THU APR 14 05

		Novel-ty Songs. A new mystery novel by singer/songwriter Rupert Holmes comes packaged "with a music CD to help solve the puzzle," reports Bob Minzesheimer in USA Today. You may remember Rupert Holmes for his number-one hit, Escape/Pina Colada Song (consider yourself lucky if you don't). Rupert is back now, with an innovative novel called Swing, "set in 1940 during San Francisco's Golden Gate Exposition," and chock-full of references to 40s-era big-band music. Rupert's editor, Jonathan Karp of Random House, thought it would be a cool idea if the songwriter/author would "write, arrange and perform the music mentioned in his novel." "That's a little like asking Hemingway if he could climb Mt. Kilimanjaro, and while he was up there, take some photographs," says Rupert, describing his initial reaction to the idea. But perhaps realizing that maybe he ain't no Hemingway, Rupert decided to play along. The result is a 9-song CD of original music that offers clues to the mystery, but that Rupert says is mainly intended to put readers "in the mood to spend a long weekend in the Big Band era." At any rate, Rupert offers a few observations on the differences between writing novels and songs: "With a pop song, you could be four minutes from finishing ... You can do a song in 32 sentences. That's not even the first page of a book," he says. More interesting are Rupert's thoughts on song/novel-writing similarities, noting that both "have those moments where you shift gears, when you're taking your audience somewhere else." Rupert also thinks words can be musical: "Not to praise myself, and this may seem like a pompous thing to do, but listen to this," says Rupert, reciting a line from his book as evidence that he knows how to play the English language like a musical instrument. Here goes: "And with that, she walked quickly up the street and out of my life forever, one would imagine. One imagines a lot of things." Imagine there's no Escape ... Tim Manners, editor