Music in English Detective Fiction

“Music, a social and artistic activity of the first importance, inevitably makes its way, often quite a substantial way, into literature of all kinds. Monographs have been, or could be, written on music in Jane Austen’s novels, or Thomas Hardy’s, or J. B. Priestley’s, or on music in Galsworthy’s FORSYTE CHRONICLES, to name a few instances at random. It may, then, be of some interest to recall (and I do not believe it has been done previously at length) some of the musical associations of the vast bulk of British crime fiction.” Philip L. Sowcroft via Waterboro Public Library —Music in English Detective FictionMusicweb)

Naturally, the article starts with Arthur Conan Doyle, due to Sherlock Holmes’s love of the violin and the opera.