The Death and Life of Gustav Henn

By Ian Tremblay

The Death and Life of Gustav Henn is a contemporary romance and a tale of sorrow and loneliness and about the complexity of aging, the importance of family and of taking care of those we love.

Gustav Henn is a retired world renowned classical pianist who dies sitting in front of his television on Christmas Eve and whose skeletal remains are only discovered five years later. Michael Brenner, the police inspector who is assigned the case is intrigued by this unusual situation and is determined to find out how someone could have died in such anonymity and not have been missed by anyone for such a long time. A dust covered diary that he finds besides Gustav Henn’s remains leads him in the right direction

In his diary Gustav Henn recounts his entire life story and once Michael Brenner starts to read it, he cannot put it down. He is fascinated by what he learns about his family and his life filled with excitement, romance and drama, as well as the wild whirlwind of the classical musical world that Gustav Henn seems to have been thrown into at a very young age. The descriptions of the people, the concert halls, the cities, the five star hotels, the receptions, his romantic love story with Claire de Petit, a French ballerina and the endless attention showered upon him as a world renowned classical pianist, opens up to Brenner a vision of a world he had no idea existed, a world of adulation and excesses, and where one lives because and at the mercy of the talent that one has been bequeathed at birth. Unfortunately for Gustav Henn, arthritis took his talent away from him too soon and he had to stop performing and was forced to retire.
From that moment on his life began to spiral into a deep, dark hole of loneliness and eventually dementia. The more Michael Brenner reads, the more empathy he feels for the man and he soon begins to draw a parallel with his own impending retirement from the police force and a delicate family situation he is living at home.

CATEGORIES
Contemporary romance
Romantic love story
Romance and drama
Romance and books
Contemporary romance books e books

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ian Tremblay
• Release date: Aug 18, 2015
• ISBN: 9780993630750

Ian Tremblay

ABOUT THE AUTHORIan Tremblay is an indie author and poet who currently works in the entertainment business. He studied English Literature and has published two four story collections, Tales of Inhumanity and Retribution and Tales of Duplicity and Discontent, as well as a novel, The Illegal and the Refugee-An American Love Story. He is a world traveler, fishing aficionado and music enthusiast.Some of the individual stories of his first two books are in the process of being made available in paperback and on all digital platforms. Aisha-A Tale of Retribution and The Death and Life of Gustav Henn are the first two and were published in 2015.Rich Homeless Broken But Beautiful is the third and a novel and was published in 2016.If you wish to find out more about the author go to his website www.iantremblay.com

Book preview

The Death and Life of Gustav Henn

By

Ian Tremblay

Published by Ian Tremblay at Smashwords

Copyright © 2015 by Ian Tremblay

Table of Contents

The Death And Life of Gustav Henn

About The Author

Smashwords Edition

The Death and Life of Gustav Henn

Copyright © Ian Tremblay, 2015

All rights reserved. No parts of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted electronically or mechanically, neither photocopying nor recording are permitted without permission of the author.

Cover design and book design/layout by Anouk Firmin

All characters, names and events in this book are fictional. Any resemblance to actual people or occurrences is purely coincidental.

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The Death and Life of Gustav Henn

The smell, God that smell; the rank moldy stench of dead unmoved air, it was like walking into a basement or a cupboard that had not been opened for a very long time. The dust also surprised him, in those first few moments that he entered apartment 107. It was all over the place, at least an inch thick, as if no one had been in there for years. As it turned out, no one had.

It was the building administrator, a Mr. Stein, who had called it in two days before. He was a man of sixty or so, overweight, short, bald and bespectacled. His face was permanently flushed and he was always out of breath. His eyes were large and bulging, like a fish living in the depths of the ocean. As instructed he had come down to the station to do a formal declaration. In his declaration he had said that he had been trying to get in touch with the occupant of apartment 107 for months, he had written him several letters and had knocked half a dozen times at the door of Mr. Gustav Henn, but to no avail. There was never any response.

I tried to get in touch with Mr. Henn two years ago for some minor repairs to the building and I never got any response. I presumed he was out of the country or something, so, we proceeded with the work. This time however, we will be doing some major repairs and we need his written approval. He is after all, one of the co-owners of the building. To be perfectly honest with you Inspector, I am a bit concerned. Not only does he not respond, but the neighbors cannot remember the last time they saw him, they say it has been years!

Mr. Stein was out of breath after his long expose to Inspector Michael Brenner. He was sweating profusely as suspects sometimes did, when being grilled or confessing to a crime. It was as if his confession, to Brenner, it had sounded like a confession, had required of his sweaty, heavyset body an unusual effort. Inspector Brenner was used to people coming clean to him, his 6 foot four inch frame, piercing blue eyes and brittle manner, did that to people. Some suspects had been known to have been so intimidated by his imposing demeanor that they had confessed to crimes he did not even know they had committed. He cleared his throat, got up from behind his desk and walked towards the window, his back to Stein. The latter followed the Inspector’s movement, eyes and body forward, expectant, hoping the Inspector would confirm that he had done the right thing. Stein was the kind of person who needed approval of someone superior for anything he undertook.

"Very well Mr. Stein, at your request as administrator of the building I