CRIME FICTION AND MUSIC
by Philip Scowcroft
Music, in all its forms, is a social and/or artistic
activity of great importance and as literature so often reflects real
life it is natural for the two to be closely associated. Studies of
the interface between music and the literary work of, for example, Shakespeare,
Milton, Jane Austen, the Brontes, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas
Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, John Galsworthy, Oscar Wilde and many others
have been published and I myself have indeed attempted some of those.
But here I would like to examine briefly the connections between music
and crime and mystery fiction, looking at, for example, "musical"
settings for crime stories, music inspired by adaptations of those stories
and one or two related topics.
The longer crime fiction has been with us, the more
have its authors taken trouble with their background. Music in its various
forms makes an attractive and often unusual background to crime. Take
opera for example. Edmund Crispin’s Swan Song (1947) has
the setting of a production of Wagner’s The Mastersingers of Nuremberg
in Oxford with Crispin’s don detective Gervase Fen in good form; the
climax comes when an attempt is made to murder the tenor lead just as
he is about to sing the Prize Song! At least twice Robert Barnard
imagines modern murder in an operatic situation (under a pseudonym he
has published two mysteries set in the time of Mozart). In Death
on the High Cs (1977) the victim is an Australian mezzo whose "recent
Carmen was fresh in everyone’s mind. Brazen, blatant, torrid
and vulgar it had had some critics reaching for their superlatives and
others simply reaching". (She is naturally murdered). In Barnard’s
Death and the Chaste Apprentice (1989), the opera, being produced
in London’s suburbia, is Donizetti’s Adelaide di Birkenhead (yes,
it is a fictitious opera but there are real Donizetti operas entitled
Adelaide, simply, and Emilia di Liverpool). Lighter "opera"
figures, too. The duo of Jill Staynes and Margaret Storey, and Gladys
Mitchell, creator of Mrs Bradley, have gone for The Beggar’s Opera
while Mollie Hardwick and, again Gladys Mitchell (with Mrs Bradley)
have preferred Gilbert and Sullivan. Opera or operetta singers figure
even in crime novels which do not have a primarily operatic ambience,
for example the heroines of A E W Mason’s No other Tiger (1927),
The Sapphire (1933) and They Wouldn’t Be Chessmen (1935).
And a surprising number of investigators, police and other, enjoy opera:
Sherlock Holmes, about whom more presently, Colin Dexter’s Inspector
Morse, a convinced Wagnerite, Mary Kelly’s Inspector Nightingale, who
is married to an operatic diva, V C Clinton-Baddeley’s Dr R V Davie,
another don detective, gentler than Gervase Fen, and many more.
But musical backgrounds to fictional crime of course
extend beyond opera. In Edmund Crispin’s Frequent Hearses (1950)
the setting is a film studio and we naturally hear about film music.
"In his concert works "Napier" was a somewhat acrid modernist
but like most such composers he unbuttoned, becoming romantic and sentimental,
when he was writing for the films". Napier is delighted to be told
that his latest film score is "beautiful", though he deprecatingly
says, "Don’t judge me by this stuff". Crispin himself, whose
real name was Bruce Montgomery, knew what he was talking about, as he
was also a musician, composing not only church music, songs and a delightful
Concertino for strings, recently (2001) recorded, but much film music
notably for the early "Doctor" films and for the first four
of the "Carry On" films.
Not all musical backgrounds involve classical music.
