Review | Brendan Slocumb’s latest is as rich and suspenseful as ‘The Violin Conspiracy’

At the center of the story is Bern Hendricks, a music professor at the University of Virginia who has worshiped the renowned composer Frederick Delaney since he was a poor Milwaukee kid who studied violin through Delaney’s philanthropic foundation. Years later, after a long-lost section of the composer’s masterpiece is discovered, Bern is tapped by the foundation to prepare it for performance.

Giddy and star-struck, Bern initially comes off as near-caricature. He wonders whether he should wear a tux just to study the music, “holding the score against his chest, stroking it absently, like a kitten.” To help him analyze the precious score’s two discrepant versions, Bern enlists the wisecracking, decoding mastermind Eboni Washington, who digitizes and cross-analyzes all the musical data. As they scrutinize the material, they notice everywhere a curious abbreviation, JoR, along with complex configurations of geometric shapes and cryptic pictographs.

Review: ‘The Violin Conspiracy,’ by Brendan Slocumb

What appear to be only obsessive doodles turn out to be the basis of an elaborate musical notation system invented by Josephine Reed, a destitute genius Delaney meets at a jazz club in the early 20th century. Lacking talent himself, Delaney invites the homeless Josephine to stay at his apartment and teach him her secrets on the piano. He soon realizes fame awaits if he can coax her into writing songs for him. Over the next half-decade, she produces brilliant genre-fusing pieces that he sells under his own name, justifying the deception by attaching his pedestrian lyrics and rationalizing that no one would buy music written by a Black woman. “Coloreds weren’t like regular people,” he reassures himself. “And Freddy’d still pay Josephine, of course. He was looking out for her. This was better for all of them.” It’s a long-standing American story of racist expropriation masquerading as benevolence.

Delaney, Bern and Eboni are all entertaining, but Josephine emerges as singularly intriguing. Her debilitating mental struggle is the source that fuels an inexhaustible creativity. Slocumb names autism in his introductory note. She is indeed characteristically withdrawn socially (avoiding eye contact and touch), but Josephine also exhibits mind states associated with schizophrenia. She is synesthetic and hypersensitive to sound, hearing notes and noises in colors. This condition makes a fantasia of merely walking down Broadway. But she can capture her musical vision through her idiosyncratic notation system. When Delaney first asks how she patterns a particularly complex chordal progression, she responds simply: “It was easy. Orange and teal go together.”

Though Josephine’s mindscape is fascinating, Slocumb doesn’t quite succeed in taking us inside it. The conventional narration he gives her barely suggests a kaleidoscopic mind’s sensory magic. But Slocumb seems less interested in psychological probing than a steady-paced adventure. As he alternates artfully between the 1920s historical narrative and the present-day quest to unravel its mystery, he also parallels the two, which symbolically serves to repair the past.

Bern and Eboni are the true equal partners, and as Black standout professionals, their work restores Josephine’s racial dignity. Still, racism persists a century later. Bern and Eboni fend off ongoing racial slights working for the Delaney Foundation, and, in one dramatic chapter, Bern suffers stark police abuse. Slocumb eventually amps the story into high-action drama, which adds gravity but also dilutes the historical realism. Meanwhile, in the present day, the Delaney Foundation becomes the White corporate villain, sending agents and goons after Bern and Eboni.

Amid the heart-racing plot, “Symphony of Secrets” is ultimately an affirmation. Music has historically been the country’s ethnically richest art form, particularly embodied in the multicultural story of jazz and in today’s cross-fertilization between popular genres. That process has been marred when the powerful extract from the powerless. Josephine Reed’s restoration speaks back to such exploitation. Shaping her vast array of colors, ciphers and traditions, she’s a seamstress of the torn national fabric.

Erik Gleibermann is working on the book “Jewfro American: An Interracial Memoir.”