I really wanted to like NightMusic. This mystery, written by Harrison Gradwell Slater was a recent find at my local discount bookstore. The cover promises Mozart, murder, international intrigue—all played out by a cast of the rich and talented in the glittering cities of Europe. It sounded very promising. Unfortunately, this is a case of a literary promise broken; smashed as if thrown from the heights of a towering cathedral somewhere in the midst of Europe….

The Story
Imagine for a moment that you are a musicologist, a Mozart scholar, struggling to find a foothold in the unforgiving world of academia. Then imagine that on a trip to Europe, hoping to generate enough self-promotion that a university decides to offer you a tenure-track position, you find yourself stranded in Milan due to a train strike. Having at least a day of travel delay ahead of you, you wander into a viewing of some items set for auction. While looking through a room filled with dusty books, you feel drawn to a folio labeled “of little importance.” However, what appears at first to be a list of household expenditures, contains on later pages what look like journal entries by the subject of your life’s work, Mozart himself, made during travels with his father as a young teen.

Of course you would change your travel plans immediately. Of course you would spend the last of your traveling money to buy what may be not only a great historical find, but also the key to finally finding success in your chosen profession. Of course you would take the pages back to your pathetic Boston apartment and begin the work of translation and authentication. And of course you would send photocopies of your find to one of the premier publishers of Mozart related historical documents in hopes of having it included in the upcoming prestigious publication on Mozart due to be published in 2006, 215 years after Mozart’s death.

And if all this happened, it would be no real surprise to then be invited to a gathering of The Foundation in Nancy, France. After all, the Foundation is known for its grants offered to support artistic and historical scholarship. And it would be a thrill to find yourself suddenly rubbing elbows with all sorts of people who are at the top of the Mozart food chain—everyone from the publisher you had sent the copied Mozart documents to (as well as his primary rival, planning to publish a similar volume the same year) to famous singers and instrumentalists specializing in Mozart’s music.

It might be a surprise, however, if members of this international cast of Mozart experts began dying under terrible and gruesome circumstances. And it would be terrifying to think that you might be the next one to go.

(Insert menacing music here…)

The Bad Beginning
The first problem with this book is the setup. I’ve read other books where they tell you what is going to happen later in the book by giving it away in the prologue. I’ve found that it often means that the book can’t stand on its own and therefore needs you to want to at least find out how the character gets himself into such an awful position. Sadly, that is also the case with this particular story. In the prologue to NightMusic, Matthew Pierce, a musicologist from Boston, finds that he is in an emergency room in Prague with a knife in his chest and no feeling in his legs. What’s more, he has no memory of how he came to be there.

The Appalling Ending
So far, this is pretty schlocky stuff, but not yet truly terrible. The terrible part is not so much the story, uninspired though it may be. The worst of it is the writing itself. The author, Harrison Gradwell Slater, is a musicologist himself and has written a non-fiction volume about Mozart’s travels called In Mozart’s Footsteps. Perhaps he should have contained his zeal to be published to scholarly reference works, because as a novelist, he has failed horribly. The story is predictable. The pacing is far too slow for a good whodunit. The characters are mere caricatures—the unappreciated scholar, the b*tchy diva, the businessman turned criminal money launderer, the beautiful and intelligent investigator who just happens to be the niece of the Viscount who is the head of the Foundation and brought all these paper dolls together in one place.

The absolute worst of the worst, however, is that at the end of the book, all the key players are re-assembled, after having run all across Europe together before going their separate ways, so that they can ‘get to the bottom’ of what has been going on. The final 46 pages of this 557-page dud tried to be a classic Hercule Poirot ending; having everyone tell everything they know about everything that has happened, with those responsible for the murders finally confessing before collapsing into hysterics. Unfortunately, Agatha Christie would be rolling over in her grave at how badly this final exposition comes across. Even this climactic scene ended up feeling slow and bloated.

The Mediocre Middle
Between the setup and the confessions is supposed to be the part of the story that makes you care about the characters. To illustrate how well the author succeeded at his chosen task, let me just tell you that on at least one occasion I put down this book, mid-chapter no less, because I felt an overwhelming need to vacuum the living room. Do I really need to say more? I didn’t care one whit about any of the characters—they were all just a bunch of boring, self-centered people running around Europe, engaged in conspicuous consumption and blathering on about missing historical documents between performing Mozart music for each other. There was one scene, at a masked ball of course, where there was sort of an accidental, homosexual encounter—but it was such an odd, disjointed, unbelievable event that even that salacious moment did little to liven up this poorly written story.

What I actually did like
The one redeeming quality of this book was that it was all chock full of interesting Mozart trivia. There was discussion of his travels with his father, Leopold, his relationship with his sister, Nannerl, and his marriage to Costanze. There were references to gossip about Mozart’s sex-life and his suspected fathering of children by women other than his wife. And there was lots of discussion about the fact that, for decades, people have tried to make profit from faked diaries supposedly written by this popular and interesting composer. The bones were here for a good story. But the fleshing-out left much to be desired.

Final Thougts
I don’t expect a lot from most mystery stories. If a whodunit is entertaining and tells a good story, I’ll give it my personal thumbs-up. Unfortunately, despite the potential of the subject matter, NightMusic failed in its effort to be entertaining. If someone offers you this book as a summer read, run (don’t walk) the other way as fast as you can. Yes, it’s that bad.


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This is my Excruciating entry into the Excellent and Excruciating write off.

My Excellent entry can be found here.


Recommended: No