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 …
‘AS I FEARED, I eventually succumbed to the photograph of Dinu Lipatti above my workbench. In black and white and shades of grey, it does me no good to look at it, no good at all.’ A wounded soul speaks. A damaged man admits his guilt. How did he cause a suicide? Not long after he types the words above, the narrator of my debut novel The Hands of Pianists, out on 4 March, begins a quest to prove that …