Dinner and a book is supported by the Rex and Alice A. Martin Foundation of Elkhart, celebrating the spirit of Alice Martin and her love of good food and good friends.

Ray McMillian has a gift and a dream.

He's determined to become a world class professional violinist, and nothing will stand in his way.

Not his mother.

Not the fact that he's poor, not even racism.

Our book is The Violin Conspiracy by Brendan Slocumb.

Let's meet my guest, Todd Cummings, who doesn't let anything stand in his way.

Welcome.

It's so good to have you.

Thank you.

I'm thrilled to be back with Michiana legend Gail Martin.

Thanks for having me.

The fourth time.

The fourth time.

Yes.

And you're cooking more and more and it's just just getting so exciting.

Well, you've inspired me.

Thank you.

Oh, I'm so glad I have done that.

So we talk about we talk about this book and food does enter it.

Oh, several times.

And we strung together some scenes from the book.

And let's just talk about what we're what we're making you're doing a breakfast.

So the book starts off with breakfast, and so I'm making a frittata with roasted tomatoes.

It's a French dish.

It's a French.

I'm trying.

Yes, Yes.

Very good.

Very good.

And I'm going to make a pie, a blueberry pie.

It's just a one crust pie.

And these pies were served at the Thanksgiving celebration when all the family came together.

And then at the end of the book, our violinist is stopped by a policeman, and it happens to him twice in a crate in his car.

First time they think he's stolen a violin case.

The second time, I can't remember the details, but I know he was stopped and he was with a crazy couple that I don't want to get ahead of the story.

But he's also guilty of something of what he does not know.

And so he has purchased some Cobb salad and he's going to take it back to the hotel.

And he never gets to eat.

He just throws it out.

He just gets disgusted.

So we're doing a Cobb salad for Brandon.

And so you're going to start with your bacon or.

Starting with bacon in the microwave, because I don't want to clean up a mess and prepping my tomatoes.

That sounds good.

That's right.

We've got all this to do.

Well, I'm going to I have been cooking a little bit of this of the blueberry, and I added some sugar, a little bit of salt and some liquid.

And I'm going to add a little more liquid, just a little bit of water.

And then we will add some fresh blueberries, put it into the unbaked pie crust and put it in the oven until it browns and our pie will be ready.

And then usually you can serve it with some whipping cream and then I'll get started on my salad.

It's going to have all those nut layers, but all those ingredients that are strung around the dish in a very artistic fashion.

Look at this.

Do you want.

Oh, you're going to put another one on top then, Right?

paper.

Because while I want to fry, I don't want to clean up the mess in WNIT, I thought, I will use the microwave.

He can fry if he wants and he can clean it up afterwards.

I have just decided I'm doing the bacon in the microwave and cover the the bacon with a paper towel.

It makes it so much easier.

So these have cooked a while and I'm going to add some fresh blueberries.

We're not going to cook them, but they will be baked in the oven, which I have set at 400 in this pie shell, and we will make the pie for maybe 50, whatever it turns brown, you know, because this has already been cooked.

I like to add some fresh berries because it is nice to be eating a pie.

And you go, Oh, I think I just have a fresh berry.

You want to make it a little more fresh and not just everything cooked.

And so I'm going to come behind you and I see that I want to make this even a little more wet.

Liquidy.

Now we talk about everything going on in this book, right?

I think we should talk about his family, what characters.

What characters eat throughout the entire book.

They do their best to discourage, to take his money.

Yes.

Make him stop what he's doing.

She wants her son when he graduates.

Graduates from high school to go work at Popeye's.

Nothing.

Nothing, you know, against Popeye's.

But she thinks that's going to be his life career.

And he doesn't want to do that.

He wants to play the violin and she doesn't even like the music.

She leaves the room or leaves the house.

When he's practicing, she can't stand it.

So can you imagine growing up in a situation like that and she wants him to give her half the money that he's going to make wherever he's going to end up working.

And so she can buy what inch TV does she want?

Seems like a giant television.

Yeah, but it was always short term.

So she didn't want to invest in his career.

She didn't want to invest in his lessons.

And even at the end, it was always short term, small amounts of money.

Yes.

And I want half of everything.

Everything.

Right.

And and she sits and does her nails.

I mean, she just kind of drives you crazy.

But he's got to there are two female members.

There's Aunt Rochelle and his grandma Nora.

And these women are to die for.

I mean, they are terrific.

