Caroline: Even if you have no interest in music at all, there’s a strong chance that you could hum at least one famous piece of organ music. Pipe organs of all sizes and shapes have been the ceremonial instrument of choice for centuries, accompanying weddings, funerals, coronations, inaugurations, thanksgivings and more. Although of course it is the air being forced through the pipes that makes the sound, as a listener it can feel as if the building the organ is in is really the instrument, as every last note resonates between the walls and off the rafters. At its best, the organ is a glorious, versatile, subtle machine for turning air into art.
And yet its very ubiquity can make us blind to its presence. We just assume it will be there in the church or the town hall because it always has been, played by an invisible figure tucked up far away on a bench we cannot see. When the organ is unappreciated and allowed to fall into disuse, we notice only when its sonorous notes are replaced by the tinny rattle of a portable speaker instead. It’s always there, the soundtrack to our biggest moments, until it isn’t.
I have been fascinated by the organ since I was a child, and it is a cherished ambition of mine to one day learn to play it for myself. But until the day comes when that is possible, I’m doing what I do best: living vicariously through golden age murder mysteries. Does the organ feature in detective fiction? Could it ever even be an instrument of death? Come with me to find out.
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Welcome to Shedunnit. I’m Caroline Crampton.
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This is an entry in a very occasional series that I make here on Shedunnit where I take a very specific thing or activity, and explore how it was used by writers during the golden age of detective fiction to create murder mystery plots. Previous instances of this have focused on dogs, chocolates, golf, cricket, and private members’ clubs — if you didn’t hear those at the time, you will find them linked in the episode description. But, don’t go and listen to them yet. For now, we have organs to hunt.
I must admit, this episode began more as a search for one particular book rather than a recurring trope. I had heard tell of mystery from 1935 titled The Organ Speaks by E.C.R. Lorac, in which an organ apparently played a starring role in both the story and the murder itself. But I had never yet managed to track down a copy. Although many of Lorac’s works have been brought back into ready availability over recent years, this is not one them. I’ve never even seen a secondhand copy on sale anywhere, let alone one for a reasonable price. And even my usual trusty source of hard-to-obtain books, the London Library, doesn’t have it. But nothing makes me more determined than libraries not having books that I want. Eventually, a long-winded combination of academic favours and inter-library loans put a first edition copy of The Organ Speaks in my hands. Is there a bigger thrill to be had than finally getting to read a murder mystery you have been chasing for literal years? I think not.
The Organ Speaks did not disappoint. I almost don’t want to tell you this because it was so difficult to get hold of, but I think it’s the best E.C.R. Lorac I’ve read yet. The story begins with a journalist on an evening walk with a friend in Regent’s Park in London and, as they come to a (fictional) Regency concert hall called Waldstein’s Folly, they hear something “damned odd” — a “ghostly, hideous wail” that just goes on and on with no variation. A passing policeman wonders if someone is indulging in a bit of late-night Schonberg, but closer investigation quickly reveals a more sinister cause for the noise. They team up with a nearby policeman and enter the dark hall in a very enjoyably spooky scene:
“He pushed the door open and entered the black darkness of the lobby, and the uniformed man caught his arm. They could no longer see one another, and the uproar of sound seemed to shut them off each alone in a horrible solitude of blackness and overwhelming dissonance.”
Groping their way towards the organ loft, the intruders discover that the organist has died mid-practice and his body has slumped down over all four manuals or keyboards of the organ while all the stops were out, causing the hideous, dissonant, never-ending cacophony that they had heard from outside. This, I suppose, is the organ speaking of the title — bewailing its musician’s death and summoning help for him, albeit help that comes too late.
Lorac’s regular sleuth, the Scotland Yard detective Philip MacDonald, is soon called into investigate this bizarre death. In his exploration of the concert hall and the people who work there, he uncovers plenty of tensions that seem entirely familiar today: the frustration of trying to keep an underfunded music venue in business, professional jealousy between poorly-paid musicians, and worries about how to maintain a crumbling historic building.
