He cleaned out his parents Brentwood home and discovered his grandpa was a spy. His novel is here

David Baerwald holds up his most precious possession so that it’s visible on our video conference: a very old violin in a very old, battered case.Baerwald, an award-winning musician, film composer and songwriter who called Los Angeles home for nearly four decades, doesn’t play the violin.During his years with the Tuesday Music Club (immortalized in the Sheryl Crow album “Tuesday Night Music Club”), he played guitar.

But the violin belonged to his grandfather Ernst Baerwald — and it plays an important role in his recently published debut novel “The Fire Agent.” Not every successful artist turns to a new medium at age 65, or moves to the opposite coast (Baerwald now lives in Kingston, N.Y.).Then again, not every artist has a family history quite like Baerwald’s, one that includes Germany and Japan, two world wars, a 1920s throuple and Beethoven’s Ninth.On the Shelf The Fire Agent By David Baerwald Spiegel & Grau: 624 pages, $32If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.The violin in Baerwald’s hands was the one his German-Jewish grandfather played as a Japanese prisoner of war in the Bandō camp at Tokushima during World War I.

“It’s a very serviceable violin,” Baerwald notes.“A friend of mine played it for some years in the Long Beach Symphony.

When my grandfather was older and wealthy, he bought a better violin, which was lost in a fire.But this is the one that matters.”It matters because Ernst Baerwald was a founding member of a German POW orchestra that chose Beethoven’s great symphony as their premiere work — a performance so moving that it began a Japanese tradition marking the December holidays that persist to this day.

Baerwald’s grandfather not only kept his violin throughout the war in which he fought; when he defected from the Third Reich in 1941, he placed it in an oiled bag and brought it with him via an oceanic escape.Ernst ...