Would You Trust Mozart to Solve a Murder Mystery?

It is 1765, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, age 9, has some thoughts about the musical deficiencies of his teacher, Johann Christian Bach, a perfectly competent composer and performer who has the mixed fortune of being the son of a genius—Johann Sebastian. Known as the “London Bach,” Johann Christian has taken the little Salzburgian prodigy under his wing. The brilliant student, at least as portrayed in Ariel Dorfman’s new novel, Allegro, is already aware that his new mentor has only a limited amount to teach him. “The London Bach did not himself know that a certain depth was lacking, he might never know it,” Mozart thinks.

But Johann Christian does have an essential lesson to impart to the young Mozart: that all of human life is a mystery. And the biggest question hanging over Mozart is whether his teacher’s eminent father was actually murdered by a famous oculist who performed two fateful eye surgeries on him only months before his death.

Yes, that’s right: Allegro is a murder mystery. And Mozart is the detective on the case.

Dorfman’s novel is one of two new books to send extraordinary artists from the past on the hunt for a killer. The other is Laurent Binet’s Perspective(s), translated by Sam Taylor. In that novel, a host of Florentine notables including Michelangelo, Cosimo de’ Medici, and Giorgio Vasari try to figure out who stabbed the painter Jacopo Pontormo in the heart with his own chisel. (The real Bach wasn’t murdered, but died of a stroke in 1750, not long after undergoing two eye surgeries. The real Pontormo died of natural causes.)

[Read: The secret to Mozart’s lasting appeal]

Imagining a great man or woman as a would-be Sherlock Holmes is not exactly a new idea: If you’d like to read about Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, or even former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden donning the proverbial deerstalker cap, you will find that your desires can be easily fulfilled. But Dorfman’s and Binet’s books are somewhat different. Their novels have little in common with the coded-messages and hidden-staircases tropes largely associated with the mystery genre—although Vasari, the renowned artist, biographer, and architect who serves as de’ Medici’s right-hand man, acquits himself rather nicely in an impressive number of Renaissance shoot-outs.

These are atmospheric, highly literary works; Perspective(s) even revives the lost art of the epistolary novel. Here, letters fly across Italy and France after Pontormo’s murder unleashes a wave of political, artistic, religious, and sexual machinations. (My favorite correspondents: Two naive and self-important nuns, one of whom blithely writes to the other that “I have no doubts concerning your future beatification.”)

These are also novels in which the mystery plots allow the authors to ask deeper, more elusive questions about human existence. By conflating exceptional artists with fictional detectives and letting us follow along as they unravel mysteries, these stories help us envision what living in the mind of a genius must be like. Although vanishingly few of us will ever have a real understanding of what it feels like to be Mozart composing a symphony or Michelangelo perfecting the proportions of St. Peter’s Basilica, solving a mystery alongside them lets us catch, if only briefly, a glimpse of their inner minds.

Dorfman and Binet also remind us that exceptional people tend to take exceptional license. Something their protagonists have in common with great fictional detectives is an unorthodox set of personal habits, combined with an idiosyncratically skewed moral compass. Just as Holmes regularly indulges in cocaine, exhausts his neighbors with his erratic violin practice, and sees himself as above the law, the artists in Allegro and Perspective(s) drink excessively, neglect their families (especially the women), and prioritize the demands of art over those of society.

This presents the reader, especially one steeped in mystery fiction, with a familiar irony: Skilled detectives typically win readers’ hearts because of their flaws, not despite them. Sure, we want to know whodunnit. Yet the satisfaction of an unexpected but supremely logical solution is secondary to that of watching a one-of-a-kind brain figure the whole thing out, no matter the obstacles they might throw in their own way.

For the minds in Allegro and Perspective(s), the work of solving mysteries is sometimes a welcome distraction from an artist’s cerebral life. Vasari, trying to solve Pontormo’s murder, must confront the profound hatred he feels for Pontormo’s particular artistic style. “I admit that there is something impressive about those walls, in the sacred terror they inspire, a feeling that seems only to deepen with prolonged contemplation,” he writes about the artist’s frescoes. “In the end I felt like I was suffocating.” To be always striving for brilliance can be exhausting; when Vasari is able to switch modes, from pondering Pontormo’s art to seeking the unknown woman who visited his home just before his death, he writes, “Well, I can breathe again.”

But the artists’ turns as detectives also thrust them deeper into that discomfort, forcing them to contend with the ways an obsession with art can disrupt the course of a life. Late in Allegro, Mozart, now 34, ill, and aware that he is approaching his own death, admits that his preoccupation with the elder Bach’s maybe-murder is really about his sense, despite all of his accomplishments, that some deeper level of musical understanding is still hidden from him. “Am I that mad, so estranged from everything I once loved, that I believe the dead Bach will deliver some message to me,” he asks; will solving the mystery “give me the serenity that he found, the peace that eludes me?”

The questions of artistic perfection that Mozart or Vasari thought about might not be comprehensible to the rest of us. But Dorfman’s and Binet’s characters become more relatable when you realize that, like anyone else, they could not have been good at everything. And one trait the legends in these novels share is that they are, in fact, not very good detectives.

[Read: An unabashedly intellectual murder mystery]

In both novels, the artists eventually do solve their mysteries, but largely through the interference of others rather than their own genius. Watching people of exceptional talent wrestle with the domains in which they are ordinary is both entertaining and instructive. Vasari’s irascibility as Cosimo de’ Medici sends him off on another hunt for information is a reminder that even the greats sometimes hate their jobs. He “knows that my devotion to him is limitless, which is why he abuses it,” Vasari writes in frustration. “I am a painter and an architect, not a nanny or a chaperone.” And when Mozart cannot correctly identify the elder Bach’s grave on a visit to Leipzig in search of a final clue, he becomes more human: We can imagine that moments of profound stress make him totally dysfunctional, as they do so many of us.

We make art for the same reason we seek to solve mysteries—because we believe that reality is deeper or different than it appears. There must be an answer to our questions; there must be a more profound way to capture the hidden truths of humanity; there must be some kind of divinity that even we mortals can find a way to glimpse. Many people create art—or try to figure out the true story behind an inexplicable occurrence—because they feel that the world is incomplete as it is.

Is something really there, just out of reach, that all this grasping might actually reveal? “I think the answer is always music,” Mozart tells Johann Christian, when his investigation reaches a crucial juncture. Art exists, he says, precisely for moments when the mysteries of human experience transcend our ability to articulate answers to them.