They love him and they tell him they love him.

And it's so much fun seeing them together.

And his Aunt Rochelle is every bit champion.

They all encourage him to do things.

Now, when we start the book, we find out that a violin has been stolen.

But then we go to the part in the book where you build the story.

I mean, there's not even a violin in the story in the beginning.

How does he get this old violin?

So the story you have to keep up with the time frame that is used.

Yes.

But he wants to play the violin and his grandmother says, I have one in the attic.

And so she goes and she gets this horrible, dusty rosin encased violin and she gives it to him.

No one else in the family has ever wanted it.

They think it's awful.

And that's where we start to have it.

Wait why are you giving him that old violin?

Right.

It's doesn't work.

It's broken.

Yes.

So of course, he starts investigating it.

And I guess we have to say what he finds out about this violin can say that.

Let's do it.

Let's do it.

All right.

So he takes it, you know, early on to have someone look at it and, you know, they think it's, you know, trash.

And they it horrible stops and strings on.

And then as he practices and he needs a new violin for a competition, they find out I'll let you.

Share what they have in the center says assessor.

It's not really an assessor.

It is somebody that imagines or actually determines the price.

And if it's a worthy violin, turns out it's a Stradivarius.

It's one of the foremost famous violins in the world.

Now, this is a bit of a stretch in my mind that this would be found in an attic.

But see, since they didn't really care, they didn't care if it got dusty and moldy and all of that.

And so he is bound and determined to have it repaired.

And after reading all these pages twice, it's been very expensive to repair.

I was surprised.

One, I love an art mystery and it was expensive to repair how much money he had to sink into repairing and then finding out that it's a Stradivarius.

Yes.

To me, that was the only thing in the book that was seemed a little bit strange.

But then, you know, he's he's meets this Janet.

Gosh, what was her last name?

I forget her last name.

College professor.

He she yes, Janet will call her.

They become fast friends.

She helps him.

She goes with him.

She gets this.

I've evaluated the violin, evaluated.

She helps him get training.

And, you know, this kind of goes very, very fast.

And all of a sudden, she says, you should try out for the Moscow Moscow championships.

It's not a championship.

It's a world famous competition.

And we were talking about the Texan from the United States that won it.

Van Cliburn, the only American ever to win in this competition.

And here he goes.

And he spends he sets up a two year training program.

How he's going to learn to play Mozart correctly and Beethoven and all these various composers and he studies like 12 to 14 hours a day.

And it's quite a cast of characters along the way.

Along the way.

And then he starts practicing and taking part in some competitions, and he meets this girl, Nicole.

Who she was playing in an ensemble while he was playing at an A, not a competition, but he was playing an engagement and folks would come just to see, Yeah, his violin.

Well, and she she becomes fast friend and she does lots of things for him.

And they get along quite well.

He gets along with the the professor that is his teacher and she protects him as well and helps him make decisions because you can you can really have people pull one over on you if you're not guided to watch out for certain things.

So this is the first part of the book and and the like You say, the time thing is sort of confusing, but one day he comes out of the shower in the hotel, he's staying, and later on he opens up the violin case.

And what does he find?

It's gone.

It's gone.

And somebody has put a size ten and a half tennis shoe in there to hold the way the same.

So we have this now.

And he he's sort of stricken like, how did this happen?

And his friend Nicole said, well, there is a woman that is illegal alien.

I bet she did it.

She left the country today.

And so they kind of go in that direction and they think that she's probably guilty.

They can't find her.

She has left and gone back to Honduras.

The FBI.

Yeah.

Our crimes unit comes in to help.

And the anxiety I feel I thought was palpable over this loss, violent.

It becomes its own character.

It does.

It does.

And he is so embarrassed.

But we don't want to remain embarrassed.

We're going to take a little break to get ready for our next segment.

And so we want you to take a look at our menu today and we'll be back to find out what happened to Ray's violin.

It's very mysterious.

We'll be right back.

And our book is The Violin Conspiracy.

And we are in Moscow and our friend has just realized his violin has been stolen, a $10 million Stradivarius.

And I find that not unusual.

Yo-Yo Ma lost his cello in a taxi, and he got it back four days later.

But he gets letters now from people.

Well, the family wants to know why he never told them that the violin was worth 10 million.

And they're dividing up all that, of course, the family.

And then he he gets a letter in a call from this couple who say they were related to the slave owner who owned Ray's family like two centuries ago.

And they want the violin.

