Blood Harmonies

Plot Outline for ‘Blood Harmonies’

This evening I was working on an outline of my next book to send to Meg, and without giving you chaper and verse, I thought I might give you a taster of how the idea came together in the first place.

Blood Harmonies was born when three chance pieces of information fused in my head.  The first came when I happened to turn on Radio 4 near the end of programme in which the leader of a string quartet (sadly, I didn’t catch his name) was talking about the process his ensemble were going through to find a new First Violin, and how a psychologist had asked to observe.

While talking, he digressed to explain a bit about this psychologist’s work in general, and how she had noticed that the longer quartets are together, the fewer words they use in communicating with each other. Then he quipped that her study obviously controlled for the  well-known quartets who weren’t actually on speaking terms and who even had riders in their contracts protecting them from being on the same flights or put up in the same hotels.  To me, the idea that four people capable of working together in such delicate harmony as a string quartet might not be on speaking terms was completely gripping, and as often happens, I thought I must use that in a story.

With the first element of the novel now in place, and I had only a week or so to wait before the second came my way, as it happens, also in the form of a tantalizing snippet on the radio.  This time someone was talking about the violin which is believed to be the most valuable in the world, the Messiah Stradivarius, which you can see dropped into this post.The reflections on the veneer are in part due to the fact that the photo was taken through the glass cage the Messiah is kept in.

Why, you might ask, is the world’s most coveted, and copied, violin trapped in a glass cage?  The answer is that it was bequeathed to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford on the condition that it never be played.   The notion of such a magnificent instrument being doomed to silence struck me as not only perverse, but also as an intriguing parallel to musicians working in complete harmony, while effectively not being on speaking terms for years.

I now had enough to sit down and start making some notes, and the plot began to emerge before me.   But the problem was the only thing I really knew about string quartets was that I loved listening to them.  So I began a journey of reading autobiographies and academic research into this most fascinating of creative dynamics.  Before I’d got stuck into the subject at the British Library, I hadn’t realised that business schools use the model of the string quartet to study team-building, or that the popular expression ‘playing second fiddle’ has more than a ring of truth about it.  I discovered the history of the string quartet is a psychological minefield where jealousies are rife, and rehearsal rooms can be the scenes of colossal egos doing battle.  Since all conflict is music to a novelist’s ear, I set about deciding who’d be slugging it out in my fictional ensemble.

To add to the claustrophobic, incestuous feeling I was after, I decided the quartet would include three members of the same family, but spread out across two generations, as well as one long-suffering innocent bystander figure.  Since clearly it would be a technical challenge too far to attempt a novel in which none of the characters were on speaking terms, I had some important early choices to make.  Which of them weren’t speaking to each other?  And more importantly, why?  I decided it would be the two violinists, who were brothers, and who had barely spoken since the tragic death of their sister (one of the quartets original members), some twenty years earlier.  More recently, the Mendel Quartet (as they are known) had reformed, with their niece (daughter of the dead sister) now taking up the fourth seat.

Unsurprisingly given the nature of psychological suspense novels, by not speaking, the brothers are actually still working in concert by colluding in keeping a dark secret.

The title itself also came from a chance remark on the radio some months later when I heard Neil Finn of Crowded House talking about the particular sort of harmony which is produced when members of the same family sing together.   He explained it’s called a Blood Harmony, and as soon as I heard this I felt it applied equally to the tragic unison that the brothers at the heart of my story find themselves in following their sister’s death.

As I work my way towards a finished draft, I’ll be posting updates on my work-in-progress during my sleepless nights in coming months.  I hope you’ll join me, for insomniacs crave company.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 at 23:47 and is filed under It's dark o'clock in the morning again, Novels in Progress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.