Alvaro Zinos-Amaro is a Hugo- and Locus-award finalist who has published over fifty stories and one hundred essays, reviews, and interviews in professional markets.

Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, Richard Diamond, Nero Wolfe, Pat Novak, Johnny Dollar – at the height of their popularity in the 1940s and 1950s, when radio was the primary means of home entertainment in the United States, detective story serials drew tens of millions of listeners.

These serialized private eye dramas, which hypnotized audiences with crackling writing, stirring voice acting, gripping plots, colorful characters, and atmospheric sound effects, were gradually relegated to silence as the art form of immersive audio storytelling went extinct–until now.

Enter True Noir: The Assassination of Anton Cermak, a spellbinding sonic re-imagining of the first installment in Max Allan Collins’ most celebrated series, the Nathan Heller casebooks.

Crisply directed and impeccably edited by Robert Meyer Burnett, based on Collins’ excellent screenplay treatment of his own novel, the audio drama drops listeners into an aurally vibrant and thoroughly realized 1932 Chicago, where we follow the shady power plays of characters both fictional and historical.

Michael Rosenbaum brings Nate Heller to life with a captivating blend of playful gusto and sensitivity, pulling double duty with a voiceover simultaneously dynamic and velvety. The stacked supporting cast, which includes Bill Smitrovich, David Strathairn, and Katee Sackhoff, unfailingly deliver performances that pop with nuance and flavor.

Michael J. McDonald’s phenomenal sound design, which expertly suggests spatial relationships through the subtle manipulation of audio channel elements, such as floating wisps of background dialog, further orchestrates the drama’s heightened sense of reality. Ingenious transitional effects, like traveling through a telephone wire or experiencing a sensory flashback, invent a whole new vocabulary of acoustic alchemy.

Alexander Bornstein’s tastefully interspersed original score, with its sultry jazz influences, smoky sax tones, and melancholy piano chords, evokes the best retro-noir scores of the twentieth century, like Jerry Goldsmith’s Chinatown, John Williams’ The Long Goodbye, and John Barry’s Body Heat. We can only hope for its eventual release as a standalone presentation.

Worldbuilding is a term commonly applied to literary and visual media–but True Noir proves that with the right team at the conductor’s podium, it can be equally batoned to mesmerizing effect just through sound. In a smoky netherworld, somewhere between bitter memory and bygone dream, the ambiance-drenched True Noir is the perfect marriage of our past’s most beloved tried-and-true storytelling tradition with the latest cutting-edge technologies of creative soundscaping.

The play’s still the thing, and this one hits all the right notes.