Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer: A Novel

by Wesley Stace

One of The Wall Street Journal' s Best fiction books of 2011

England, 1923. A gentleman critic named Leslie Shepherd tells the macabre story of a gifted young composer, Charles Jessold. On the eve of his revolutionary new opera's premiere, Jessold murders his wife and her lover, and then commits suicide in a scenario that strangely echoes the plot of his opera---which Shepherd has helped to write. The opera will never be performed.

Shepherd first shares his police testimony, then recalls his relationship with Jessold in his role as critic, biographer, and friend. And with each retelling of the story, significant new details cast light on the identity of the real victim in Jessold's tragedy.

This ambitiously intricate novel is set against a turbulent moment in music history, when atonal sounds first reverberated through the concert halls of Europe, just as the continent readied itself for war. What if Jessold's opera was not only a betrayal of Shepherd, but of England as well?

Wesley Stace has crafted a dazzling story of counter-melodies and counter-narratives that will keep you guessing to the end.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Mystery, Music, Historical, Book Club, British Literature

389 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Wesley Stace also records music under the nom de plume of John Wesley Harding.

Reviews

[Paul Secor · Rating 4 out of 5]

I believe that Wesley Stace (John Wesley Harding) wrote this book a paean to music criticism and as a psychological study, rather than as a mystery, which it certainly is not - even though there's an ending which provides a solution to the opening scene of the novel.
It certainly succeeds best as a psychological study of the narrator and provides more than a glimpse into the world of musical criticism and the English classical music world in the first part of the 20th century.

Here's an interesting extra offered on Wesley Stace's website: https://wesleystace.com/charles-jessold/
Scroll down to Listen only to Daniel Felsenfeld's five-song suite
On Murder, Considered as a Fine Art and click play.

[Kurt Keefner · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am surprised that there are so few 5-star reviews for Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer, because this novel is an instant classic. The background alone is fascinating. Britain in the early twentieth century is just getting over a 300-year dry spell in music. This recovery is controversial since it came about by grafting German music (Brahms, Wagner) onto the English stalk, resulting in hybrids like Elgar (who wrote the music usually used at graduations).

Truly English music is sought out by collectors of rural folk songs. Our title character and the narrator, Leslie Shepard begin the novel by going out to the country songcatching. Shepard is a music critic and musically conservative and looks to composer Jessold as the Great White Hope of English music. We follow Jessold through Shepard's eyes as he develops by incorporating modernist dissonances from the continent into his music, all the while holding on to some more traditionally English elements.

The climax of Jessold's career is to be the premier of his opera, Little Musgrave, the first English opera since the time of Shakespeare. But on the night of the dress rehearsal, Jessold's wife and her lover are poisoned and Jessold is found dead of a gunshot wound, an obvious suicide. This triple death seems to echo the plot of the opera, whose performance is now cancelled.

Shepard takes us through Jessold's life and death two times, the first time in an "official" account, the second time as a memoir written in his old age. The two stories have some significant differences, raising interesting questions about how truth gets spun and how myths get made. Shepard's narrative voice alone is worth the price of admission: observant, self-aware, arch, vain, he slightly resembles Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead.

Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer is a fascinating portrait of three wonderfully-wrought characters: Jessold, Shepard and Shepard's wife. It is replete with period detail and references to both real and imaginary musical history. I am only passingly acquainted with the era, and it completely held my attention.

[Aguess · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have enjoyed Wesley Stace's earlier work. Particularly By George. But I really didn't like Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer. The narrator "biographer" is not likable or interesting, and his subject isn't either. The first half of the book - essentially the "false" biography of the main subject is rather boring. The only thing that kept me reading was my interest in figuring out what "the point" was. The second half - really a bit less than half was much more enjoyable as the narrator begins to reveal himself, and his long dead subject, in his old age. All of the characters get a much more nuanced definition, but by the time I got to the revelations at the end I already suspected them, but didn't really care. In the end everything seems to be in service of "the point" about the dangers of biographical criticism and not the story itself. It is a bit like all the descriptions of music the reader can't hear that make up a great deal of the text, they become tedious loose their "musical" qualities. To me this book just didn't sing.

