101 YEARS OLD AND STILL BLOWS HIS OWN TROMBONE...
RETICENT though I am to dispute the logic of Sherlock Holmes, I do feel that the great detective may have made a blunder in a case I have just been reading. The Mystery Of The Fourth Trombone is one of the tales told in a new book Solve It Like Sherlock in which the writer Stewart Ross challenges the reader to: “Test your powers of reasoning against those of the world’s most famous detective.”
As in the other stories recounted in the book, Ross gives us the details of the case then invites us to reconstruct Sherlock’s thought processes. The cases, however, are not from the wellknown canon of Holmesian literature but are supposedly hitherto unknown examples from Dr Watson’s files. I suspect that Sherlock himself put an embargo on the Trombone story after he realised that he got it wrong.
The story involves the death of a fourth trombonist, found dead in the gents’ lavatory at the Royal Albert Hall after a concert, killed by a shot to the head. The trombonist, Holmes noticed, had been present during the first half of the concert for Arthur Sullivan’s cantata The Golden Legend but had failed to return after the interval for Tchaikovsky’s 1812 overture.
Suicide due to illness and depression was the obvious explanation but Sherlock, who was present at the concert, had a more sinister view: the conductor had had the trombonist assassinated by a villain who first poisoned him to send him to the loo then shot him during one of the noisier passages in the Tchaikovsky.
What gave the conductor away was his poor sense of rhythm and putting his watch on the lectern, clearly a sign that he had commissioned the murder to take place at an agreed time when the sound of the shot would be muffled by the noise of the orchestra.
That, I humbly submit, is highly unlikely. If the assassin could poison the chap so easily to send him to the gents’ then why not just administer a higher dose and get the job done without all the Tchaikovsky nonsense?
What Sherlock missed is that both the Sullivan and the Tchaikovsky are scored for only three trombones. One may double up all the trombone parts, of course, for greater effect but four trombones instead of six would cause imbalance in the brass section.
What probably happened, I would say, was that the orchestra normally had four trombonists, one of whom was left out for this particular concert. Feeling distinctly miffed, he turned up anyway, sat next to the rest of them and joined in Sullivan’s cantata. By the time the conductor noticed, it was too late to send him away without disrupting the entire concert.
When that piece was over, the conductor let the trombonist know what he thought of his behaviour and the poor fellow, realising that his career was over, went to the lavatory and shot himself.
The conductor’s poor tempo was just a sign of his distress at what had happened. As for his watch on the lectern, well we must remember that he was a Hungarian, so should be forgiven such quaint idiosyncrasy.