Novels, especially thrillers, with pop or rock music settings are becoming quite collectable ..this novel Lantern Hill (Joseph, London 1957) by Barbara Worsley-Gough is so early it's practically an incunable. It has all the modern elements-- obsessive fans, excess, celebrity hauteur, displays of wealth (fabulous designer interiors) and an entourage; also the star even goes to a country retreat to get her head together...
The blurb on the inside flap of the dust wrapper reads:
Phyllis Flower, beautiful and famous, has become the 'top pop singer' with an immense fan-club following. Although an essentially nice person, she has been spoiled by success and made tyrannical by flattery. Like many successful people in the entertainment world, she is surrounded by a crowd of so-called friends and hangers on, all of them greedy for pleasure and bent on making as much as they can out of their generous patroness.
But Phyllis leavs her Knightsbridge house and goes to Lantern Hill, the Irish country home of her dead husband. There she romps in the fields with her child, takes pleasure in roughing it and forgets for a while that she is a celebrity whose faces known to everyone, whose voice has become the property of those thousands of unknown people who buy her records.
At Lantern Hill a tragedy occurs, a sudden death by poison. The unravelling of the mystery is undertaken by Aloysius Kelly, the Irish journalist who is an old friend of the family. By chance he finds out the strange method used by the poisoner and his efforts to solve an exceptionally nasty and cunning murder take him to Dublin ...Working with the police, his rudimentary notions of detection augmented by an intimate acquaintance with the Flower circle of sycophants and admirers, Aloysius Hill returns to London and at last discovers the motive for the murder...
From the text at the beginning of Chapter Two:
Basil Chalk had no taste for television, or for popular music. He would have been none the wiser if he had been told that the goddess on the balcony was Phyllis Flower, the Pop singer known to her innumerable fans as the Spirit of Song. He had only haziest notion of Pop singers, of what they sang, and he knew the names of none of them. He'd never sat before a screen worry platform or stage and heard the size of the rapture and seen the tears brush from adoring eyes as Phyllis indulged her fans with their favourite Only A Babe and I'll Dream it Again. He had never even heard a recording of the phenomenal Flower voice, with its extraordinary power and compass, the blood-curdling low notes, and the terrible ease with which it out-soared the range of every other living soprano. This experience was still in store for Basil Chalk.