In my off-peak moments, those minutes/hours before I turn off my bedside lamp and drift off into dreamland I like to read. Usually my choice of literature is either a hard-boiled American crime/mystery novel or some jazz related tome. When the two are combined in one book the results can vary. Even with the best of intentions it often becomes obvious that the writer is more at home with one genre over the other.
Not so Bill Moody. In his 1997 novel, The Sound of the Trumpet, his character Evan Horne - a pianist and a sleuth by circumstances - is asked to advise and help authenticate a couple of tapes thought to be by Clifford Brown. This seemingly innocent task leads to Horne becoming involved in murder and violence all centered around the tapes and a trumpet which may once have belonged to 'Brownie'.
There's also flashbacks to that fateful rainy night (June 26, 1956) on the Pennsylvania Turnpike and the car crash that killed Clifford Brown and Bud Powell's brother Richie and his (Richie's) wife Nancy. As I read I can almost see the rain lashing down and hear the swish of the Buick's tyres on the wet tarmac.
The Sound of the Trumpet is the third of seven Evan Horne jazzy mysteries and, on the strength of this one, I'm going to have to make space on my bookshelves for the other six.
Top of my search list will be Moody's Death of a Tenor Man which has our piano-playing sleuth looking into the mysterious death of Wardell Gray.
My thanks to Peter Bevan for introducing me to The Sound of the Trumpet. I think it is still available via the online hucksters. Lance
Bill Moody - The Sound of the Trumpet.
Published Walker & Co. (1997).
ISBN 0-8027-3291-7
1 comment :
Bill Moody was a successful jazz drummer as well - Syncopated Times wrote about him when he died in 2018.
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