Worst of all, he discovers that the organist’s death is not accidental, as it had initially appeared. Somebody has rigged up a deadly booby trap by replacing one of the ceramic organ stops with a replica metal one and then running an electric circuit through the organ. It was a diabolically targeted and deliberate crime too, tailored to the preferences of this particular musician. When he reached a certain moment in his favourite piece and thus had his foot on the steel swell pedal while his hand touched the replaced live stop, his body completed the circuit and a fatal dose of electricity coursed through him, killing him instantly. It’s a cunning, if horrifying, murder method that takes MacDonald a couple of hundred pages to unravel satisfactorily. Along the way, we learn a surprising amount about 1930s musicianship and electrical technology, the latter mostly from the many days MacDonald spends in the basement of the hall trying to trace the wire that turned the organ into a murder weapon.
Reassuringly, I am not alone in my giddy glee at how good this book is. When it was first published, The Organ Speaks attracted high praise from none other than Dorothy L. Sayers, who was at the time at the height of her own detective fiction writing powers. 1935, lest we forget, is also the year that Gaudy Night was published. Writing in the Sunday Times when The Organ Speaks came out, she gave it a glowing review.
“Mr. Lorac’s story is entirely original, highly ingenious, and remarkable for atmospheric writing and convincing development of character… Mr. Lorac knows his musical “stuff” inside out, and uses that technical knowledge very skilfully to produce effects of mystery and beauty.”
Sayers was at this time fresh from writing her own church music related mystery, The Nine Tailors, which uses a complex code hidden in the changes rung by a group of bell ringers at a church in the Norfolk fens. No doubt she appreciated the thoroughness with which her fellow author had entered into the music spirit of the mystery. Yet another thing I loved about The Organ Speaks was the fact that Lorac even included a diagram of the organ console at the start of the book so that readers can fully appreciate the subtlety of the plot, in the spot at the front where you might expect to see the country house floor plan more traditional in a classic murder mystery. Sayers was wrong about one thing, though. There was no “Mr Lorac”, as she wrote in her review. E.C.R. Lorac was, of course, the pseudonym of Edith Caroline Rivett, who published over seventy detective novels between 1931 and her death in 1958. No doubt when Rivett was inducted by Sayers into the prestigious Detection Club in 1937, this mistake of gender was resolved.
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Exploring this “organ as murder weapon” idea from The Organ Speaks lead me to another story that proves fatal for an organist, although not in quite the same way. The continuous sound from the organ that originally draws attention to the body in The Organ Speaks recalls a scene in an earlier novel of suspense, rather than detection: The Nebuly Coat by J. Meade Falkner from 1903. Although not a murder mystery, this story does see an organist perish while at the instrument. In this case, though, it is human hands that strike the blow. But the corpse ends up on the floor with the back of the head on the D flat pedal — he had been playing his own composition, called “Sharnall in D flat” — and it is this endless note that brings someone to the organ loft to investigate.
A very similar scene occurs in The Hymn Tune Mystery by George A. Birmingham from 1930. A disreputable if talented organist makes a terrible racket by expiring face forward onto the instrument, having been coshed from behind and thus sustained a fatally cracked skull. I would, by the way, recommend this unintentionally very funny book about jewel theft an ecclesiastical investigation into a mysterious religious composition.
Suddenly, when contemplating all of this, a lightbulb went off in my head. When I was at university we went on a choir tour to Paris and performed in Notre Dame cathedral. Some of the musicians who were hosting us gave us a tour and it involved going up to the organ loft to marvel at the controls for the incredible organ. While we were up there, one of them showed us an extra organ bench that sits up in the loft and explained that this was the bench in use on the 2nd June 1937, when the cathedral’s organist, the composer Louis Vierne, was giving his 1750th recital at Notre Dame. He lost consciousness and died instantly of a fatal heart attack as his foot hit the low E pedal to begin his first piece. The note resounded through the great Paris cathedral as the last he would ever play until his body was removed from the instrument. The bench, bearing a small plaque with his name, had been kept in the organ loft ever since and shown to visiting musicians as a way of sharing his story.