For example jazz comes into Ngaio Marsh’s Swing Brother Swing
(1949) and into John Wainwright’s Walther P38 and Do Nothin’
Until You Hear From Me (1977). Ellis Peters’ Black is the Colour
of My True Love’s Heart (1967) is set in a weekend school on folk
music, while J R L Anderson’s Festival (1979) relates to a pop
festival, though admittedly classical music festivals are more often
scene of crime, as Clinton-Baddeley, Ellis Peters, Alan Hunter and Mary
Peters, among several others, have shown. Church music is still another
background, with Edmund Crispin again prominent, also Michael Gilbert
with his Close Quarters (1947, set in a (fictitious) cathedral
close. Among "concert" settings we have Douglas Clark’s Performance
(1985), in which the contralto soloist drops dead at the end of
a North Country performance of Handel’s Messiah. And one I like
particularly is When the Wind Blows (1949) by Cyril Hare. The
murder is of a visiting soloist for a provincial orchestral society,
just as she is about to perform Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto. If the
reader is to spot the culprit before investigators he or she needs to
have a knowledge of the orchestration of Mozart’s symphonies (I remember,
when I first read the book, that I had such knowledge but as I thought
the author did not, it didn’t help me).
I have mentioned relatively few titles but there are
many more relevant ones – altogether I have discovered 188 separate
crime novels or stories with significant musical input and they are
merely those by British authors and, usually, with a British setting.
Several of the authors were themselves musicians. We have already introduced
Edmund Crispin and we also can point to Agatha Christie who considered,
only to regret, careers as a singer and as a concert pianist – she even
composed four songs and piano pieces, some of which achieved publication.
Dorothy L Sayers played, though not professionally, violin and saxophone
and sang in the Oxford Bach Choir when she was an undergraduate and
Freeman Wills Crofts was an accomplished organist. Other crime authors
wrote libretti for musical stage works: Conan Doyle – in collaboration
with J M Barrie of Peter Pan fame – abridged for the operetta
Jane Austen, which was a monumental flop at the Savoy Theatre
in 1893 (the music was by Ernest Ford, a pupil of Sullivan); V C Clinton-Baddeley,
who did likewise for the opera The What d’Ye Call It, with music
by Phyllis Tate; and Edgar Wallace who wrote libretti for the musicals
Are You There? (1913), Soldier Boy (1915) and The Yellow
Mask (1927) but only the last was successful.
Several crime authors have made their detectives not
only music-lovers, of which I quoted examples just now, but also practising
musicians, though only rarely do they use their musical expertise in
their investigations. Sherlock Holmes played the violin, a Stradivarius
he picked up for fifty-five shillings (£2.75), a bargain even in the
1880s; and Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey sang tenor and played the piano,
"a musician of some skill and more understanding" whom we
see playing, on his baby grand at 110A Picadilly, Bach and Scarlatti
– though he admits a harpsichord is better for their music – among more
modern composers. Both he and Philip Trent of Trent’s Last Case
(1913) married musicians. Wimsey’s Harriet, like her creator, sang in
the Oxford Bach Choir, while Trent’s fiancee plays him, in the book,
the theme from the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and in the 1952
film of Trent’s Last Case the slow movement of Mozart’s C Minor
Piano Concerto.
To balance the several fictional villains there are
also practising musicians, like music teacher Miss Gwilt from Wilkie
Collins’ Armadale (1866), Count Fosco of Collins’ The Woman
in White (1860), who enjoys singing Italian Opera, especially Rossini
(we hear of him declaiming Largo Al Factotum to his own concertina
accompaniment), John Jasper of Charles Dickens’ Edwin Drood (1870),
choirmaster at Cloisterham (really Rochester) Cathedral, Irene Adler,
a former prima donna of the Warsaw Opera, "the woman"
for Sherlock Holmes, whom she outwits in the short story "A Scandal
in Bohemia", Tony Perelli of Edgar Wallace’s On the Spot
(1931), set in Chicago’s gangland, the culprit in Margery Allingham’s
Dancers in Mourning (1937) who composes musical comedies and
concocts nasty murders, and one of the Vicars Choral in Michael Gilbert’s
Close Quarters, previously mentioned.
