DEATH ON THE DOWN BEAT

Murder during a concert performance kicks off a genuine curiosity: a one-off by pseudonymous music scholar and journalist Eric Walter Blom (1888-1959) that’s been mostly forgotten since its first publication in 1941.

Almost none of the performers in the Maningpool Municipal Orchestra have a kind word for Sir Noel Grampian, their late conductor. He was sarcastic and abusive, and his wife, Letty, hadn’t lived with him for years, ever since she found out about his extramarital dalliances. But who could have ended his career with such shocking decisiveness by shooting him dead in the middle of Richard Strauss’ tone poem Ein Heldenleben? DI Alan Hope, the Scotland Yard detective who’d just left Maningpool to avoid hearing a concert in which Grampian might have been hard on his wife Julia’s friend and Lady Letty’s sister, Beatrice Gillighan, who plays second harp for the orchestra on those rare occasions when a score calls for two harps, is promptly called back to investigate. In a series of letters and other documents he sends to Julia, he explains why Grampian must have been shot by someone actually in the orchestra, someone who took advantage of a particularly noisy outburst in which the composer imitated, and now concealed, gunfire. The suspects and their motives are, as even Hope acknowledges, utterly forgettable, and his letters to Julia, cloyingly facetious. But the puzzle itself, drawing on details the author helpfully provides about the decorum of orchestral performance generally and Ein Heldenleben in particular, is first-rate.

A one-of-a-kind treat from the golden age best enjoyed with appropriate musical accompaniment.