Rupert Holmes

• Born: February 24, 1947
• Place of Birth: Northwich, Cheshire, England

TYPES OF PLOT: Historical; amateur sleuth

Contribution

Rupert Holmes has contributed to mystery and detective fiction in a variety of ways, and almost everything he has touched has turned to gold (or platinum). Beginning in his late teens, Holmes, like other singer-songwriters of his era, such as Jimmy Buffet, Don McLean, Al Stewart, and the late Warren Zevon, composed songs that told stories often of a dark and dangerous nature, perhaps best exemplified by his 1971 opus, “Timothy,” which described possible cannibalism in a collapsed mine. During more than a decade as a performer whose works were often performed by other recording artists—including Barbra Streisand, Gene Pitney, the Platters, and the Drifters—Holmes found success with such hits as “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” (1979) and “Him” (1980). His songs and arrangements have been featured on many film soundtracks, including A Star Is Born (1976), How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1998), Shrek (2001), and The Sweetest Thing (2002) and on television series like The Shield (beginning in 2002) and Six Feet Under (2001-2005).

In the 1980s, Holmes began to write plays and scores. His first effort, a musical called The Mystery of Edwin Drood (pr. 1985), adapted from ’s novel of the same name, took five Tony Awards and an Edgar Award, probably because of Holmes’s innovative staging. Others of his plays have also met with critical acclaim: Accomplice: A Comedy Thriller (pr. 1990) won an Edgar; the suspenseful Solitary Confinement (pr. 1992) set box-office records at the Kennedy Center; his serial-killer play Thumbs (pr. 2000) set similar records at the Helen Hayes Theater; and Curtains (pr. 2007) has also proved popular. Other nonmystery Holmes plays, including the nostalgic Say Goodnight, Gracie (pr. 2002) and the musical adaptation of Marty (pr. 2002), have likewise been well reviewed.

Television has also benefited from Holmes’s talents. Though not a mystery—but sometimes incorporating mysterious elements—Remember WENN (1996-1998), the American Movie Classics series that Holmes created and wrote in the 1990s, won Cable ACE awards for editing (1996) and costume design (1997) and captured an Emmy Award (1996) among its five nominations.

Holmes’s first mystery novel, Where the Truth Lies (2003), was nominated for a Nero Wolfe Award as best American crime novel and was made into a major motion picture. His second mystery novel, Swing (2005), was well reviewed and incorporates a CD of songs composed by the author; the title song is performed by Melissa Manchester.

Biography

Rupert Holmes was born on February 24, 1947, in Northwich, Cheshire, England, the first of two sons born to clarinetist, conductor, and later high school music teacher Leonard Eliot Goldstein—at the time leader of an Army infantry band—and his British war bride Gwendolen Mary Pynn Goldstein. In 1950 the family came to the United States, where Rupert grew up in the New York City suburb of Nanuet. As a youth, he was an avid reader and at the age of nine was determined to become a mystery writer. He was an eager listener to such radio dramas such as Suspense (1942-1962), Have Gun—Will Travel (1958-1960), and Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar (1949-1962). Holmes, who learned to play more than a dozen musical instruments, joined his first rock band, the Nomads, as a teenager. In his senior year, he wrote his first one-act play, “Countdown for George.”

Following graduation from Nyack High School, Holmes attended the Crouse College of Music at Syracuse University for a year before transferring to the Manhattan School of Music. Holmes soon dropped out to work on Tin Pan Alley, acting in a variety of capacities, including studio and session musician, backup vocalist, producer, arranger, and songwriter. Holmes in 1969 married a childhood sweetheart, now attorney Elizabeth “Liza” Wood Dreifuss, and the couple produced three children, Wendy, Nick, and Tim.

Holmes composed and arranged songs for a number of groups and individuals, such as the Cuff Links, the Buoys, Gene Pitney, the Platters, the Drifters, and the Partridge Family, and in 1971 penned a major hit with “Timothy.” In the early 1970s, while his younger brother Richard was training to become an operatic baritone, Holmes embarked on his own singing career, releasing his first album, Widescreen, in 1974. The music gained considerable acclaim for the author’s lush orchestrations of his clever, witty narrative songs and attracted the attention of Barbra Streisand, who recorded some of his songs and engaged the songwriter to produce several of her albums. During a decade of recording—he cut his last album in 1994—Holmes released such critical successes as Singles (1976), Pursuit of Happiness (1979), Partners in Crime (1979), and Full Circle (1981). His “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” was a major hit in 1979-1980. Other recording artists, including Dolly Parton, Barry Manilow, and Britney Spears have covered his tunes.