[Mandolin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Surprising and gripping, this book is intellectual suspense at its best. Initially worried that its basis in the world of opera would be a negative aspect, my reluctance to read the book was quickly replaced by captivation and a hunger to read more. Thrace sets his stage as well as any good operatic composer and I found myself immersed in a world that, despite its unfamiliarity, became vibrantly alive with his musical descriptions and his twisted plot. Although portions of the novels are less than glimmering, their necessity in clarifying the operatic world to the non-initiate is clear and, therefore, they don't detract from the more interesting parts of the story. The psychological insight into the characters and their motivations is its best aspect, for the book leaves you wondering who the "bad" and "good" guy really were and rethinking your entire views on jealousy, unfaithfulness, love and murder.

[Kris Fernandez-Everett · Rating 2 out of 5]

i'll give this an extra star for originality and research -- the idea was interesting, and there's no doubting the erudition and preparation in the writing. however, the prose is entirely and needlessly overwrought, and the structure of the book is nothing short of annoying... the telling and retelling with some epilogue bits thrown into the main prose 2/3 of the way through made this a tedious read... a potboiler at best -- not sure how i could have enjoyed this book at all...

[Jason Pettus · Rating 5 out of 5]

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

It's no secret that I'm a huge fan of British author Wesley Stace -- who when he's not writing has a second career as indie musician John Wesley Harding -- mostly because of the way that he can declare a theme and then weave in all kinds of complicated and subtle references to it throughout his dense manuscripts, yet maintain a light-hearted and very readable tone to the whole thing, as best manifested so far in his 2008 charmer by George, simultaneously a multilayered family drama and an overlook at the entire British live-entertainment industry from the 1870s to 1970s, as public taste morphed over a century from music halls to supper clubs, radio and television. And now his latest is out, the equally entertaining but much darker Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer, which again pairs together two themes to fascinating effect, one more philosophical and one more practical -- it's essentially an examination of what we mean by 'objective truth,' and exactly how malleable that concept really is, told through the filter of a scandal within the classical music world, right at the time that Early Modernism was calling into question what exactly the future of chamber music was to even be, and what role British artists were to have in it.

Because that's an important thing to know if you don't already, long before discussing any of the weightier, more metaphorical issues this book raises, is simply that the British musical arts had a complicated relationship with the Early Modernist movement of the beginning 20th century; that after missing the boat during the Renaissance and Enlightenment, the UK in the 1800s had just started producing its first world-class composers and performers, just to flounder again in the face of atonality and experimentation in the 1910s and '20s, which when followed by thirty years of international war meant an almost complete lack of influence in the music world until the rise of the first 'Britpop' bands of the 1950s and '60s. And this is one of the things to love about Stace, apart from anything else in his writing, is his mere dedication to and almost musicologist approach to the history of the British arts; and if nothing else, Jessold is a fine historical look at an intriguing era of British music, and really brings to life the image of mustachioed gentlemen still dressing in Edwardian tuxedos for formal evenings out, but now sitting around listening to the dissonant, challenging songs of Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Debussy.

But like I said, this is far from the only pleasure to be had in Stace's work, with these rich settings serving as mere window dressing to the main tale he means to convey; in this case, a complicated "meta-story" that gets unspun through a series of retellings by the same main narrator at different periods of his life, each detail taking on new resonances as he slowly reveals more and more behind what went into each of them. That narrator is one Leslie Shepherd, who in turn is telling us mostly about the eponymous Jessold, a wild-child and former prodigy who nearly singlehandedly changed the face of British music in those years, if not for a tragedy on the night of his greatest triumph that weirdly mirrored the melodramatic details of his work itself. See, as we learn over the first third of this novel, Jessold was one of the rare Brits to really understand and embrace Modernism right at its centennial beginnings, only helped by his internment at a German non-military prison camp during World War One, from which he came back heady with experimental thought from the Continent; and so in the early '20s does he embark on his first major opera, based on similar twin legends that are introduced into his life and detailed earlier in the book, in which a wealthy patron discovers an affair his wife is having with the artist he is supporting, and kills both them and then himself in a fit of passion and insanity. And indeed, through a delicious series of events that Stace details in the first hundred pages, Jessold ends up in a quite similar situation himself, even as he is writing the opera that so closely mirrors it, culminating in a raucous opening night that ends in the real world with the same kind of murder-suicide that befalls his aria-singing characters.

