Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer

An unusual and intriguing thriller set knowledgeably by Wesley Stace against the changing cultural landscape of the first half of 20th-century England, this is a novel to be savoured, especially in this season of prom concerts, by anyone seeking absorbing, if occasionally challenging, holiday reading.

Protagonist Leslie Shepherd, a music critic with larger ambition both as a writer and a mentor to the more talented, offers us his accounts, in 1923 and in 1953, of events leading to the killings of his protégé, the composer Charles Jessold, and of his wife and her lover.

The deaths occur the day before the premiere of Jessold’s innovative opera, Little Musgrave, and appear to mirror the plot of that opera. Only in 1953, when Shepherd is reaching the end of his life is the truth of the events exposed.

In Shepherd, Stace (a musician himself) gives us an opinionated, calculating, often amusing, observant narrator, who engages interest and, somewhat surprisingly, a degree of sympathy as the – essentially plot-led – novel unfolds.

Alongside the personal stories, Shepherd is concerned with issues such as national identity and cultural inheritance; changing conventions in music and the part that timeliness plays in the reception of artistic endeavour; and the necessity to separate biographical fact from the interpretation of an artist’s work.

These add interest and texture to the novel, even if occasionally they threaten to overwhelm the narrative.

Stace, in this his third novel, captures well, almost too well, the idiom of his somewhat Bloomsbury-esque characters so that the occasional anachronistic witticism — ‘Does he do children’s parties?’ asks someone in 1910 of a dark Shepherd anecdote — is welcome for its leavening effect.