Liner Notes for A Musical Interlude

 

Liner Notes for A Musical Interlude

I’m not a horse person. But I have known horse people; some I was at school with, my lab partner for a year at university; some friends and acquaintances. I’ve been to parties and found myself in a horse conversation (with nothing much to offer). All this to say I don’t know a lot about horses, but I do know some HORSE FACTS.

Here’s how to write horses in fiction if you don’t know much about horses. First write it so you get to deploy one of your HORSE FACTS. Next at the point that where you’d have to explain the details of horse care or handling, close the scene or have a groom/stablelad/jockey/coachman etc take control of the horses. In this way you appear to be knowledgeable without getting ahead of your actual knowledge so that horse people will criticise your lack of understanding of horses.

You want to avoid that because once people start asking question about if you know anything about horses they start to ask about other elements, maybe you don’t know about locks, about poetry, about etiquette. Maybe you don’t know anything and are just making things up.

Fortunately no such problems can come up in this story, which is not about horses at all. Instead it is about the high stakes world of musical scores, manuscripts, and arrangements. The key here is that the object is the document, but Jackson wants to use it; to put it on display not in a dry, curated manner, but actually played. Hence musicians and an audience, and so an entry point for our protagonist. Jackson is brought down not by his avarice but by his pride.

The misdirection uses class differences. Miss DuBois is no common labourer; as a tutor she would have been superior to the servants (though the principals; butler, housekeeper, perhaps the cook have their prerogatives, taking their orders from master and mistress). Still, she is employed, and so can be overlooked. Which Schneemann, an outsider of sorts, can see clearly and take advantage of.

This is almost the template for my Edwardian comedy crime stories, lighter on the comedy than some. Someone has stolen something; Schneemann arranges a convoluted plan to steal it back. A bit of vicious gossip, a secret, an amiable buffoon intervenes. And in this case a little bit of music. Or at least one MUSIC FACT. And leave the rest to the musicians.