The story brings out the craziest cast of characters.

Yes.

All claim this violin.

Yes.

And it don't we don't know the full provenance of the violin until the end of the book, but everyone feels like they have claim to this random violin.

And his mother, of course, she wants it.

There was a family wants him to sell it.

So they all get $1.6 million.

Right.

And and, of course, there's a ransom note.

And he has just a certain amount of time.

And so he crowd.

What do you call that?

He crowdfunds.

He was even in Moscow.

He says if everyone will send me a dollar, I can get I can pay the ransom and get my violin back.

And I thought, how are these Russians?

Will they find a dollar if they really want to do this?

And so it just seems like a slow process.

But he does raise about 4 million, doesn't he?

He does.

6 million.

He does.

And I'll admit that I thought that that made him seem really suspect that when he was trying to raise the money for this violin that had insurance, I thought, ha.

I hadn't suspected him in the theft, but I. I wonder if he's somehow behind it.

Well, the author's very good at making you suspicious of everybody.

Everyone.

And and you don't.

You don't find out until the very end who really made a mess of this, making a mess of his life and so he does play with his old violin.

He plays in the Moscow competition, and he sets up this cross the room sort of I glare with the the top Serbian violin player in the world, and they go mano a mano, a violin, the violin.

And they end up winning both of them at the end.

I mean, we're just going to say that.

And we he doesn't have his violin back yet.

This couple says he's they're related to the man who was the slave owner.

They won it and they are suing him.

The family sues him.

I mean, this man is just taunting to shreds, thinking about all this.

And how he has to focus on not only his competition but all the other gigs he has coming up.

And he has these multiple lawsuits.

And like I said earlier, this character, this violin becomes a character.

And you're I found myself concerned about the violin.

Where is it?

Who's taking care of it?

And so you feel that anxiety for him as well.

Where's this great, great grandfather's violin?

Just as soon as you think you've got to figure it out, something else happens.

But here's this poor young man.

They don't let the author doesn't let him win the Moscow competition, but he comes in second and gets signed up for all these tours.

He still doesn't have his violin back.

And how does he all of a sudden discover what happened to this violin?

Well, I. I have to admit, I almost didn't finish the book because I was afraid I would give it away today.

So I'm going to be careful.

I'm going to let you handle this.

Oh, well, in any case, we have two court cases going on, and we at the end of the book, Nicole is writing him a letter and she says, I love you, I love you.

I didn't mean to hurt you.

I only thought about my future and your future.

And that's as far as we'll go.

Right.

But anyway, he doesn't.

She wants him to be a witness for her good behavior and her good character.

He won't do it.

And of course, this young man, I don't know how he could stand all this.

And the family.

He works out a plan.

The family is going to get some of the money if he ever sells the violin, some of the insurance money and it all ends well.

It does.

But we are going to tell you what actually does happen because we want you to read the book.

And he to me, the only thing that was amazing to me, people who play in the Moscow competition are people who probably played 10000 hours a a year and have probably studied violin for 20 years.

And he you know, he does this all pretty quickly.

And but it makes for a very exciting and fun book.

And was such a page turner because like you said earlier, it was always something new happening.

It was the lawsuit, it was the court cases, and it was always some new, really horrible cast of character coming out against the violin player.

Yes.

And after the competition, he does he is signed up for a lot of world tours.

And of course, his mother always calls him in the family calls him.

How much did you make at that gig in Stockholm or in in Vienna?

And so he he has to dodge them, but he also does give them money.

He's a very generous nephew.

So the story may seem a bit far fetched, but as I say, many violin cellists have left their cellos in taxi cabs or they have been stolen and there have been lawsuits.

And this these two lawsuits are just amazing in the sense that they almost come on top of each other.

And the people that had owned the violin, the family owned it, they are on top of the lawsuit.

They want to get the oh boy.

They want this violin no matter what, even if it hasn't been fixed yet.

They want it.

And they they're the ones that pop up everywhere.

Where he's in New York, they pop up on a snowy night and that's when he gets arrested for having the violin in his car after everything is kind of worked out.

And there's this undertone.

I think he handles it really well.

There's this undertone of racism that he discovers.

And I thought it was really an interesting look at the life of a professional musician as well, but specifically the life of a professional African-American musician.

And what he has to overcome and the arrests and the stops by police.

I thought he wove that together really Well.

We have read numerous books on dinner and a book about this kind of trailing of black men in their cars and and how they're pulled over and accused of things.