Ah, but then we enter the second part of the book, in which years later Shepherd is pushed through circumstance into examining the sordid story again, where through time and distance he ends up admitting things about it all that he hadn't during his original remarks to the police, the story that made up the first third of the manuscript. Like, does anyone really know what exactly happened to Jessold during his three years in Germany during the war, besides what Jessold chooses to tell everyone else? Why has no one ever met this mysterious experimental poet who was supposedly writing so many of Jessold's librettos? Why did Shepherd's wife have such a cool attitude towards Jessold, anyway, even from the first day she met him? And so as the manuscript continues, we get a very different view of what exactly transpired between these people in those years, even as the "objective facts" laid out in part one never actually change; and then just as we think the mystery is finally solved, along comes the third section of the novel, written by Shepherd near his death when he decides to finally confess all the remaining secrets regarding these now half-century-old events. (And be forewarned, by the way, that Stace deliberately inserts several red-herring threads into his storyline that ultimately go nowhere, specifically for all you smartypants who like trying to outguess the author before actually getting to the end of the story.)

By the end, it all adds up to a highly inventive, surprise-filled but fundamentally sound reading experience, helped immensely by Stace's constant little references and callbacks in every detail to the book's main themes of identity, secrecy, and the slippery nature of capital-t 'Truth.' I mean, granted, it's not for everyone, which is why it's getting a score a bit lower than the love I personally feel for it -- many will find it much too convoluted, others will find it a bit too silly, while I imagine that those who actively dislike chamber music will often be bored -- but for sure this is one of those books for those who love novels not just as objects but as concepts, the kind of people who appreciate puzzleboxes equally for their complexity and their beauty. Weighty and light by equal turns, this is truly a manuscript for the deep-thinking reader, and it comes specifically recommended to such audience members today.

Out of 10: 9.2

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Murder Mystery or Music Criticism?

Wesley Stace's ample new novel—half murder mystery, half music criticism—opens with a press report on the death of the talented (but fictional) young English composer Charles Jessold in 1923. He appears to have shot himself in his apartment after poisoning his wife and his wife's lover and watching them die. The murder-suicide has not one but two ironic precedents. It reproduces the story of the Renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo, who similarly killed his wife with her lover. It is also the subject of an English folk-ballad, "Lord Barnard and Little Musgrave," which Jessold had taken as the subject for his operatic magnum opus, due to premiere the following night. Given the circumstances, the opera was canceled and Jessold's posthumous reputation ruined. It seems clear that he was a man obsessed by the career of Gesualdo, his near-namesake, as he squandered his own talent in alcoholism and excess. The facts are not in dispute; it only remains to trace the sorry path that led to this debacle, and ascertain the composer's possible motives.

This task is left to Leslie Shepherd, a gentleman of independent means who writes musical criticism for a leading London paper. Meeting Jessold at a country-house weekend, he takes it upon himself to promote the young man and guide his early career. It is the period of the English folk-song revival, when composers such as Vaughan-Williams and Holst would go out into the countryside to transcribe ancient versions of the old ballads as sung by aged countrymen, in search of a home-grown nationalism to combat the dominance of German music. Jessold is staying with Shepherd and his wife Miriam when they hear the "Little Mossgrave" ballad (sic) sung by an old sheep-shearer, planting the seed for the eventual opera, for which Shepherd will write at least the first draft of the libretto. But a decade must pass before that. Jessold attracts attention with a number of smaller compositions; he makes two trips to study in Germany, but is trapped there by the outbreak of the 1914 war, and spends the next four years in an internment camp. There, he manages to write music of ever greater brilliance, and returns to London in 1918 as a musical celebrity and clearly the next great hope for British music. But he also becomes personally unreliable, rejecting his old friends, and turning to drink.

Wesley Stace is clearly a musician; in fact he has a separate career as a singer-songwriter under the name John Wesley Harding. But he knows the classical repertoire too. Unlike virtually all novels about musicians that I have read (Vikram Seth's An Equal Music being the sole other exception at the time of writing—though I would since add The Time of Our Singing and Orfeo by Richard Powers), the musical background to this one is impeccable. Stace understands the conflict in prewar British music between pastoral Englishism and dilettantish daring. He is also aware of the great movements on the continent; he has superb passages on Stravinsky's Rite Of Spring and especially Schoenberg's second string quartet, the work in which he renounced tonality. Shepherd sums up his experience of the latter:

Yet I had to admit that I too felt the wonder of the music, its power, its horror. I had laughed at Jessold's "breeze from other planets," but I had experienced it, that chill wind blowing from the future, in the hairs on the back of my neck, in my soul.

Stace is brilliant at showing how Jessold steered his way between these various influences. He makes the composer always plausible, but very much his own man. If there is any one composer whose early music one thinks of more than others, it is Benjamin Britten, and the 1945 premiere of Britten's Peter Grimes is another of the brilliant musical set-pieces in the book.

