Musical Murder Mystery: An Author Roundtable

Whether it's the Metropolitan Opera or the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, the best murders are always musical. If you love music and murder mysteries, this evening is for you! Folio is thrilled to welcome award winning author and violinist Gerald Elias, award winning author and former Metropolitan Opera violinist Erica Miner, and the multi-talented author, columnist, radio host and former bass player Charles Philipp Martin for a special author roundtable.

The authors will discuss how their musical careers informed their writing, and share a live musical performance or a recording. Each author will share intriguing and humorous stories from their profession and invite audience participation to help you explore how your profession could influence your own mystery novel. The evening will conclude with a wine reception. 

About The Authors

Gerald Elias leads a double life as a critically acclaimed author and internationally recognized musician. His award-winning Daniel Jacobus mystery series, beginning with Devil’s Trill, takes place in the dark corners of the classical music world. Murder at the Royal Albert, the eighth and most recent installment of the series, received high praise from Publisher’s Weekly. Elias has also penned two standalone novels, The Beethoven Sequence, a chilling political thriller, and Roundtree Days, a Jefferson Dance Western mystery. His essays and short stories have been featured in prestigious journals ranging from The Strad magazine to Coolest American Stories 2023. A former violinist with the Boston Symphony and associate concertmaster of the Utah Symphony, Elias has performed on five continents and has been the conductor of Salt Lake City’s popular Vivaldi by Candlelight chamber orchestra series since 2004. In 2022, he released the first complete recording of the Opus 1 violin sonatas of the Baroque virtuoso-composer, Pietro Castrucci, on Centaur Records. Elias divides his time between his home on the shores of Puget Sound in Seattle and his cottage in the Berkshire hills of Massachusetts.

Former Metropolitan Opera violinist Erica Miner now enjoys a multi-faceted career as an award-wining author, lecturer, screenwriter, and arts journalist. Based in the Pacific Northwest, Erica is a top speaker and lecturer on opera. In addition to her pre-concert lectures for the Seattle Symphony at Benaroya Hall, Erica regularly presents for the Creative Retirement Institute at Edmonds College; Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of California San Diego and the University of Washington; and Wagner Societies in Boston, New York, the Bay Area, Los Angeles, San Diego, North Carolina and New South Wales, Australia.

Erica continues to balance her reviews and interviews of real-world musical artists with her fanciful plot fabrications that reveal the dark side of the fascinating world of opera. Aria for Murder, set at the Metropolitan Opera, published by Level Best Books in Oct. 2022, is the first in her Julia Kogan Opera Mystery series. Sequels taking place at Santa Fe and San Francisco Opera are due for release in 2023 and 2024 respectively. Erica’s debut novel, Travels with my Lovers, won the Fiction Prize in the Direct from the Author Book Awards, and her screenplays have earned awards in the Santa Fe, WinFemme and Writer’s Digest competitions.

Charles Philipp Martin grew up in Greenwich Village in New York City. After attending Columbia University and Manhattan School of Music, he took off to become a bass player in the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra. Six years later he put down his bow and became a full-time writer. In addition to spending four years as a Sunday Magazine columnist for the South China Morning post, he wrote and presented several radio series on Radio Television Hong Kong. After seventeen years in Hong Kong he moved to Seattle, where he now lives with his wife Catherine. His weekly jazz radio show 3 O'Clock Jump was heard every Saturday on Hong Kong’s Radio 3 for some two decades. Neon Panic is his first novel. Another Inspector Lok novel is in the works.