Welcome to a collection of new mystery stories written by members of the Crime Writers’ Association. This year the guiding theme is music, a subject which really enthused members of the CWA and prompted a large volume of submissions. In selecting stories for inclusion, I’ve aimed to include a wide variety of voices and styles, showcasing the wonderful diversity of contemporary crime fiction.

If you glance at the list of contributors, you’ll see that I’ve tried to cater to a wide range of tastes – in mystery writing as well as in music. The stories are an eclectic mix, some of them very short, some much more elaborate. Four of the authors have won the CWA’s Diamond Dagger, the highest honour in UK crime writing. Although the CWA’s membership is predominantly British, there are two American authors, an Irish writer, and a high-profile bestseller from Iceland. In addition, no fewer than nine of the twenty-five stories gathered here are written by people who have never previously contributed to a CWA anthology. I believe this enhances the freshness of the collection and I hope that readers who enjoy stories by writers previously unknown to them will be tempted to sample some other work by those authors.

I wasn’t surprised by the number of stories that were sent in, because music is a subject that fascinates a great many crime writers, including myself, and is often touched upon in mystery fiction. After all, Sherlock Holmes was fiction’s most famous violinist. In his first recorded case, A Study in Scarlet, he says to Dr Watson, after attending a concert: “Do you remember what Darwin says about music? He claims that the power of producing and appreciating it existed among the human race long before the power of speech was arrived at. Perhaps that is why we are so subtly influenced by it. There are vague memories in our souls of those misty centuries when the world was in its childhood.” When he seeks solace after solving the mystery of ‘The Red-Headed League’, he finds it in ‘violin-land, where all is sweetness and delicacy and harmony.’

In her youth, Agatha Christie dreamed of a musical career, and her lifelong love of music is reflected in a number of her novels and short stories. Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey was, like Sherlock, an amateur musician, with a talent for the piano, while music features prominently in any number of classic detective novels. An interesting if obscure example is Death on the Down Beat by Sebastian Farr (a pen-name for the music critic Eric Blom), in which a loathsome conductor is shot dead during a performance of a tone poem by Strauss; the book includes four pages of musical notation, which contain clues to the crime. Better- known is Cyril Hare’s When the Wind Blows, where a snippet of musical knowledge proves crucial to solving the puzzle. Edmund Crispin, another accomplished author of detective novels, was a pen-name for Bruce Montgomery, whose main profession for many years was as a composer. His work ranged from church music to dozens of film soundtracks, including several Carry On movies. Naturally his enthusiasm for music is evident in his mysteries, notably Swan Song (a title also used by Christie for a short story with musical elements).

A fascination with music is equally evident in very different types of crime fiction, such as Raoul Whitfield’s hardboiled novel Death in a Bowl, which sees a tough, hard-drinking private eye investigating another murder of a conductor in the middle of a performance – this time in the Hollywood Bowl. More recently, Ian Rankin’s love of music has been apparent in many of his novels – and in titles such as Let it Bleed. My own first series, featuring the Liverpudlian lawyer Harry Devlin, took their titles and themes from 1960s hit songs including Suspicious Minds and The Devil in Disguise, while references to the work of Burt Bacharach crop up in all my contemporary novels.

Among the contributors to this book, perhaps I may highlight Paul Charles, who has spent many years working in the music business with leading acts such as Ray Davies, Van Morrison and Elvis Costello; Paul’s knowledge and love of music shines through in his series of novels about the cop Christy Kennedy, who is a fan of the Beatles, the Kinks and Jackson Browne. Many of our other authors have had some kind of involvement with the world of music over the years. Their love of different kinds of music is a recurring feature of the stories presented here.

This is the first CWA anthology of brand-new writing to be published by Flame Tree Press. Its appearance was prompted by the success of a previous Flame Tree anthology, Vintage Crime, which celebrated CWA members’ work published since the mid-1950s and traced the intriguing development of mystery writing over the past half-century. In trying to put together a book that is a varied yet harmonious whole, I’ve benefited from having the opportunity to work again with Nick Wells, Josie Karani, and their colleagues, and I am particularly grateful for their commitment to publishing books with high-quality production values. The CWA board has been supportive as ever, and I’d like to thank all the members who sent in stories, including those who were unfortunate enough not to make the cut.

Above all, my thanks go to you, the readers of this book. The CWA has been responsible for publishing anthologies of members’ work for more than fifty years and I’ve been editing the collections for nearly half that time. These collections have yielded many stories that have won or been nominated for awards in the UK and the United States, by writers ranging from Ian Rankin and Cath Staincliffe to Edward D. Hoch and Lawrence Block. But the series could never have lasted for so long or enjoyed so much success without enthusiastic readers. I hope that you will find in these pages plenty to entertain you, and a number of pleasurable surprises.

Excerpt used with the prior permission of the publisher.