It centres on a pair of young women who are training to be doctors, and who get caught up in the shady world of police surveillance, the emerging anti-vivisection movement, and the operations of a killer who is conducting Flatliners-like experiments using the drug curare.
Listeners are taken on a dream-like, melodramatic journey through the fragmented phonograph recordings of police interrogations of Zina Mozharevskaya, obstetrics student; Arkady Mozharevsky, Professor of Medicine; Dunya Kriukovskaya, obstetrics student and murderer, and unprincipled scientist and con-artist Gershka Kebmezakh. Zina is injected with curare by her best friend, but survives, and is then instrumental in laying bare the unregulated and unethical use of curare in which both her husband and Kebmezakh are involved. Finally, Zina takes over the running of the Medical Academy. This adaptation embeds the original in the wider cultural context of the period, exploring medical classes for women, the use of curare in anaesthesia, the establishment of the first-ever RSPCA, and the use of photography in early forensic science.
A sample is available below.
