As much as we love the traditional gumshoe wearily making his way through the mean streets, pursuing another case lousy with double-crossing dames and grinning gunsels, we must admit the formula has grown familiar. We’ve spotted an intriguing trend in Indie titles: crime and mystery stories set in the wild and woolly world of pop music. It’s a surprisingly natural fit: The music industry is nothing if not a snake pit of exploitation and desperate ambition (it’s surprising that anybody makes it out alive). These criminally enjoyable tales eschew shadowy back alleys and skid row joints to play out in DJ booths, recording studios, and Andy Warhol’s Factory. It’s not Chinatown, Jake—it’s only rock ’n’ roll (and we like it).
In Freeman Jayce’s 2023 book House Made of Sound, a desperate record company executive (a redundant phrase if ever there was one) must navigate a strange afterlife seeking the lost master tapes of a recently deceased band’s last album. Our review calls the novel “an absolutely winning story, a rousing, funny, and surprisingly moving tale,” praising Jayce’s “elegant prose”: “His thoughts returned to the empty wallet, and to the ousted presidents that once held office there.” Sounds like a musician to us.
Jeff Gomez’s Vicious (2022) proceeds from an even less likely premise: Lou Reed, the famously foul-tempered leader of the iconic Velvet Underground, is lured from his early retirement in suburbia back into the demimonde of his mentor, Pop Art titan Andy Warhol, when one of Warhol’s paintings plays a role in a murder (considering the depravity rumored to go down at the Factory, a simple murder seems almost quaint). Our review raves, “The author’s sly, deadpan prose captures both settings and their denizens in wonderfully evocative detail.” A rock poet heroin survivor playing Columbo? We’re in.
The 2022 novel Spirit Valley Radio by Jennifer Tall also puts a spooky spin on a rock-adjacent mystery—pirate radio station KSR seems to transmit broadcasts from the past; Spirit Valley, the source of the strange transmissions, is evidently haunted as all get-out. Garage rockers will cringe in empathy for the local combo that is paid to scare away tourists with their caterwauling. Our review describes the novel as “A beguiling fable that’s full of rich whimsy with a thoughtful bite” and highlights the “colorful characters who stay grounded amid the supernaturalism and sly humor and prose whose deadpan matter-of-factness shades into poetry.”
Flip Your Wig (2022) by Roy Chaney sets a murder mystery in the chaos surrounding a concert by the Beatles in the mid-1960s—a guitarist for the band set to open for the Fab Four is found murdered, leading detectives to investigate a group of musicians stealing songs and bootlegging records (it’s tough to make a living playing rock ’n’ roll). An anticipated Beatlemania-stoked riot adds a ticking clock to the proceedings in a thriller our review calls “A historically rich mystery with a delectable noir touch.” “She said, ‘I know what it’s like to be dead.’ ”
Tamatha Cain’s Song of the Chimney Sweep (2022) follows the efforts of a group of true-crime podcasters to solve the 2021 disappearance of Betty Van Disson. Her diary reveals a late-1960s romance she shared with charismatic R&B musician Dominicus Owen, leader of the Downtown Sound band. The novel alternates between the intrepid podcasters chasing down leads in the present and Betty’s experiences decades earlier in a richly atmospheric Florida-set mystery our review describes as a “compulsively readable story” in which Cain “ably and steadily ratchets up the suspense.” Sarah Koenig only wishes she got there first.
Arthur Smith is an editor for Kirkus Indie.
