It All Begins with a Duet…
Sebastian Arcady is a vain, eccentric violinist, with a genius for observation and deduction, who thinks he’s the next Sherlock Holmes.
Phineas Zene is a washed-up, pragmatic cellist, with a punch like daylight bursting through your skull, who doesn’t want to be the next Watson.
They live and breathe classical music in a way that makes obsessive classical musicians think they’re crazy.
They solve mysteries.
Storylines
The Well-Tempered Clavier
The Well-Tempered Clavier starts with Crime and Violins #1: Bastardizing Britten.
How bad could it be?
It all begins when Phineas Zene answers a Craig’s List ad that he’s almost certain is written by an insane man, but he desperately needs the money–and if it will get him a job playing the cello, he’s willing to put up with anything.
After all, how bad could it really be?
Meet Sebastian Arcady, eccentric virtuoso violinist, who freelances as a consulting detective on the side.
Their first job is a duet performance at a wine tasting held by the most well-known and deep-pocketed political contributers. But the evening comes to a screeching halt, as evenings do when the dead body of the incumbent for the Senate seat falls from the chandelier.
It’s up to Arcady and Zene to find the killer before he strikes his next target–Arcady’s father.
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More Character Information
Sebastian Arcady may be the first fictional detective who has a truly feverish, and arguably compulsive, admiration of Sherlock Holmes. He wants to be Sherlock Holmes (but better; he’s as egotistic as his hero), and surrounds himself with tokens of the man, from the erudite collections of Sherlockian essays (all of which he has read and made comments in the margins of) to gaudy little action figures from Japan.
Young and inexperienced, with unfortunate interactions with the modern equivalent of a country squire father, he felt he needed a partner. Mostly because Holmes had Watson.
His partner turns out to be Phineas Zene, who can’t bloody stand Arcady’s chipper attitude, and has no qualms about knocking him down several notches when necessary. He acts as a moderating factor for Arcady, who never grew up with a proper father figure.
If that wasn’t enough, both of them make seriously demented references to classical music, as any normal person might use traditional metaphors and slang. It’s humming up notes instead of counting to 10, or regarding the torrid rainfall of their native Pacific Northwest clime as flats and sharps falling from the sky rather than cats and dogs.
A Homage to Holmes
In many ways, just about every detective these days can trace their lineage back to Sherlock Holmes (and their sidekicks to John H. Watson). Arcady is quite aware of this and embraces it, which worries Zene from time to time, but not enough to make him quit the company of this odd fellow who fills Zene’s formerly empty days with company and–it has to be said–adventure.
Arcady and Zene are both isolated men, as were Holmes and Watson. Arcady retains Holmes’s more neurotic and unusual traits, and Zene retains Watson’s romanticism and man-of-action nature. But if they are Holmes and Watson, they are Holmes and Watson reflected in a fun house mirror; Arcady is far more optimistic than Holmes, and Zene far more bitter than Watson. And possibly Holmes.
Somehow, this twisted friendship holds up under the various strains put upon it.
They are a joy to write and, I hope for you, a joy to read.