Now for music inspired by crime fiction. Sherlock Holmes
will figure considerably but of him more presently. The most popular
of all mystery authors is Agatha Christie and inevitably there have
been many adaptations (with music) of her books, for small and large
screens, the radio and also for the stage as Benjamin Britten composed
attractive music for the stage version Love From a Stranger (1936)
of the short story "Philomel Cottage". Ron Goodwin wrote music
for the four Margaret Rutherford Miss Marple films of the 1960s and
for the Alphabet Murders, the film version of Christie’s best
detective novel, The ABC Murders (1936), the Italian Nino Rota
for Death on the Nile (1938), Malcolm Lockyer for Ten Little
Indians (1966) and Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (also Italian) for
And Then There Were None, a 1945 adaptation of the same novel,
originally entitled Ten Little Niggers (1939). All these composers
are, or were significant names in the musical world. The music for the
latter-day Poirot TV adaptation, by Christopher Gunning, captures well
the sound of the popular music of the 1930s, Poirot’s heyday, while
the opening tune for all the Joan Hickson Miss Marple TV features (the
tune is by Alan Blaikley and Ken Howard – I understand one wrote the
tune and the other scored it) I have heard played in a live concert
by three oboists. But the best known piece inspired by Agatha Christie
is the Introduction and Waltz from the film Murder on the Orient
Express (1974, book 1934) by Richard Rodney Bennett, excellent both
as "train music" and also at painting, with just a shade of
oriental colour, the romance of the setting of the murder, one of the
most high profile railway trains of all time.
Before I leave Dame Agatha let me recall that Joseph
Horovitz wrote music for the TV adaptations of her non-Poirot books
Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? (1934) and The Seven Dials Mystery
(1929) and Colin Towns, who is keen on jazz but is capable of gentle,
non-jazzy scores, did likewise for The Pale Horse, another non-Poirot
Christie. Both Horovitz and Towns obliged other crime writers, Horovitz’s
title music for the 1980s Edward Petherbridge/Harriet Walter versions
of three of Dorothy L Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey novels encapsulating
to perfection the 1920s style of popular music, while Towns’ music has
been heard in An Unsuitable Job For a Woman, based on PD James’
female detective Cordelia Gray and in the Derek Jacobi versions of Ellis
Peters’ Brother Cadfael investigations in which Towns, probably wisely,
makes little attempt to write mock-medieval music. Nigel Hess has composed
title music for at least five TV detective series, mostly based on books:
Dangerfield, Maigret (Simenon), Campion (Margery Allingham),
Wycliffe (W J Burley), and best known of all and recently very
popular as a brass band piece, Hetty Wainthropp Investigates.
Hess has combined the tunes of all five in a single movement The
TV Detectives, for wind band.
For large screen crime adaptations some notable names
have been pressed into service from both sides of the Atlantic. Examples
are: from America, Victor Young (Raffles , ((E W Horning), film 1939)
and Jerry Goldsmith (The List of Adrian Messenger (Philip MacDonald),
film 1963)); from Britain, William Alwyn (Green For Danger, by
Christianna Brand, film, 1946), Richard Addinsell for A E W Mason’s
Tudor Spy Thriller Fire Over England (film 1937, and the music
is "mock old"), Anthony Collins for E C Bentley’s Trent’s
Last Case (film 1952: the bits Mozart didn’t compose), Malcolm Arnold
(The Ringer by Edgar Wallace, film 1952), and from France, Georges
Auric for the film of Father Brown (1954), the clerical detective
created by G K Chesterton, one of several British films of the period
for which Auric wrote music, another being the comedy thriller Lavender
Hill Mob. John Barry, English-born but now domiciled in America,
wrote music not only for virtually all the James Bond films; but also
for The Ipcess File, Len Deighton’s tale of secret service (1965).
