Whodunit with a CD

Swing

A Mystery

By Rupert Holmes

Random House. $24.95.

Music has spun the plot of many a mystery, but Swing is the firstto include a CD with musical clues. The tunes, orchestrations, andmost of the singing are by the author himself, and how many whodunitscan make that statement?

It's not so surprising when the author is Rupert Holmes, whomemorably gave Broadway audiences the option to vote on how to endeach performance of "The Mystery of Edwin Drood." He reaped TonyAwards for the book and score. The show won the Tony for bestmusical, and some version is still running somewhere two decadeslater.

As for Swing, I changed my vote on villainy more than once, beingno less gullible than the narrator, Ray Henderson. He's a saxophonistand arranger in a touring big band playing a fine hotel in 1940 nearthe Golden Gate International Exposition, California's answer to theNew York World's Fair.

America is not yet in World War II. German-Americans hold a rally.Japanese diplomats want an orchestration of a prize-winningcomposition by a flirtatiously delightful Berkeley student. Shetracks down Ray for help.

Will love walk in as they notate together? Your average mysterydoesn't have the details of writing and copying a big-band score --much more important than the lusts of characters in the wings.

Does it matter that Ray's ex-wife turns up working at the fair forfan-dancer Sally Rand? Or that the bandleader's wife asks Ray to liefor her? Or that a mutilated corpse may not be what it seems?

The story pulses ahead a bit like an orchestration itself, withodd harmonies, varying tempos, witty exchanges (sometimes onlyinnuendo), and a poignant leitmotif of parental loss and guilt. Thelatter imagery resonates even in a conventional no-way-out climax, ala James Bond, though James never claimed a life-preserving advantagein the tenor sax.

It's "a myst'ry with musical diction," to quote a song on the CD.The same might be said of Looking for Chet Baker and other tales bydrummer Bill Moody, a longtime expert in jazz-scene mysteries. ButMoody never added a CD of his drumming.

Swing lets us hear Ray's fictional music, with riffs and rhythmslike artifacts of the days when the whole band would chant inresponse to the singer. Their counterparts abound in bandleader LeeBarron's history of Midwest bands, Odyssey of the Mid-Nite Flyer. Itoured briefly with one of those bands, enough to have a fellowfeeling with the kidding camaraderie of Holmes's musicians on theroad.

Ray is part of a sax section dubbed the French Foreign Legionbecause the players are escaping from something -- though "nothingbad" had happened to one of them "other than him being just anaverage saxophonist."

Narrator Ray gets so many old brand names and other thingsdeliciously right -- anyone for a lime phosphate? -- that I hate toniggle. But what American ever referred to a drum set as a "drum kit"in 1940 (though some do now)?

Holmes wasn't there but took inspiration from his father, whotoured in a big band at the time. So the beat goes on from an erawhen what musicians loved to play was what the public loved to hear.

Their attitudes and lingo, mostly mild by today's literarystandards, form a counterpoint to the strains of violence, deception,and espionage that entangle Ray.

School bands and others relied on stock arrangements such as thoseRay writes as hack work. But when he visits such a band from abroadit's "like Handel dropping in on the Mormon Tabernacle Choir."

For all the youthful excesses that threaten to haunt him, he hasgrown in many ways. Like his readers, he has to learn that, as hesings on the bandstand, "What is Greek to some is not to Greeks, yousee?"

Roderick Nordell is the acting book editor of the ChristianScience Monitor, where this review first appeared.