I do have problems, however. There are many times when I am not sure whether the music is just the background to the personal story, or whether the story has been devised solely to enable Stace to write about the music. As a musician myself (including as an opera librettist and former newspaper critic!), I was fascinated by everything, but other readers might find the book slow. Stace also goes out of his way to imitate the mandarin style of a lot of English writing at the beginning of the century, flowing with the stately amplitude of a Henry James, and there are times when you just wish he would get on with it. This is especially so in the second part of the book, after Jessold is long since dead, and Stace continues into the later years of his biographer, Leslie Shepherd. The musical details continue to fascinate, but when Hamlet has left the scene, who is interested in Horatio? Yet stick with it while Stace goes through the same events again but from an intriguingly different perspective. Some of his surprises come close to narrative cheating, but in the end they transform the book into a different kind of psychological study altogether, still very much worth the reading. [3.8 stars]

[Katy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Please note: This book was received from the Amazon Vine program and as such, I cannot post the same review here as I did on Amazon, so I am making some changes to accede to the ToS there.

Synopsis from Goodreads: A gentleman critic named Leslie Shepherd tells the macabre story of a gifted young composer, Charles Jessold. On the eve of his revolutionary new opera’s premiere, Jessold murders his wife and her lover, and then commits suicide in a scenario that strangely echoes the plot of his opera---which Shepherd has helped to write. The opera will never be performed.

Shepherd first shares his police testimony, then recalls his relationship with Jessold in his role as critic, biographer, and friend. And with each retelling of the story, significant new details cast light on the identity of the real victim in Jessold’s tragedy.

This ambitiously intricate novel is set against a turbulent moment in music history, when atonal sounds first reverberated through the concert halls of Europe, just as the continent readied itself for war. What if Jessold’s opera was not only a betrayal of Shepherd, but of England as well?

My Thoughts: While I am certainly a person who enjoys the journey when it comes to reading a book, the journey in this book is like taking the railroad across the country when you just need to get across town. The narrator shares pretty much every event with us, no matter how small the detail and insignificant the occurrence, every single thing he ever experienced with Charles Jessold is described in excruciating detail. I was looking forward to a story about the events of the murder and the solving thereof and instead of I get a history of Charles Jessold's descent into alcoholism and eccentricity. While certainly this background is useful, it could be more easily digested if woven around the story of the murder and its solutions.

Very disappointing. I would recommend checking it out of the library if you are curious about it rather than wasting your money. I abandoned it at about the halfway point; simply could not finish.

[Mackay · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a peculiar and compelling book, literate and sly, peopled with characters at once unlikeable and empathetic. It is erudite about music and British society in the first half of the 20th century, and contains a wonderful exemplar of the untrustworthy narrator. I can't say I couldn't put it down, but I was ever eager to return to it. To say more would be to give away its secrets, which are worth discovering on one's own.

[Bruce MacBain · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a psychological murder mystery whose central character is a music critic (there aren't many of those!). Anyone who likes classical music, especially the British composers of the early 20th century, will enjoy this book.

[Nick Jones · Rating 2 out of 5]

I should have loved this book -- about music, England, history... and murder. But I gave up half-way through - the narrator, fussy, witty, and SO long-winded as to bore me helplessly to sleep. I know the whole book shifts with a second half, but I couldn't summon up the energy to follow it through.

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a finely written book. The book opens with a police report of the double murder and suicide of a composer, his wife, and her lover. Then the book proper opens with the story of the narrator's first meeting with the young composer, Charles Jessold, at a weekend in the English countryside where they are on a search for English folksongs, one of which becomes the basis of the opera which had its dress rehearsal on the night of the deaths. There are stories within stories, mirroring the tale told by the folksong, of a lord catching his wife and her lover and killing both of them.
I highly recommend this book for lovers of music, literature, and mystery.

[Marcy · Rating 3 out of 5]

As this historical, literary mystery opens, we read the 1923 British newspaper clipping of the double-murder and suicide involving a promising composer, Charles Jessold. The story, as it unfolds, tells about the lead up to this event and about the years subsequent from the perspective of the narrator who is a music critic, friend and co-composer. Unfortunately, I have little knowledge nor interest in British music of the early 20th century and so I was often bored by the musical minutiae discussed. What I did enjoy, however, was the author's wonderful use of language and turns of phrase. The mystery was intriguing in that I didn't question the facts early on and by the end had to acknowledge that things are not always as they seem. The resolution, while compelling was also very disturbing to me. Although the beginning of this book was very tedious for me, I fully enjoyed the 2nd half and can definitely recommend it.