Now, Vierne most certainly was not murdered, and his death occurred after the organ-signalled deaths in The Nebuly Coat, The Organ Speaks and The Hymn Tune Mystery. But as every good journalist knows, three is a trend. And this matter of people dying while playing the organ and it making a terrific and unending racket feels too specific for two different authors to have invented it from scratch. I feel fairly secure in saying that this must have happened, more than once, in a way that both E.C.R. Lorac and J. Meade Falkner had heard about. Perhaps the organ is more closely associated with death than we realise.
After the break: won’t somebody please think of the poor organists?
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Being an organist during the golden of detective fiction was an occupation with a surprisingly high mortality rate. Keen to match the demand for this style of book from readers with the supply of ever-more whodunnits, authors became more and more inventive with the scenarios for their murder plots — if you’ve listened to years worth of episodes of this podcast already, you will know this. We have so much variety of mystery settings, of types of murders, of types of characters, weapons, narratives styles, revelations, and more. And all of this competitive creativity resulted in several fictional organists perishing in the line of duty, in addition to E.C.R. Lorac’s effort in turning the organ itself into a murder weapon.
The wellbeing of not one but several organists is in peril in Holy Disorders by Edmund Crispin, a golden age style detective novel from 1945. The book opens with a composer named Geoffrey Vintner hurrying across London to answer a summons that has arrived by telegram from his friend, Crispin’s recurring detective the Oxford don Gervase Fen. The telegram reads:
“COME AND PLAY THE CATHEDRAL SERVICES ALL THE ORGANISTS HAVE BEEN SHOT UP DISMAL BUSINESS THE MUSIC WASN’T AS BAD AS ALL THAT EITHER YOU’D BETTER COME AT ONCE… PREPARE FOR A LONG STAY”
Someone seems determined that services and performances in a small cathedral city of Tolnbridge should not go ahead, because the regular organist, Dr Denis Brooks, has been attacked and rendered unconscious while on his way home from the cathedral. And the violence begins to seem generally directed towards all organists, rather than Dr Brooks in particular, because Geoffrey himself has a lucky escape while on the train to Tolnbridge. Over the course of the book, it feels like anyone who can work the instrument is attacked, as Geoffrey and Fen work to solve a case that also, improbably, involves Nazis and witches. It’s good fun, I promise.
Crispin was the pseudonym of the composer Robert Bruce Montgomery, so it is perhaps unsurprising that he chose to put musicians as the centre of his story. Indeed, plenty of his books have a musical underpinning. Back in 2020 the Shedunnit Book Club enjoyed reading his 1947 novel Swan Song together, which concerns an opera company performing Wagner’s The Mastersingers of Nuremberg for the first time since the Second World War. Prior to embarking on a career writing both fiction and music, Montgomery had been the organ scholar at St John’s College, Oxford, so had doubtless spent many years of his life around the instrument. His detective fiction appeared under the name Edmund Crispin, but as Bruce Montgomery he had a successful other career as a film composer. He wrote the scores for lots of the Carry On films in the 1960s and 1970s, including Carry On Cruising, Carry On Regardless and Carry On Teacher. And if you are lucky enough not to know what a Carry On film is, then, I congratulate you.
Another crime writer, Freeman Wills Crofts, was an enthusiastic amateur organist, but sadly to my knowledge he never wrote an entire organ plot. However, there is a reference in 1922’s The Pit-Prop Syndicate that suggests the organ was never far from his mind. In that book, he waxes lyrical about how “the gentle hum of the traffic made a pleasant accompaniment to their conversation, as the holding down of a soft pedal fills in and supports dreamy organ music.” I can’t help think about the organ mystery that we missed out on from Crofts. Would it have involved a train timetable as well? A girl can dream.
