Charles Delaunay's book covers everything you'd ever want to know about gypsy guitar legend Django Reinhardt in a captivating, readable form. Included anecdotes make you feel like you really got to know Django from the perspective of friends and fellow musicians. Many of them are quite funny too.

In addition to the exceptional story of Django and his music, Delaunay's book includes many pages full of rare Django Reinhardt photographs.

Get this book now! You won't be sorry :)

Although I wouldn't necessarily call this book a literary classic, it's quite readable and certainly worthwhile for anyone who likes the music of Django Reinhardt and is interested in learning more about him as both a person and a musician, as well as the other musicians (such as Stephane Grappelli) of the Quintet of the Hot Club of France and others that played and recorded with him. There are plenty of anecdotes that bring their songs to life for me in a new way. Just to take one example, the first song on the first disk of the 5-CD set "Django Reinhardt: The Classic Early Recordings in Chronological Order" (which I'd highly recommend, by the way) is a popular song that was new at the time, called "I Saw Stars." It's a nice little tune, with some great solos by both Reinhardt and Grappelli, but I learned from this biography that the newly-formed quintet had never played it before. They were on their way to their first-ever recording, and were concerned that their music might not be commercial enough to be accepted, and Grappelli had just obtained a copy of the sheet music for "I Saw Stars" (which was a popular hit in the U.S. at the time). They went over it a couple of times in the taxi on the way to the studio, stopping along the way to pick up vocalist Bert Marshal, who Reinhardt thought might give the group a more commercial sound. (In later recordings, the QHCF rarely used vocalists.) To listen anew to the recording knowing now that they were just improvising on a song they'd never even played before just brings home all the more how intensely talented these musicians were. This biography is full of similar examples, as well as filling the reader in on Reinhardt's early background and musical studies while travelling on gypsy caravans as a boy, and on his teen years spent backing up "musette" dance musicians in Paris cabarets and so on. All in all, I'd say that if you're a fan of the great Django Reinhardt's music, this biography will enhance your appreciation of it all the more. (The author, Charles Delaunay, by the way, was a French music critc and contemporary of Reinhardt and Grappelli, who was instrumental in getting their professional careers started and who probably knew them and their music as well as or better than anyone. So this is as authoritative a biography of Django Reinhardt as there is ever likely to be.)

Interesting but not definitive.
It was a marriage of convenience that had turned inconvenient for someone. In 1875, Florence Ricardo married Charles Bravo. He was after her money and she was seeking to cleanse her name after a lurid sex scandal by marrying respectably. After less than six months of married life he was dead and a cloud of suspicion hung over his wife and the servants of her home.
A Coroner's inquest determined that the death was murder by poisoning. But it was never able to solve who had committed the crime. The chief suspects were: The widow who resented his attempt to control her money, the groom who had been fired by the new master of the house, the lady's maid who was next line for dismissal, or the elderly doctor who was Florence's ex-lover embittered about her marriage.
This unsolved Victorian mystery has been the subject of numerous speculations for over a century. Investigative reporter James Ruddick feels that he has finally cracked the case with damming new evidence. He goes beyond the source material used by many authors and travels the world over to contact descendants of the infamous participants in the original mystery. He weaves together a narrative that he feels is the definitive solution to the case.
This book is, in my opinion, a little too concerned with showing off the intrepid exploits of the author than it is with reasoning out the evidence. While his solution is very plausible this book is by no means going to be the final word on the case.

In 1876 a young newlywed and Victorian aristocrat, Charles Bravo suffers a horrible death by a caustic poison in his London area mansion, the Priory. Murder! Despite four clear suspects, a Scotland Yard investigation, a highly publicized Coroner's inquest and 125 years of professional and amateur sleuthing, the murderer is not identified . . . until now!

James Ruddick solves an infamous riddle in "Death At The Priory". His book is divided into three intriguing parts. The events leading up to the murder and the inital inquest provides all the suspense and mystery of an Agatha Christie yarn. Ruddick skillfully weaves Coroner's inquest testimony into facinating dialog, adding color and spice to a brisk narration.

The second part enables the author to narrow the suspects and eventually identify the murderer by utilizing the wealth of research on the murder and a very creative perspective. The third part takes the reader through some of the dark secrets of Victorian wealth. In a society of double standards, even a wealthy woman becomes a prisoner within her own household. What can she do to stop being beaten, sodomized, robbed, verbally abused and nearly killed by an abusive husband? There are no help groups or laws to protect her.

In the end most of the charaters involved in "Death At The Priory" are poisoned by the notoriety. For the reader there is a great deal of satisfaction from this work and a greater appreciation that today's standards, no matter how flawed, are far more preferable than the good old days of Queen Victoria. Enjoy!

I read this book in England in October and considered it to be the book of the year. Ruddick's strength is his ability to take lots of disparate themes and thread them all together in a thrilling page-turner. On one level the book is a straightforward murder mystery - was Charles Bravo murdered by his wife, his wife's lover, his housekeeper or the stableman? The plot twists and turns like something from Patricia Cornwell or Elizabeth George. But then Ruddick begins sowing into the story other dimensions: he looks at the repressive nature of Victorian society, and particularly at the appalling way it treated its women. He reveals the shocking consequences of transgressing the moral codes of the time. He brings to life the atmosphere of London in 1876, the wealth and poverty, the strict social hierarchy, the conversations, appearances and personalites: his prose style is rich with the flavour of the period. Towards the end, the book changes gear and becomes a modern thriller, with Ruddick himself travelling the world in search of the proof he needs to unmask the killer. He knows who committed the crime - so do we - and the pleasure is in watching him slowly piece together the evidence. The last hundred pages were so compulsive I took the phone off the hook. Ultimately Ruddick succeeds in taking several genres - crime, romance, history - and weaving them into a masterpiece of suspense. This book was thrilling to read and will be selling for years...