[Cat · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked this book up, in large part because of Sarah Waters endorsement on the front. In lieu of spoiling this truly well written book, I will say that the comparison between Waters and Stace is apt. There is a lot of research that obviously went into the book - composers and music from the first world war to the time right before the second; richly detailed, and not so dense that the uninitiated cannot access the story. I am not up on my composers, or orchestral music history, but I did know who Schoenberg was. And that was enough.

I cannot emphasize enough how this book carried me away - there are three accounts of the story presented, and they get closer and closer to the truth every time - the messy, altogether too human truth. I will stop here. But I reached the end, and had to re read several chapters to fully get the details of what occurred in the conclusion. There is no neatly tied up, cliched expected ending. The book is stronger for it.

Loved it.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are some things I like about this book that I want to tell you about:
1) It has old-timey language.
B) It's got a lot of music history stuff woven into the plot.
iii) It has some pretty cool devices by which the author tells some parts of the story again with new information
Four) It has some pretty mongo plot twists and revelations.

I enjoyed this book quite a bit!

[Kemi looves 2 read · Rating 1 out of 5]

I could not make it through the 1st 100 pages of the book. I was bored stiff. If you enjoy operas, the world of historical Brit composers etc, this might be your thing. The narration was a bit over the top - too many useless details. A couple of words I picked up: tarmacadam, damascene.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's rare that a book surprises me these days, but this one did. It's not just the story of a musician--it's told through the eyes of a critic who champions him, who sees his flaws as much as his potential and is not afraid to gloss over the sordid details.

The first delightful surprise was the inclusion of the folk music revival, an anthropological movement when people went out to record old, dying folk songs for posterity. Leslie Shepherd, the critic, first meets Jessold on a trip dedicated to this attempt and their friendship and mutual interest in creating a good English opera--the first since Gilbert and Sullivan--blooms.

It's a clever move on the part of the author to show us a musician's life through a critic's eye--the critic is used to writing for an audience without an advanced education in music, so I was never completely lost in the vocabulary of music.

After the interesting and wholly engaging first half, in which Shepherd recounts the bare facts of his acquaintance with Jessold, tracing the evolution of the composer and eventual murderer, a beautiful second half unfolds. We know from the beginning that we don't get the whole story in the first half, but the second half is, well, unexpectedly romantic (this from someone who considers herself "a cold-hearted crocodile"). Shepherd's devoted, if out-of-the-ordinary relationship with his wife unfolds almost as an afterthought, but their mutual relationship with Jessold adds gorgeous depth to an already nuanced story. As with all love, though, the Shepherds' becomes complicated.

This is, of course, the story of a murderer who has been shown at his most human and vulnerable--it can only be a tragedy. Whose tragedy it is receives direct discussion in the book, but whether the reader will agree with the narrator's conclusion is, I suspect, as much a reflection of the individual reader as the plot.

The only reason I won't put this on my "recommended" shelf is that I think it could take a very particular reader to appreciate it all. An interest in music is a given, no less than in historical nonfiction, but there is also a danger, I think, of misreading...or at least, reading in a very different light from the one I read it in. Usually I would find this delightful, but I suspect that some people would consider the Shepherds' relationship the opposite of romantic, and I'd rather not have that reading act as a bait-and-switch.

Readers with an interest in classical music in general and opera in particular, in England on the eve of World War I, and in the lives of those one would not normally suspect capable of murder will enjoy this book...but it's also a great one to get people who usually like only one of those to come out of their literary shells.

Quote Roundup

Jessold was an atheist, but here he spoke through the unlettered voice of the rural travelling people. He had no faith of his own, but in theirs he was a true believer. (75)

Mustard gas and shells shattered the calm of imperial verse. No one had read war poetry like it. Heroism, valour, the sweet wine of youth': gone. (119)

I hadn't liked the work in 1912. I liked it even less now, so perfectly did it suit the forced smile, the self-conscious frivolity of the post-war hour. (133)

I felt myself Dickensian: not one of his characters but the author himself, creator of plots, puppet-master. (136)

"As a critic, it is your job simply to tell people whether they will be entertained. The public must not be short-changed with mediocrity because a company is counting its pennies." (202)