And so this happens to him twice in this book.

He even misses a concert because he's pulled over in in South Carolina.

So he's got all this going on.

The family, I don't know.

We don't really know too much.

At the end of the book, they kind of disappeared.

They do once.

Once it's been decided, they take an offer that he will give them a certain amount of money every.

Year they reach a settlement.

Yeah.

And then his family disappears.

We hope that it's forever because they're not they're not very nice to him.

They aren't there.

They really.

And they reach a settlement with them.

And we assume that he pays it.

And then we're still on the search for the violin up until the very end.

Yes.

So and there's a lot of insight, too, about learning to play at that top level.

I had read that to become a outlier in like is a professional musician, you have to practice at least 10000 hours a year.

And he's been doing that.

And then of course, he's practicing for six months.

And so in any case, we're going to take a break and we're going to let's see, what are we doing in this one?

We want to see if we have the food and we're want to show some pictures of this Moscow competition with the bright lights, the gold chandelier.

I mean, this is something to behold.

So let's take a break and we'll be right.

So we're talking about the violin conspiracy by Brendan Slocomb.

And you and I both agree.

We liked it.

We did like the book very much.

Yes.

I thoroughly enjoyed it.

And you told you like you told me you like books about art heists.

I'm a fan of the art heist.

And so when the violin was stolen, there are other books about the Isabella Gardner Museum in Boston.

I like the FBI art heist ring, and I like a good art heist book.

And this fell into that genre nicely.

This was an art heist, a violent art heist.

I mean Heist.

I love that word.

Heist.

At first I thought you were talking about some German expressionism.

And I thought, Well, Art Heist.

Yes, that's it.

Exactly.

And since we had you had so many ideas about who could have stolen it, it was successful in tripping you up a little bit on the timeline.

And who who left little clues.

So I thought it was going to be easier to figure out than it was.

But it really did take me to the end.

And like I said, by the time I got to the end, I thought it was the the main character.

And I was a little surprised at the end who it was.

But he there's so many horrible characters in the book.

That's it's it could be anyone.

Yes, it could have been anyone.

It could have been the whole family getting together and putting an old tennis shoe in there in that old violin case and running off with the violin.

They had all kinds of plans for what they were going to do with the money.

And they were going to It was a crazy family.

Very it was funny.

But I have heard about people that win, you know, the sweepstakes of some great, you know, 2 million.

Now it's up to 2 billion.

What's that?

All your friends from your past, they come and they talk to you and they ask you for a little loan.

And then the loan gets bigger and bigger and it becomes more of a bother than a real gift.

And then the money's gone.

And then it's gone.

Yeah.

So that's my my favorite part of the book was, I think, the competition itself.

And.

And you liked.

When you discovered it was the Stradivarius.

We took it to the appraiser.

Yes.

And so we had fun copying some of the food from the book.

A little blueberry pie here and the now finally he's got his Cobb salad.

You know, he threw the other one in the trash because he was so upset with the policeman for for pulling him over and telling him, you know, something wrong with you.

And I'm just going to add some little drizzling part of this.

You can add any kind of dressing you want on your salad.

I kind of like a Greek style.

I like oil vinegar and a little lemon juice.

And you could, but you can do it.

Calls for ranch.

And I'm not exactly a ranch aficionados.

I do like it, but I don't care for it very often.

So you can put anything you want it on like this.

So tell us what you did to arrive at these gems.

So the book starts with bacon and eggs, and so I'm a frittata fan.

I usually use up at the end of the week what I have.

And so today I took my eggs.

I made them a frittata.

So I pre cook for my week.

So I have breakfast and then my new recipe I've been working on is French roasted tomatoes.

So olive oil, tomatoes, mushrooms and balsamic vinegar.

And I roast them till they're till they're soft.

My chef.

Chef Cummings, you are really moving on here.

I enjoyed the book.

I enjoyed having you again.

Thank you.

Thank you for coming on.

And we thank you for joining us.

So remember, good food, good friends, good books make for, oh, gosh, a magnificent a wonderful and amazing life, right?

And thank you for having me back.

Michiana legend Gail Martin.

Yeah.

I'm thrilled.

We'll see you next time.

This WNIT Local production has been made possible in part by viewers like you.

Thank you.

Dinner and a book is supported by the Rex and Alice A. Martin Foundation of E;khart.

Celebrating the spirit of Alice Martin and her love of good food and good friends.