The Violin Conspiracy

By Brendan Slocumb, Anchor Books, 2022, 352 pages
Reviewed by Tom Vogt, June 5, 2023

PRESTO!

PRESTO!

And, PRESTO!

As I read “The Violin Conspiracy,” that word turned out to have three different applications.

First-time author Brendan Slocumb is a musician and music educator who learned about tempos – allegre, andante, presto – as a beginning violinist. On sheet music, "presto" means that a piece should be played quickly.

The word also is a familiar bit of stagecraft when a conjurer makes something disappear ... which is what happened when someone made Ray McMillian's violin vanish from its instrument case.

A few chapters into this book, I realized that there was a literary application: I was reading at a presto pace. I borrow a lot of books through our library's digital collection, and I often have to gauge my progress against that 21-day checkout period. I finished this book in a week.

There was a mystery to be unraveled, of course, but that wasn't the most compelling part of the book. If there is a multi-million-dollar theft in the opening pages, you expect the crime to be solved by the last chapter.

What kept me presto-ing through the pages was Ray's own story. Reflecting many of Slocumb's own experiences as a Black classical musician, it's a new take on an underdog tale: Ray McMillian must overcome more than his fair share of obstacles on his way to the world's premier music competition.

In his first gig, Ray and three high-school classmates played for a wedding. The other members of the string quartet were invited to stay for wedding cake. As the only Black player in the group, Ray's $200 came with a side order of spit.

His first solo appearance with a metropolitan orchestra was sabotaged when organizers dismissed him as an affirmative-action case. After spending weeks rehearsing a Mendelssohn concerto, Ray showed up ready to rock it. That's when the conductor told him that they would be playing a Bruch concerto instead. When the music started, the spotlight hit him square in the face. He couldn't see his music. He couldn't see the conductor. And he rocked it.

Ray's story actually goes back to the pre-Civil War South, when an enslaved fiddler on a Georgia plantation got to play Master Thomas's Stradivarius. (This isn't really a spoiler, by the way. The thief left a $5 million ransom note in Ray's violin case, so you could pretty much see it coming.)

Ray's Grandma Nora is the link between five generations of the family. She got the violin from her grandfather, the former slave, and passed it along to Ray. Together, the talented violinist and the Strad made a superstar musical team – until the instrument vanished.

While the book is a work of fiction, it does reflect real life. Lost million-dollar masterpieces do pop up. Two small husband-and-wife portraits in a family's private collection were identified as Rembrandt paintings a few weeks ago.

And as Slocumb wrote in his author's note, "Many of the events in this novel come from my own experiences," citing the wedding scene, a chilling "driving while black" traffic stop and a lot of racial stereotyping.

In a college music history class, Slocumb wrote, "my professor told us that Black people played Chopin better than white people because of the embedded jungle rhythms in our blood."