If [Walmsley] knew anything, he knew how to sell a newspaper. He could hold a mirror to the world better than anybody alive, reinforce public prejudice, the nmake the man on the street pay for the privilege of reading an opinion he already held. He could also make that many pay for having his opinions formed on his behalf. (205)

It is one of the singular joys of our century that our great contemporary composers, having reached Schoenberg's precipice [of atonalism], did not leap. Merely because he had thrown himself into the abyss did not mean that it was good or right or necessary, or that others had to follow suit. Nor did they. The greatest of their works harnessed the power of that unbounded force released by Arnold Shoenberg: Berg's Wozzeck and Jessold's Little Musgrave spring to mind. Both prove that atonalism, used with restraint, can give us the most passionate and expressive of music. At the time, I was too intimidated, to occupied, too circumspect to allow such a possibility. It became clear as time passed, and I came to understand each of those operas as pure emotion, an exposed nerve. Great art requires perspective. (251)

I had resigned myself, in marriage, to love and honour, but Miriam's reticence with regard to the certain aspects of the first half of my vow merely made the other half more attractive. I had always hoped that a good marriage should rather require warmth and friendship than romantic passion to sustain it, and I had been long been suspicious of the intensity of the latter. (301)

Surely there are very few husbands who do not experience a frisson of pleasure when their wife is admired by another man. I had many times delighted in the position, reading the minute clues that emanated from her, the privileged information unknowable to anyone else. (304)

I had not, during our marriage, been anxiously awaiting such an alignment, but I had assumed it inevitable. Miriam and I did not share the same lack of vitality. She required an unconditional love from me that I was happy, so happy, to give. I had taken it for granted that, with another individual, with my acquiescence and approval, she might feel free to explore shared interests quite distinct from my own. I had not dreamed that, in this eventuality, our intentions should be so perfectly in harmony. (306)

I had thought it so tedious for Jessold to be at the mercy of a muse; but how much worse to be a muse at the mercy of an erratic imagination; and how much worse still to have been a muse wrung entirely dry of inspiration. (352)

It is not by the kindness of the creator that we judge the greatness of art. (383)

[John Vettese · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first 20 pages and the last 30 pages are decent, everything in between is a freaking slog of academic / faux historical droning. The title and opening promise murder, but instead of a period piece crime drama, the book that unfolds is mostly a dry narrative about the lives of opera composers and music critics in the early 20th century. There are some attempts at clever postmodern stuff -- for instance the characters' excitement over Tristram Shandy, another book I disliked, that the structure of this book seems to hearken back to -- as well as some interesting commentary on the reliability of biography and the whole can-you-separate-the-art-from-the-artist debate. But it doesn't land. At one point, the narrator talks about hearing an Arnold Schoenberg string quintet, saying "This granted me a privileged glimpse of the future, of an inhumane music, the ne plus ultra of Shoenberg's purely academic manoeuvres, cruel to listeners and performers alike: music composed to only impress other composers." While I wouldn't exactly call Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer inhumane, I still feel like that sentiment applies to it as well, and wonder who exactly Stace was trying to impress with this book.

[Joshua Line]

Original review from 2011.

I can't recall where I'd read a recommendation for Wesley Stace's Charles Jessold Considered As A Murderer but it was from some reputable blog, with the line that it was ideally suited to music lovers. Well I'm one of those I thought, but alas, not quite. Stace's protagonist is Charles Jessold, a young up and coming English composer interested in English music, especially traditional folk forms, and furthering English music on the world stage. Stace creates an eloquent and convincing voice in critic Shepherd (his name a rather obvious pun) but the narrative is too straightforward and nationalistic (albeit satirically - reminded of too many unpleasant Harold Moores customers and Radio 3 programs), the links with Gesualdo too obvious, and the terrain too familiar and conventionally explored. It remains unfinished.

[Ria · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating novel telling a tale where life can imitate art.
Leslie Shepherd is a music critic nearing the end of his life, the reader sees him reflecting on the time where he was friends with a composer called Charles Jessold, a talented, promising and emerging star the world of composing and opera but when Charles Jessold's family is found murdered it's CONSIDERED that he is the culprit but is there a darker twist to the tale here and is the stain on such an enterprising name of the theatrical world truly deserved...?
An exciting plot and a rather surprising ending lies in wait for the reader.
A really great read with a well thought out storyline.