Turning to theatrical composition in the 1980s, Holmes scored a major success with his first effort in 1985, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, a multiple Tony Award winner. At the same time, the Holmes family suffered a personal tragedy: Their ten-year-old daughter Wendy died suddenly of an undiagnosed brain tumor. Traumatized by the loss, Holmes was for a time unable to compose music. He later returned to work with a string of successful plays—Accomplice; Solitary Confinement; Say Goodnight, Gracie; Thumbs; and Marty—and in the late 1990s created and wrote the Emmy Award-winning television series Remember WENN.

In 2003, Holmes published the first of his well-received historical mystery novels, Where the Truth Lies, which was shortly afterward made into a motion picture. He then published the novel Swing.

Analysis

Since the beginning of his career, Rupert Holmes has been a quick study. He has shown amazing versatility, demonstrating time and again his ability to learn a new art and to master it quickly. This craft started early when, during his college years, he worked in New York City’s Tin Pan Alley, performing a variety of tasks including musical session work, writing and arranging songs and jingles, backup singing, and producing recordings. By the age of twenty-four, he had gained a reputation as a writer of songs that told stories in narrative fashion, including the 1971 the Buoys’ hit, “Timothy.” During the 1970s, Holmes became a recording artist in his own right, compiling a number of albums featuring original tunes frequently covered by other singers. His pop singing career reached its apex late in the decade with the smash “Escape (The Piña Colada Song),” which made it into both domestic and worldwide charts in 1979 and 1980, although it did not win a Grammy, an award that has thus far eluded the writer. Many of Holmes’s clever lyrics, frequently featuring criminal acts, as well as his well-written short stories, appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.

In the 1980s, Holmes, long a fan of written and broadcast mystery fiction and a lover of historical subjects, became a playwright, turning Charles Dickens’s unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), into a musical that garnered five 1986 Tony Awards, including three—best book, best music, and best lyrics—given to Holmes, and picked up an Edgar Award as well, for best play. Much of the success of the play rested on Holmes’s innovation of stopping the action at the very point where Dickens had left off, so the audience could vote on which character they thought committed the murder; Holmes wrote lines for all the possible suspects, giving the play a number of alternative endings. The author followed that success with a play, Accomplice, a parody of a traditional Golden Age mystery, which won an Edgar Award. Other Holmes plays include the mystery-thriller Solitary Confinement, which features a man trapped in a building with an assassin hired to kill him, and Thumbs, a drama that brings a spouse-murderer and a serial killer into conflict. During the 1990s, Holmes began to work in television, writing all fifty-six episodes—and all of the incidental music—for the American Movie Channel’s first original series, Remember WENN, an Emmy Award-winning comedy-drama Holmes created, set in 1939 at a Pittsburgh radio station.

In the twenty-first century, Holmes added novel writing to his repertoire: Where the Truth Lies (2003), Swing (2005), and The McMasters Guide to Homicide: Murder Your Employer (2023). These works combine the author’s primary interestsmystery, history and music. The novels demonstrate the author’s considerable writing skills, particularly his ability to juggle many plot points, his eye for telling detail, his ear for realistic dialogue, his creation of large casts of believable characters, and his predilection for mixing humor and drama. Holmes has shown a remarkable talent for matching the style of his writing to the period in which it is placed: Where the Truth Lies, set in the mid-1970s, features breezy, self-conscious, and sometimes satirical, cynical language, whereas the writing in Swing, a story revolving around events in San Francisco in 1940, is more straightforward, harder-edged, and crisper. The books do not display an excess of literary pyrotechnics, and, though nothing alike in tone or purpose, each book provides an entertaining read.

Where the Truth Lies

Holmes’s first novel is as much a character study as it is a mystery. A multilayered work, the novel is really a story within a story within a story. It is written in the present about events that transpired in the mid-1970s, which involve something that happened in the late 1950s. The bulk of the story unfolds in 1976 and consists of narrative, letters, and excerpts from memoirs.

Narrated in first person by a brash, cynical twenty-six-year-old woman, K. O’Connor, Where the Truth Lies concerns a publishing project in which O’Connor, an up-and-coming celebrity interviewer, is ostensibly assigned to write an objective tell-all biography. The subject is singer Vince Collins, half of a successful act, who broke up with partner comedian Lanny Morris in the late 1950s. The partnership loosely resembles the careers of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. In the course of firsthand research that takes her coast-to-coast, O’Connor learns that at the time of the breakup, Collins and Morris were implicated but never charged in the death of a beautiful young red-haired woman named Maureen O’Flaherty. While O’Connor conducts her investigation in an attempt to discover the truth of the matter (or at least provide something sensational for her book), she violates many tenets of the investigative reporter’s code. She lies shamelessly to anyone and everyone. She passes herself off as her best friend, complicating both of their lives. She makes promises she has no intention of keeping. She destroys any remaining traces of objectivity—O’Connor has no qualms about plying her sexuality to elicit answers—by becoming romantically involved with both Collins and Morris. In the process of writing about the two men who served as the object of her attention, she becomes as much a central character as they do, a not unexpected eventuality given O’Connor’s habit of thrusting herself prominently into the stories that bear her byline.

