Actually, nowhere is a good country for elite young pianists. Especially terrifying is the stage of a 2000-seat concert hall where a big black Steinway is waiting to abuse you. Formidable Australian pianist Noel Mewton-Wood had just turned 31 when he drained a tumbler of liquid cyanide in the front room of his home, now in a posh inner-London suburb. Mewton-Wood had recently lost his partner Bill. But he was a promiscuous homosexual, and it was 1953. Were the police …
Two months after the death in a 1953 air crash of the great New York pianist William Kappell, the equally brilliant Australian keyboard artist Noel Mewton-Wood drained a tumbler of prussic acid — cyanide – in the front room of this London house. He threw the empty glass at a wall in which police later found shards. Many suicide notes were scattered around the room. Why does a musician already world-renowned kill himself? The narrator of my debut novel The …
Wreckage of a BCPA four-engined DC-6 has lain since 1953 in a redwood forest south of San Francisco airport. It should haunt Qantas. The crash occurred because the Australian pilots of British Commonwealth Pacific Airlines had the despicable habit of flying a shortcut into the airport over mountaintops higher than those beneath the official flight path. BCPA was half-owned by the Australian government. After the crash, Qantas took over BCPA’s shell. Among the 19 passengers and crew killed when the …