Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer

In London in 1923, after the dress rehearsal of his revolutionary new opera Little Musgrave, wunderkind composer Charles Jessold comes home to discover his wife and her lover in bed. Killing them both and then committing suicide, Jessold leaves a permanent stain on his once-promising career, compounded by the bitter irony of the similarities between his murder-suicide and the plot of his new opera. Wesley Stace sets this fictional tragedy in an entirely real context, the tumultuous musical era when the lure of European modernism sparks against the nationalistic spirit behind the emergent English folk revival, with the horrors of World War I underpinning the international conflict. Alongside his meticulous recreation of the story's time and place, with hints of Wilde's subtle homoeroticism and Wodehouse's jovial tweaking of social mores, Stace also plays some David Mitchell-like post-modern games: not only is Jessold's fate inspired by the true story of Renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo, erudite narrator Leslie Shepherd tells the tale three different times, each new version casting doubt on the one that came before. Fair warning: Shepherd is a dogmatic music critic, and Stace (himself a well-known folk-pop singer-songwriter under the name John Wesley Harding) often allows his narrator lengthy historical and technical digressions that those not musically inclined may find themselves skipping. That said, the characters of Shepherd and Jessold are so appealingly fleshed out that knowledge of music theory is far from essential to enjoy the well-plotted story.