SHORT STORY WEDNESDAY: MURDER TO MUSIC

 "Murder to Music" by "Anthony Burgess" (John Anthony Burgess Wilson)  (from the Burgess collection The Devil's Mode (1989); reprinted in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, January 1991; in The Incredible Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (2009), edited by John Joseph Adams; and in The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories, edited by Otto Penzler (2015).

A witty, eloquent, and rather labyrinthian Sherlockian tale.

In the final moments of an afternoon violin concert at St. James Hall featuring noted violinist and composer Sarasate, the maestro's piano accompanist is shot dead on stage.  In the audience are Holmes and Watson; Holmes because of his interest in Sarasate's convoluted playing, and Watson (lowbrow that he was) because he needed a nap.  The dying accompanist managed to strike a few notes on the piano before he passed on to that great concert hall in the sky.

Not much of a mystery here.  Soon the assassin is cornered on a rooftop from which he fell and broke his neck -- whether by accident or design does not really matter.

But there is a plot to assassinate the infant king of Spain, along with his mother, the regent.  Also on deck is:

• A young man who had never travelled out of England, mysteriously stricken with a rare Malaysian malady known as latah, which symptoms manifested in a conviction that the victim had metamorphosed into a bicycle.
• Later, the same victim was stricken with a rare Chinese disease, shook jung, which caused the victim to mutilate his male organ of generation.
• A stolen piece of royal note]paper used to forge the signature of the private secretary to the Prince of Wales.
• A tattoo of a phoenix rising from the flames, a symbol of radical Catalonian separatists.
• A threat of of disinheritance from the dead pianist's father.
• A performance at the D'Orly Carte for the visiting Iberian royals of Gilbert and Sullivan's Gondaliers, a musical in which Spanish nobility is mocked; a performance which lowbrow Watson thoroughly enjoyed and Holmes slept through.
• The involvement of Sir Arthur Sullivan.

It all ties together well and, in the end, the day is saved.  And we also learn that Scotland Yard Inspector Stanley Hopkins is related to Gerard Manley Hopkins, who once taught Greek to Holmes at Stoneyhurst College.

A joy of language is present (I had to look up the meaning of several words), as is a distinct whimsey -- one could expect no less from Burgess, a distinguished author, critic, linguist, translator, and composer.  Burgess may be best known for his novels, A Clockwork Orange, The Lone Day Wanes trilogy, Devil of a State, the Enderby Quartet, Tremor of Intent, Earthly Powers, and Nothing Like the Sun.  He was short-listed for the Noble Prize in Literature in 1973.  He wrote many screenplays and film treatments. and was noted for devising the Stone Age language used in the 197 film The Quest for Fire.  Sadly, his script for the James Bond adventure The Spy Who Loved Me was rejected, although at least one part of the film was reportedly his inspiration.  Perhaps fittingly, considering "Murder to Music," Burgess was supposedly the co-writer of the script for the television series Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson (1980) -- a fact not noted by the IMDb website, possibly something that can be attributed to Burgess's noted mythomania.