Music Meets Murder

By Vinnie Hansen

Think Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.”

Can you hear the opening guitar riff?

The bass sneaks in.

Think you might leave? Not your kind of song? Hah! Robert Plant’s vocals invade your auditory canal.

It’s already a big, full song when BAM! Drums. The music explodes.

Music crept into my fiction like that.

As a child, I took piano lessons. In my tweener years, I learned clarinet and participated in band. But I was a retired adult before I discovered the way playing music actually fit into my life. Walking at the Santa Cruz harbor, I encountered a huge ukulele group—with a hundred participants—strumming and joyously singing. And, I had a realization. I didn’t want to play piano alone in my house. I wanted to make music WITH people. And at the beach! What could be finer? Not everyone there played ukulele. They had a bass and drummer. An occasional guitar or flute. Why not a piano?

To reach this goal, I bought a portable keyboard and learned how to operate it, only to realize the group played from fake charts. Where were the notes? I had to learn piano all over again with an emphasis on chords.

Then I worked up the nerve to join the group only to realize after some time that no one could hear me (probably a good thing). The sound from the small built-in keyboard speakers emanated upwards. I needed an amp . . ..

It’s been fifteen years since I started this musical journey. I spent several of them in an honest-to-goodness performing group called All in Good Time Orchestra. I continue to play at the beach on Saturdays. And because I’m an incurable learner, last year I started to teach myself ukulele.

As writers know, everything is grist for the mill. When editor Susie Bright invited authors to submit to Santa Cruz Noir (2018), part of the Akashic Books’ series, she asked each of us to propose a spot and sub-culture of our colorful town about which to write. Without hesitation, I said, “The harbor and the ukulele community.” From that commitment, came “Miscalculation,” my first short story in which music plays an important role.

About this same time, short story collections with music themes snuck into my writing. My story “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend,” was published in Gabba Gabba Hey: An Anthology of Fiction Inspired by the Music of the Ramones (2021). Although inspired by the song, the story itself doesn’t contain music references, only a bad boy on a motorcycle and a teenaged girl.

When I contributed to the anthology Friend of the Devil: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of the Grateful Dead (2024), editor Josh Pachter wanted one story associated with one song from each of the Dead’s albums. I chose “Dire Wolf.” The story evolved from there, with Josh wanting specific allusions to the song and Easter eggs for Deadhead readers.
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So, BAM! No surprise I found myself developing Zoey Kozinski, the protagonist of my new suspense novel, Crime Writer, by giving her a side hustle of playing keyboards in the band She Cats. I even created a YouTube playlist for the book, which you can find here. Play it before beginning Crime Writer to set the mood or enjoy the songs as they occur in the plot. Rock on!

A Claymore and Silver Falchion finalist, Vinnie Hansen is the author of the Carol Sabala mystery series, the novels LOSTART STREET, ONE GUN, and CRIME WRITER, as well as over seventy published short works. She is a member of Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, and the Short Mystery Fiction Society. A retired high-school English teacher, she lives with her husband and the requisite cat in Santa Cruz, CA.
Learn more at www.vinniehansen.com

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