June 2008

Stuart Woods

Sunday, June 01, 2008

If best-selling author Stuart Woods were a composer, he’d be a Mozart at least in terms of productivity. He turns out three novels every year with the last 23 of them all hitting the New York Times bestseller list – including his most recent release Santa Fe Dead. His books have been described as “offbeat thrillers with a wicked sense of humor”. His best known character is a New York homicide detective-turned lawyer with some obvious autobiographical overlaps with Woods (a regular at the popular bistro Elaine's and flies his own plane). Perhaps not what might have been predicted for someone whose mother was a church organist and whose pre-service preludes provided the only live classical music in the small Georgia town in which he was born.

In this wide-ranging interview with “Mad About Music” host Gilbert Kaplan, Stuart Woods reveals how music entered his life at an early age and never left. He first studied the clarinet but soon switched to piano where he confesses he was a failure. Then he started singing and became the lead tenor in his high school glee club and later took up the drums to play in a jazz group at college—and always finding time to drop into some neighborhood bar to sing Frank Sintra-esque songs ("No better seduction music than Sinatra").

As he started his writing, he discovered Beethoven whose Pastoral Symphony served as a soundtrack as he drove 12,000 miles crisscrossing the British Isles researching for a book, A Romantic's Guide to the Country Inns of Britain and Ireland. His music selections also include a Franz Lehar song ("as beautiful as anything in Puccini"), Gershwin's Concerto in F and Mahler's Ninth Symphony—especially an overwhelming performance by Leonard Bernstein ("You would have thought he was about to die when he finished it.")