The Quarter Note Tales

Three novellas featuring Axel Crochet, peripatetic professor of music history … An Unfaltering Trust. When the apparent suicide of a popular English professor begins to look more like murder, Axel finds that the “suicide note” seems to make reference to the victim’s wife, his student lover and his competitor for the deanship. The text of a choral elegy puts Axel on the killer’s trail, but not before a comely coed meets her death. Murder in the Music Department. An irreverent look at academic amphigory. Prof. Crochet returns home from a weekend conference to learn that the chairman of the music department has been murdered and the police are about to arrest the voice teacher, whom Axel believes to have been wrongfully accused. Murder in the Pulpit. The senior minister of Allegheny United Church dies while delivering his Christmas Eve sermon. Axel soon becomes caught in a tangled web of shady real estate practices, illegal dumping and financial malfeasance on the part of church members. Axel begins to wonder whether the minister, for all his autocratic style, was really the intended victim.

During his twenty-year career as a musicologist, Arthur Wenk published books on Claude Debussy (Claude Debussy and the Poets; Claude Debussy and Twentieth-Century Music) and music bibliography (the prize-winning Analyses of Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Music and Musical Resources for the Revised Common Lectionary).