An acerbic, satiric peek at the attitudes and moralities of the era in which the story is set, Where the Truth Lies begins slowly but compensates for its languid early pace with fascinating vignettes and insider glimpses into the worlds of publishing and entertainment and the lifestyles of the rich and famous. The mysterious element, mostly ignored in favor of comedic, film nostalgia-related, and erotic sequences during the opening third of the novel (as a result of which the reader will never again view Disneyland as an innocent playground), begins to slowly assert itself, and the narrative gains momentum. O’Connor, like a bumbling amateur sleuth-in-training, manages to divorce herself from her feelings, to separate genuine clues from red herrings, to weigh contradictory accounts of events from a variety of sources, and to home in on the most logical explanation for both the death of Maureen and for the breakup of a successful showbiz act. At the end of her search, O’Connor reveals a classic locked-room puzzle, the answer to which is key in disclosing the real crime, and the real murderer.

Swing

Holmes’s second novel, Swing, combines history, mystery, and music into a satisfying, atmospheric, and innovative noir-flavored whole. Set in 1940 on Treasure Island during the San Francisco Golden Gate Exposition World’s Fair, Swing features the world-weary first-person narrative of thirty-eight-year-old Ray Sherwood, a longtime jazz saxophonist and music arranger touring with Jack Donovan and His Orchestra of Note, which are booked at the Terrace Lounge of the Claremont Hotel. Ray, divorced from his wife following the tragic death of their child, is contacted by an attractive Berkeley coed who proposes that he score her contest-winning composition, “Swing Around the Sun.” Ray accepts the offer only to be propelled into a complex murder mystery-thriller involving Jews escaping from occupied France, impersonations, secret codes, enemy agents, and other assorted malfeasance.

Swing has much going for it. Holmes’s extensive musical background is used to full advantage throughout—a CD of the tunes mentioned in the novel, with words and music by the author, plus full lyrics that help provide clues to the mystery—were packaged with the book. The novel is laden with evocative period details of a former age, the now-vanished Exposition and the special appeal of San Francisco, aided and abetted with maps, photographs, luggage stickers, and postcards of the era introducing each chapter. The convoluted story, underscored with the uncertainty of a nation currently at peace but troubled by the war in Europe and the lurking menace of Japan, captures well the conflicted emotions of the time. The action, except for a couple of coincidences that strain credulity and several incidents that happen offstage that might have been better dramatized rather than summarized, is for the most part believable; there are a plethora of unexpected plot twists that continually ratchet up the level of suspense. The voices of the characters, including some truly nasty villains, are authentic and unique. The concluding chapter, which resolves a few dangling threads and provides a happy Hollywood ending, somewhat undercuts the downbeat mood of the bulk of the novel but does not seriously detract from what is, for a relatively new novelist, a major accomplishment.

Murder Your Employer: The McMasters Guide to Homicide

Murder Your Employer was published in 2023 as the first novel in a mystery series set in the 1950s. The plot follows three students—Cliff Iverson, Gemma Lindley, and Dulcie Mown—of the McMasters Conservatory for the Applied Arts, which teaches the art of committing murder. Each student's thesis is about carrying out the murders they studied to commit. The novel became a New York Times, USA Today, and Publisher's Weekly bestseller.

Bibliography

Henry, William A., III. “Detective Kit.” Review of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, by Rupert Holmes. Time, December 16, 1985, p. 83.

Holmes, Rupert. “Murder, With Music.” Interview by Bridget Kinsella. Publishers Weekly, vol. 250, no. 22, 2 June 2003, pp. 33-34.

Holmes, Rupert. Rupert Holmes Website and Resource Center. www.rupertholmes.com. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Kirkus Reviews. Review of Where the Truth Lies, by Rupert Holmes, vol. 71, no. 10, 15 May 2003, p. 702.

Salamon, Julie. “Back to a World Where Mystery and Music Go Hand in Hand.” Review of Swing, by Rupert Holmes. The New York Times, 19 Mar. 2005, p. B11.

“Short Takes.” Time, 23 Nov. 1992, p. 81.

Stroup, Kate. “A Ham for All Seasons.” Review of Where the Truth Lies, by Rupert Holmes. Newsweek, vol. 142, no. 3, 21 July 2003, p. 58.