Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer [Hardcover]

What a find this novel was. I had never heard of author Wesley Stace but now I will read everything he has written. He is an author and musician and here he combines both in an intricately written psychological historical novel. With historical fiction it is important that time and place be real to the extent of being a character in itself. Stace far surpasses that requirement here. This book is written with literary prose that fully respects the written word. His sentences and phrases are works of art and the fact that this happens in a novel where music takes center stage is no mistake. We are fully placed in the early 1900s and then the deeply psychological aspect of the book takes form. All the characters here are fully developed and true creations. Charles Jessold is a young composer who on the night before the premiere of his new opera kills his wife, her lover and then commits suicide. Critic Leslie Shepperd tells the story and he also happens to have cowritten the opera. He tells the story to us from three different perspectives and with each perspective the way the mysteries and answers unfold is ingenious.

Wesley Stace is not a new author but he is new to me. This novel fills me with great admiration of his work. One must read this novel to be able to fully appreciate his gifts as an author. This definitely can only be defined as musical fiction. What a creation. This is a very intelligent piece of work that fully respects the reader. Be prepared to be taken to another place and time and be well taken care of by author Stace. This novel is a very welcome addition to historical fiction and I highly recommend it. Put it at the top of your to read list.

Wesley Stace's ample new novel -- half murder mystery, half music criticism -- opens with a press report on the death of the talented young English composer Charles Jessold in 1923. He appears to have shot himself in his apartment after poisoning his wife and his wife's lover and watching them die. The murder-suicide has not one but two ironic precedents. It reproduces the story of the Renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo, who similarly killed his wife with her lover. It is also the subject of an English folk-ballad, "Lord Barnard and Little Musgrave," which Jessold had taken as the subject for his operatic magnum opus, due to premiere the following night. Given the circumstances, the opera was canceled and Jessold's posthumous reputation ruined. It seems clear that he was a man obsessed by the career of Gesualdo, his near-namesake, as he squandered his own talent in alcoholism and excess. The facts are not in dispute; it only remains to trace the sorry path that led to this debacle, and ascertain the composer's possible motives.

This task is left to Leslie Shepherd, a gentleman of independent means who writes musical criticism for a leading London paper. Meeting Jessold at a country-house weekend, he takes it upon himself to promote the young man and guide his early career. It is the period of the English folk-song revival, when composers such as Vaughan-Williams and Holst would go out into the countryside to transcribe ancient versions of the old ballads as sung by aged countrymen, in search of a home-grown nationalism to combat the dominance of German music. Jessold is staying with Shepherd and his wife Miriam when they hear the "Little Mossgrave" ballad (sic) sung by an old sheep-shearer, planting the seed for the eventual opera, for which Shepherd will write at least the first draft of the libretto. But a decade must pass before that. Jessold attracts attention with a number of smaller compositions; he makes two trips to study in Germany, but is trapped there by the outbreak of the 1914 war, and spends the next four years in an internment camp. There, he manages to write music of ever greater brilliance, and returns to London in 1918 as a musical celebrity and clearly the next great hope for British music. But he also becomes personally unreliable, rejecting his old friends, and turning to drink.

Wesley Stace is clearly a musician; in fact he has a separate career as a singer-songwriter under the name John Wesley Harding. But he knows the classical repertoire too. Unlike virtually all novels about musicians that I have read (Vikram Seth's AN EQUAL MUSIC being the sole other exception), the musical background to this one is impeccable. Stace understands the conflict in prewar British music between pastoral Englishism and dilettantish daring. He is also aware of the great movements on the continent; he has superb passages on Stravinsky's RITE OF SPRING and especially Schoenberg's second string quartet, the work in which he renounced tonality. Shepherd sums up his experience of the latter: "Yet I had to admit that I too felt the wonder of the music, its power, its horror. I had laughed at Jessold's 'breeze from other planets', but I had experienced it, that chill wind blowing from the future, in the hairs on the back of my neck, in my soul." Stace is brilliant at showing how Jessold steered his way between these various influences. He makes the composer always plausible, but very much his own man. If there is any one composer whose early music one thinks of more than others, it is Benjamin Britten, and the 1945 premiere of Britten's PETER GRIMES is another of the brilliant musical set-pieces in the book.

I do have problems, however. There are many times when I am not sure whether the music is just the background to the personal story, or whether the story has been devised solely to enable Stace to write about the music. As a musician myself (including as an opera librettist and former critic!), I was fascinated by everything, but other readers might find the book slow. Stace also goes out of his way to imitate the mandarin style of a lot of English writing at the beginning of the century, flowing with the stately amplitude of a Henry James, and there are times when you just wish he would get on with it. This is especially so in the second part of the book, after Jessold is long since dead, and Stace continues into the later years of his biographer, Leslie Shepherd. The musical details continue to fascinate, but when Hamlet has left the scene, who is interested in Horatio? Yet stick with it while Stace goes through the same events again but from an intiguingly different perspective. Some of his surprises come close to narrative cheating, but in the end they transform the book into a different kind of psychological study altogether, still very much worth the reading.

I cannot remember the last time I was as enthralled with a novel as I've been with "Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer." Superbly written and expertly plotted, author Wesley Stace has blessed us with the kind of book they don't make anymore: a literate, thinking man's mystery. Combining the wit of Oscar Wilde with the execution and skill of Dorothy L. Sayers, it's a brilliant, erudite delight that echoes past classics. The first person narrative moves forward with the steady, relentless suspense of DeMaurier's "Rebecca;" and the milieu draws clear parallels to the homoerotically charged drawing rooms of Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray." Or does it? Like Agatha Christie at her best, Stace is a master of misdirection, devilishly toying with our grasp of just what story he's telling - and whose; I was happily surprised on more than one occasion.

If the world of England's musical literati in the first half of the 20th century means nothing to you (if, for instance, you have no knowledge of or interest in composers like Vaughan Williams or Benjamin Britten), "Charles Jessold..." may seem a tad pretentious and refined in its sensibilities. But if the time and place, as well as the aforementioned authors, get you salivating, I think you'll devour this book with the same relish and pleasure as have I.