Mystery Review: The Metropolitan Opera Murders has been recently republished as part of the Library of Congress Crime Classics series, apparently because it was co-written by Helen Traubel (1899-1972), the most famous Wagnerian soprano of her time. Forgotten today (numerous photos of her are online), she was then a larger than life character, and appears in the novel as "Elsa Vaughn." Other than her own appearance, I don't know how much might be a roman à clef, but it's fun even without that, containing credible characters and being very Manhattan. The Metropolitan Opera Murders is an excellent read for anyone who enjoys grand opera (assuming it hasn't changed much from the Fifties -- is Wagnerian opera still popular?). The footnotes are numerous, awesome, amazingly thorough, deadpan, and could serve as a college-level course on the subject. I learned more about opera than I'd ever known. For readers with no interest in opera this is not your book. The mystery is only average and while I may or may not have figured it out, the perp was the one person I was hoping it wasn't. But this isn't a book to be read for the plot, it's about an exotic and unique setting with eccentric characters, about getting a voyeuristic insight into an unknown and insular world. As we learn, a world dependent on the snobby upper crust, because opera isn't important at all to most people for whom it's just the shrill and noisy singers on the classical music station. This is the first book I've read with a (known) ghost writer (I debated even reading it), but there's obviously a whole lot of Helen Traubel here, with a good sense of humor (the detective's name is Sam Quentin). The book snob in me rebels against reading a ghost-written book, but somehow I survived without too much charring. The ghost writer was Harold Q. Masur (1909-2005), a lawyer (the story has legal elements) who had a significant mystery writing career of his own. The Metropolitan Opera Murders is an average gem in a resplendent setting. [3½★]
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