In Thursday’s (7/12) Boston Globe, Nancy Shohet West writes, “As a longtime violin teacher and professional musician, first with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and currently as associate concertmaster for the Utah Symphony, Gerald Elias thought he might write a book for would-be professional musicians, covering the basics of violin technique as well as issues such as how to prepare for an audition. Yet he realized that if he had been handed a book like this when he was a young music student, ‘I would have fallen asleep in about five minutes,’ he said. But how to make an instructional manual for violinists a little more engrossing? Well, why not work in a whodunit murder mystery? … So in 2009, Elias published his first novel, ‘Devil’s Trill.’ A contract with St. Martin’s Press led to a second book, ‘Danse Macabre,’ and since then he has published two more, ‘Death and the Maiden’ and ‘Death and Transfiguration,’ all of which he calls ‘excursions into the dark side of the classical music world.’ … Elias concedes that his earlier idea of an instruction manual for violinists has more or less been sacrificed to the pursuit of murder mysteries, but he sees his approach within a greater context of novelists setting mysteries in very specific locales.”
Posted July 12, 2012
