A Snow Day With the British Library Crime Classics

I woke up this morning to my daughter whisper-yelling my name to wake me up and let me know school was canceled because of snow. My morning plans had already been postponed because I knew the storm was coming. I promptly rolled over and went back to sleep.

I love snow days.

There was nowhere I had to be, nowhere I could be, and absolutely nothing required of me. What more could I ask for out of life today? It has been a day of puttering around, watching All Creatures Great and Small with my husband, and…well, I don’t really know what else.

Reading is necessary on a snow day. That is a given, isn’t it? I just finished Death on the Down Beat: An Orchestral Fantasy of Detection by Sebastian Farr. It is one of the British Library Crime Classic reprints. It is an epistolary novel which is a genre I enjoy. Most of the story is told by means of letters sent by D. I. Alan Hope to his wife interspersed with clippings from newspapers and letters from the members of the orchestra. Here is a bit from the blurb on the back of the book.

As a rousing Strauss piece is reaching its crescendo in Maningpool Civic Hall, the talented yet obnoxious conductor Sir Noel Grampian is shot dead in full view of the Municipal Orchestra and the audience. It was no secret that he had many enemies—musicians and music critics among them—but to be killed in mid flow suggest an act of the coldest calculation.

The book follows the Inspector as he sorts through a vast array of information. After all, a death in front of an audience of 2,000 provides many suspects. There is also a good amount of discussion about the musical scores and what they tell about when the murder could have been committed. All of this was interesting but, ultimately, I felt it provided a muddied storyline. There were so many members of the orchestra and bits and pieces of information that no one character felt real and fleshed out which left the conclusion a bit anticlimactic.

I did enjoy the book in the same way I enjoy all of the British Library Crime Classics but I don’t think this was one of my favorites. It is, however, the perfect snow day read. Somehow snow days and vintage crime seem to go together.

My thanks to the British Library for the review copy of this book.