A glass tube is discovered embedded in the fret (neck) of a guitar crafted about 300 years ago by the great Italian violin maker Antonio Stradivari (aka Stradivarius).
Inside the tube is a piece of parchment with a partial, handwritten message — in Italian —attributed to Stradivari. It’s a mystery to Norman Dan, the Toronto-based custom guitar maker, who discovers the tube. But to the MI6 of the British Secret Service, Russian hackers, a greedy auction house owner, and a very rich Russian oligarch, this message-laden glass tube means so much more, and could adversely affect the world of the multi-billion-dollar rare musical instrument market.
That’s the premise of The Stradivari Formula by Grit Laskin, a mystery-thriller that’s reminiscent of the best-selling novels of Dan Brown (author of such books as The Da Vinci Code and The Secret of Secrets, to name a few).
“I’ve been a guitar maker since 1971, and instrument makers around the world know about Stradivari. In fact, he actually built five guitars during his lifetime, of which one was playable,” said Grit during a recent phone interview.
That formed the genesis of the novel; however, Grit was preoccupied not only as a guitar maker, but also as an author, songwriter, recording artist and founder of the label Borealis Records, so the idea for the book was put aside for many years. But that all changed when Borealis Records was sold to a new owner.
“After Borealis was sold, I had a lot of free time on my hands. Even though I had several guitar building commissions, I still had bills to pay,” he said. “That’s when I decided to return to the book idea. I formulated a plot about Stradivari having a secret formula hidden in a secret compartment of one of his crafted guitars, yet no one ever found it. And the character of Norman Dan is given the task of extracting the glass tube with that secret, yet he and his fellow luthiers (the name given to artisans who are skilled in crafting and repairing stringed instruments such as guitars, lutes and violins), who get involved in this operation, remain the innocents in the middle.”
Grit wrote his first book — a YA novel — about 20 years ago, and when he dove into book writing for the first time since then, he wasn’t intimidated by any challenges that such a task could have presented to him. He credits this to his songwriting skills. “As a songwriter, I am lyric-driven, in which words are always critical for me,” he said. “As well, I am an avid book reader, whether they be mysteries, history or science. Combine both, and it gave me the ability to absorb overall structure, pace and sentence structure. Therefore, I didn’t find it difficult to write the novel; I felt I was having an adventure.”
“As well, when it came to musicology and what’s involved with crafting and restoring instruments, I made sure to minimize many of those details, so that readers wouldn’t find it boring and get caught up with me explaining too much about the technology and the equipment that goes along with it,” he added.
Right now, Grit is in the midst of writing a new series of mystery novels, with one book completed and two more in progress. And he revealed that two of the characters from The Stradivari Formula will make a return appearance in this new series.
And how did he get the nickname of “Grit”? He attributes that to his time at summer camp when he was nine. “My original first name is William, and in school, my friends called me Bill,” he said. “During summer camp, my nickname was ‘Billy Goat’, which morphed into ‘Billy Groat’, then ‘Groat”, and finally ‘Grit’.”
The Stradivari Formula is a mystery-thriller that accomplishes the impossible. It takes an object that’s associated with a subject that is mostly unfamiliar to a general reading audience, and turns it into an absorbing novel that is intriguing and full of heart-stopping action. You may not know much about Stradivari and his world-famous violins, as well as the art and science of instrument restoration, but after reading this book, you become a quick student of both topics and enjoy a healthy dose of skullduggery and espionage while learning. No pun intended, but it strikes all the right chords.
by Stuart Nulman
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