[Dan Vine · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved the first two sections of the book - the language, the ideas, the storytelling. Unfortunately the final two sections, I suppose I'd call it the 'reveal', seemed contrived. It was not exactly predictable but I was expecting something of the sort. Unfortunately I was expecting something better of the sort. Still I was hooked and read the book in one sitting!

[conrad may · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful interlacing of plots with subplots

The plot is propelled with a subtle humor at a high intellectual level. The vocabulary is exquisite the book. One enjoys looking up words that are rarely used.

[Judy · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 STARS. Beautiful and complex. The musicality of his language perfectly supports the story. Wesley Stace is magical. I have already purchased all four of his novels. Two down and two to go and then I will be sad and wait patiently for more.

[Molly Fogel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have very mixed feelings about this book.

Having finished it, I regard it as a very interesting story that was not told in the best way. I say this because I enjoy the story thinking back on it as a whole and knowing everything that I now know having finished the book. However, while I was reading the first 3/4 of the book I really struggled to understand why I should care about anything that was happened or anyone that it was happening to.

I liked Jessold at first, but he quickly became irritating and I struggled to understand why Shepherd continued to subject himself to Jessold's presence. And while Shepherd himself was not unlikeable, I also struggled to find reasons to really like him either. He was kind of a blank character for me, just there to tell the story of another man.

Then I got to the last quarter of the book where we get kind of a record scratch moment in which Shepherd realizes that he needs to tell the truth about everything that happened with Jessold and tells the full story.

To the book's credit, it did not take back everything that it had said previously and tell a completely different story. That shit makes me angry. It simply gave details about previous events that had been left out in the first half of the book and thus creates a much richer story and explains the connection between Shepherd and Jessold, and also explains why Shepherd is still so focused on Jessold's life and death even after the man has been gone for so many years. I enjoyed this reexamination of events immensely, but it was still not enough to "save" the majority of the book for me.

I can't say that I know how the story could have been told better, how it might have kept me more engaged for the first 75% or made the characters more likeable or interesting. Unfortunately, I think this just wasn't the book for me, even though I enjoyed the last 25%.

[Katherine · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had to be patient and stick with this book which picked up in the end with a surprise twist

[Leila · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book started out with, what felt to me, all the right ingredients. An intriguing triple murder, a story within this one that mirrored these events, an Edwardian setting. I found strong writing within, and some beautiful sentences as well as insightful commentary. But by 100 pages in, I was having trouble mustering enthusiasm to continue reading. There was more than enough right to make the novel, but for some reason, it wasn't coming together. The book is narrated by a music critic, Leslie Shepherd, who is self-deprecating about his insignificant role without meaning a word of it. He is unaware that his interests (mainly British classical music) are not as dreadfully compelling as he feels they are. I did not like him much, which would not be a problem if he were simply a character, but he controls the storytelling, and spends far too long focusing on information that I can't bring myself to pay attention to. It is not that operas and folk songs in the the first half of the 20th century in Europe can't be fascinating; it's that Shepherd's droll, self-important narration doesn't make the case very strongly. I was disappointed. So why did I give this novel four stars? For the final third, which swiftly kicks in, leaving the reader reeling and delighted.

Maybe it is that I read The Good Soldier right before this, but I see many parallels between. There are three sections to Charles Jessold, and the first is a straightforward telling of Shepherd's interactions with the eponymous Jessold, leading up to his death. The second part is, as far as I can tell, stalling, during which Shepherd talks about himself and the general decline of life following the murders. The final section, by far the shortest, at long last unleashes the truths that up until now, the reader had not even realized were hidden. Once again, Shepherd retells this story. But this time, he makes it worth the reader's while. The events are exactly the same. But now, with knowledge of secret relationships and hidden motives, not only does the narrative take on exciting life, but even better, it illuminates a complex set of desires and situations. It makes allegorical use of two similar stories, first told in the first section. They are no longer vaguely interesting coincidences, but rather expert tools in examining something that is hard to explain in a straightforward manner. This is where I see parallels to The Good Soldier. It, too, lays out the story of three deaths, the tragic result of a love affair (or two), and ends with the unveiling of a decidedly less innocent role for the seeming-naive narrator. Perhaps on account of the time it was written, or maybe more by Ford's style, The Good Soldier is never as explicit as to how unreliable the narrator has been as Stace's work becomes. Charles Jessold benefits the more. An uninformed reader could pass through The Good Soldier with little more than a vague suspicion that there was something going on beyond a tragic story. The reader of Charles Jessold is spared that misfortune, and pressed instead to examine the implications of the knowledge at last given to them.