Agatha Christie was also a very accomplished musician, although her teenage dreams of making music her profession were stopped in their tracks by her extreme stage fright and performance anxiety. She was sent to Paris when she was fifteen to finish her education and at one point, was expected to prepare two piano pieces for to play in a concert at the end of term. She made herself so ill with sorry about this that a doctor had to be called, and she had recurring dreams that the piano keys were all stuck down, or that the piano had turned itself into an organ under her hands. In her autobiography, she recounts how she asked one of her teachers to be honest with her — was she ever going to be able to play professionally? The answer she received would have been devastating at any age, but especially so as a young woman who had poured so much of her life to date into music:
“He said that he thought I had not the temperament to play in public, and I knew he was right. I was grateful to him for telling me the truth. I was miserable about it for a while, but I tried hard not to dwell on it more than I could help.”
Surprisingly, then, not much music makes it into Agatha Christie’s fiction, and the organ only once that I have been able to find, and it crosses over with my golf episode! In her 1934 novel Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?, Bobby Jones is playing golf at a seaside course with a doctor friend when he accidentally hits a ball over the cliff. Looking down, he sees a man on the rocks below who appears to be, at best, unconscious. Upon clambering down to him, the doctor finds that the man is very seriously injured and sets off immediately to get help, leaving Bobby to stay with him — this is when the mysterious question of the title, “why didn’t they ask Evans?” is uttered. Bobby, meanwhile, is in a state of great anxiety because he was supposed to be playing the organ in his father, a vicar’s, church straight after golf but now he is trapped on some rocks with a dying man. At this moment, a stranger comes along, and Bobby deputes his guardianship of the body to him so that he can dash back to be an organist — this decision proves to have far reaching consequences for the rest of the plot. We get a small glimpse of the stresses of the country church organist before Christie whisks us on to the next phase of the story:
“Explanations and recriminations were postponed until after the service. Breathless, Bobby sank into his seat and manipulated the stops of the ancient organ. Association of ideas led his fingers into Chopin’s funeral march.”
At least Bobby has the organ with which to express his feelings about finding a body at the bottom of a cliff and it making him late for church.
The final book I want to touch on is not, strictly, an organ mystery. But it does feature a musical booby trap on a par with the one in The Organ Speaks, which has been made to target and murder a particular musician. In Overture to Death by Ngaio Marsh from 1939, a gun has been improbably hidden inside an upright piano in a rural village hall. A concert has been got up to raise funds for a new, grander, less broken piano, and a local spinster, Idris Campanula, is going to play Rachmaninov’s Prelude in C-sharp minor to open the evening’s entertainment. The gun has been rigged to fire when the soft pedal of the piano was depressed. Miss Campanula plays the first three chords of the prelude and then “paused, lifted her big left foot and planked it down on the soft pedal”. The gun fires from inside the piano, straight into her chest, and she slumps onto the keys while the strings inside “hummed like a gigantic top” from the aftermath of the explosion. It’s an incredibly shocking death, made all the more so by the reader’s existing knowledge that Miss Campanula isn’t even supposed to be playing at this point in the concert — another pianist has pulled out at the last minute with a painful finger.
Music can be a sinister presence in a mystery novel, then. In seeking to entertain and soothe with their hard-won skill, the musician is vulnerable at the point when they sit down to their instrument — a mechanical device that usually obeys their every command, but can, occasionally, be commandeered for an evil purpose. And given that it is so mechanical — a feat of engineering as much as it is of art — the organ is, in many ways, the perfect golden age mystery device. It is familiar to many, even if only a select few know how to play it, and it is thus all the more horrifying to have it transformed into an instrument of death. Its complex mechanics lend themselves to fiendish tampering. But above all, it is capable of moments of incredible and noisy drama. And what could be more dramatic than a musical murder?
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This episode of Shedunnit was written, narrated and produced by me, Caroline Crampton. If you’d like more from the podcast, including extra interviews, behind the scenes commentaries and the chance to read a book each month with a community of other mystery lovers, join the Shedunnit Book Club now at shedunnitbookclub.com.
You can find a full list of the books I mentioned in this episode at shedunnitshow.com/instrumentofdeath. We publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.
Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece. Production assistance from Leandra Griffith. Member support for the Shedunnit Book Club from CC McLoughlin.
Thanks for listening.
