Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer

In his other life, novelist Stace (Misfortune; By George) is alt-folk-rock singer John Wesley Hardin. His new work narrates the short life and tragic death of Charles Jessold, an English composer of considerable promise who kills his wife and her lover and commits suicide on the night before the premiere of his folk opera, Little Musgrave. Because the opera's plot parallels too closely the sensational deaths, it never opens. The story is told three times over, first in a news release; then with a sanitized narrative prepared by Jessold's champion and collaborator, a gentleman critic named Leslie Shepherd; and finally, in Shepherd's bald retelling of events years later. The narrative is like a set of Chinese boxes, or perhaps an Agatha Christie novel: open one box and another still waits to be opened and contains a very different story. A virtue of this highly enjoyable diversion is Stace's sensitivity to tone: he captures the way aesthetes wrote and talked in the giddy early 1920s, when feyness and wit were all.