I like a good story all the more when it can weave stories within it, and in the end reveal that they have been subtly setting the skeleton which the novel mimics (excuse me if that metaphor is slightly mixed). As well, Stace has countless references to other works, which I enjoyed. Still, this novel spends nearly 200 pages asking the reader to put energy into it without hinting at what the reader will receive in return. If I were less obsessive about finishing things, I would not have continued--I had been given no reason to. That lack is a failure, to me, one that could and should have been rectified, but which was not, to my disappointment. If you do make it through to part 3, though, you are in for a treat which transforms the slow beginning into something clever and worthwhile.

[Michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

This peaked my interest about early-twentieth-century music, but it's just so similar to The Good Soldier that I have to wonder what Stace was thinking. The narrator here, however, is really irritating, so he doesn't lull you into complicity like the masterful Ford Madox Ford did with his narrator.

[Steve Mayer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Several books in one. It's "Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?" in the middle of a history of early twentieth century English classical music. It is also a hymn to English folk song.

There's a story here that's worth telling. About ten years ago the author, who doubles as a singer named John Wesley Harding, made a record called "Trad. arr Jones." It consisted of folk-songs that had previously been recorded by an English folksinger named Nic Jones. Once one of the most promising and accomplished singers on the english folk scene, Jones' career ended when he had a terrible accident in 1982. Harding made the record as an act of homage and also to get Nic some money.

One of Nic's best songs, on his first record, is a ballad called Little Musgrave, which is also on the Harding record That song is, in a sense, also the centerpiece of the novel. It is the basis of an opera written by the composer whose name gives the book its title and it also forms the basis of the plot. Yet, surprisingly, Nic Jones is not listed in the author's acknowledgements.

While I enjoyed the book very much, I also felt it was full of musical allusions that I didn't get. A familiarity with the works of Schoenberg, Wagner and Stravinsky would be very helpful. But I did get all the folk music references in the first part of the book, which deepened my enjoyment.

The plot is very clever, with many twists and turns, and the narrator is an odd combination of obtuse and fiendishly clever. Parts of the book dragged, but much was fast-paced and an entertaining read. It is accessible, yet it's a bit of a book for music aficionados.

[Carol · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novel is amazing, achieving a great balance between being entertaining and profound. Narrated by upper crust music critic Leslie Shepherd and set in the early part of the 20th century, it tells the story of Charles Jessold, an up and coming young British composer whose life and career end in a tragedy that eerily mirrors that of the Renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo and that of the old English ballad upon which Jessold's opera Little Musgrave is based. I really liked the way Stace linked these three versions of this story, each belonging in a different time: there was the factual and historical Gesualdo story from the past, the fictional and timeless tale of Little Musgrave, and the present day* story of Charles Jessold where the relationship between fact and fiction is not always clear. The book is split into two halves; Shepherd tells the story of Jessold in each, but with some very crucial differences.
Stace gives us an intricate and heady mix. Charles Jessold is a clever mystery, a moving story of love, art, and tragedy, and an interesting look at the relationships between criticism and art and between real life and artistic creation. Stace also gives us a good view of the different things going on in the classical music world of the early twentieth century, especially the rise of interest in traditional folk material and the reception of atonality.


*Present day in the novel's terms, that is, since the story takes place from 1910-1923.

[Jules · Rating 3 out of 5]

An intricate and twisty novel, the literary equivalent of a sketch by M.C. Escher. From the start I was impressed by the unusual, wry voice of the narrator, early 20th-century music critic Shepherd. Although I found my interest dulled by his somewhat length rumination on musical details, the first half of the novel ambled along as expected, covering the years of his relationship with his friend, the (we assume) murdering composer Charles Jessold, up until Jessold's double murder of his wife and her lover(?) and his subsequent suicide.

But then, when that unremarkable tale is told, a newer version of the same events unfolds, this one with all sorts of new information, adding richer shadings and very different context for words spoken and deeds done previously. And this second half of the novel speeds toward a surprisingly different conclusion, in which we reflect back on our previous impressions of the characters involved -- Shepherd, Jessold, and Jessold's unassuming wife Miriam -- and view them in quite another way than we did at the novel's midpoint.

Stace spends a lot of time on both musical allusions (many lost on me) and the fragility of human emotions and relations (more universal, and more captivating to me). I imagine this novel would hold even more interest for someone who found both fascinating.