Sometimes it is not clear who did the music for a particular-film, even
a famous one, like the 1935 Robert Donat version of The Thirty Nine
Steps (by John Buchan, of course), credited to Hubert Bath, later
of Cornish Rhapsody fame, but it is thought that most of the
score was composed by Jack Beaver and Charles Williams, best known for
Devil’s Galop, the signature of BBC radio’s thriller serial Dick
Barton, Special Agent (1960s). The 1961 remake of The Thirty
Nine Steps, with Kenneth More as Hannay had music by Clifton Parker;
for the 1978 Robert Powell version Ed Welch did the music.
Not many Radio crime adaptations or series had
or have had specially written music. Often the title and other cues
came from classical sources or from the shelves of the recorded music
libraries and, on a few occasions, depending on the popularity of the
series, the tune’s name was made. One such example is Vivian Ellis’
railway piece Coronation Scot, used as the signature tune to
many, though not all, of the Paul Temple series popular just after the
last war. This applied also to TV; Ronald Hanmer’s Changing Moods
No 2 became the title music for Dixon of Dock Green. Francis
Durbridge, the author of the Paul Temple mysteries, wrote the lyrics
and apparently the music also for a stage musical: yet another connection
between crime fiction and the musical stage and another is that operatic
adaptation of The Lodger by Mrs Belloc Loundes, a thriller based
on the Jack the Ripper story, with music by Phyllis Tate.
When all is said and done, the most famous of all detectives
is Sherlock Holmes. The number of films about him is legion. These are
mainly American and mainly "invented" cases (that is, not
adaptations of real Doyle Stories). For those which appeared in the
period around World War II, Hollywood called on perhaps its second string
composers for the most part, people like Frank Skinner, Cyril Mockridge,
Paul Sawtell and Milton Rosen, to provide the incidental music. This
group of films included the earliest, and probably still the best, talkie
version of The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939); later remakes
of The Hound had music by James Bernard, a regular composer for
Hammer Films, in 1959 and the entertainer Dudley Moore (1977). Other
latter-day Holmes films have often had major composers to write their
music. John ("Jock") Addison, English-born, latterly American
domiciled, for The Seven Per Cent Solution in 1976, though Stephen
Sondheim contributed a rather naughty song to this; John Scott, for
A Study in Scarlet (1965); Henry Mancini for Without A Clue
(1988), and Miklos Rozsa for The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
(1970). The Most notable TV music for Holmes was by Patrick Gowers,
for the long-running Granada series starring Jeremy Brett on Holmes.
Some music – that by Scott and by Malcolm Williamson for Channel 4’s
Masks of Death – has sought to exploit the fact that Holmes was
a violinist.
But Holmesian music does not stop at film adaptations.
A musical, Baker Street, premiered on Broadway in 1965, was successful,
a British musical Sherlock Holmes with music by Leslie Bricusse
(1989) much less so. Nigel Hess’s incidental music for Jeremy Paul’s
play The Secret of Sherlock Holmes is attractive. In 1953, a
ballet, The Great Detective, with music by Richard Arnell, was
produced as Sadler’s Wells. And the composer Carey Blyton wrote music
for a pilot Holmes TV cartoon feature which did not get off the ground
but he reused some of it in a suite for brass quintet with movements
like March, The Game’s Afoot, The Baker Street Irregulars
and Moriarty: Hansom Cab Chase.
How can we sum up music and fictional crime? In whatever
form, music makes a pleasant and interesting background for a detective
story or thriller and by and large – thought there are always exceptions
to any general theses – the authors best at describing the music have
written the best mysteries. Not often, though, does the music materially
affect the detective plot. At times detective stories afford valuable
material for the social historian of music, especially those of Dorothy
L Sayers which shed interesting light on early 20th century
musical institutions, now outdated, such as cinema orchestras, café
and hotel orchestras, seaside orchestras or the village concert and
also on attitudes to music in the Lord Peter Wimsey era. Finally music
inspired by crime writings, whether for films, radio, TV, theatre or
whatever, is generally light and if rather ephemeral, usually entertaining.
It is perhaps a special footnote to the heritage of 20th
century light music.
Philip L Scowcroft