During the five years I spent researching and writing The Devil Is In It, I met and interviewed many musicians, guitar dealers and collectors, uncovered numerous stories about long-forgotten guitarists and heard countless tales of lost guitars… not just the inevitable “one that got away” but also the many that were “too good to be true”. While many stories didn’t quite make it into The Devil they all seemed too good to lose forever and I held them on file, wondering how to use them. 

Over the last few years I carried out more research, interviewed more people and did more digging, not only in England and the USA but also in France. The result is The Guitar Detective, a companion book to The Devil Is In It.

The Guitar Detective is the story of a guitar enthusiast who buys an old acoustic guitar with unproven provenance from a music store in London. He has admired this old guitar, hung high up on a wall as an ornament, for years. It’s only now for sale because the small store is closing down. When the retiring octogenarian store owner first acquired the guitar in the 1960s, he was told that it belonged to a long-forgotten American blues player.

The guitar enthusiast acquires the guitar believing that it might just be another tall story. He soon discovers, however, that the story might well be true and sets out to track down the player. 

The Guitar Detective is best described as a non-fiction novel, faction if you will, although none of the characters in the book are wholly fictitious and all the locations are real. Set against a background of real global events, the action takes place between 1910 and 1990 and moves from rural Mississippi to 1920s Storyville in New Orleans, to the blues clubs of Chicago and New York in the pre-war years. Our protagonist meets the jazz obsessed German Luftwaffe pilot known as Dr Jazz in occupied Paris, before escaping to London’s Soho, and the red light district that was home to jazz and blues clubs run by the European mafia.