Learning Culture

Brendan Slocumb’s goal is to be the “Stephen King of musical mysteries.” In the last three years, he has published three mystery novels with Penguin Random House: The Violin Conspiracy (2022), Symphony of Secrets (2023), and The Dark Maestro (forthcoming in May). The protagonists of all three novels are classical musicians, and all three plots intertwine plots of murder and mayhem with stories of stolen violins and plagiarized opera compositions. 

A professional violinist and music teacher, Slocumb turned to writing during the COVID-19 pandemic, when musical gig work dried up. A lifelong reader and writer—his mom took him and his siblings to the library every other week, and he loved his college English classes—Slocumb stumbled across an online advertisement for book publishing in 2020. After a failed attempt to sell a “terrible” (in his words) science fiction story that he wrote 20 years ago, Slocumb’s agent suggested he write what he know. Slocumb incorporated elements of his own biography—including the real-life theft of his beloved 1953 Eugene Lehman violin during a home invasion—into The Violin Conspiracy, a mystery about a Black violin prodigy named Ray whose instrument is stolen on the eve of his participation in the Tchaikovsky Competition.

Though Slocumb never set out to write explicit political commentary, his books foreground the lives and experiences of Black musicians—and highlight classical music’s racist past and present. In The Violin Conspiracy, Ray is turned away from a wedding gig because “Black people just couldn’t play this kind of music.” In Symphony of Secrets, the composer Josephine Reed’s compositions are stolen by a white composer, then lost to the archive for 100 years. In The Dark Maestro, a young cellist named Curtis combats economic disadvantage and racial discrimination to forge a career as a cellist, which is upended when he is taken into the Witness Protection Program. 

In our conversation, Slocumb and I discussed strategies for writing about music, the intersections between music and politics, and what needs to change in the classical music industry.