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Post by novastar6 on Dec 11, 2019 18:40:36 GMT
Can anybody recommend some good Christmas murder mystery novels and/or anthologies?
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Post by Nalkarj on Dec 11, 2019 20:09:58 GMT
I don’t think Hercule Poirot’s Christmas is in Agatha Christie’s top tier (kinda falls apart at the end, especially character-wise), but it’s OK. The buildup is good.
Not exactly Christmas, but wintry: Christie’s The Sittaford Mystery is quite good.
John Dickson Carr’s “Blind Man’s Hood” (short story) isn’t, er, a straight detective story, but it’s a masterpiece, reminiscent of the Christmas party sequence from the movie Dead of Night (1945). Probably my favorite thing he ever wrote. Available in the recent Black Lizard Book of Locked-Room Mysteries.
H.C. Bailey’s excellent, sinister “The Unknown Murderer” is set at a Christmas party, but Christmas is not particularly relevant to the plot. Highly recommended, though.
Gladys Mitchell wrote two Christmas-set mysteries: Dead Men’s Morris, recently republished as Death Comes at Christmas, and Groaning Spinney, republished as Murder in the Snow. I haven’t read either, and though I’m a great Mitchell fan, keep in mind that she’s an acquired taste.
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Post by theravenking on Dec 12, 2019 16:02:30 GMT
The British Library has published 3 Xmas themed anthologies, the quality of the stories varies, but I would still recommend them. Christmas at the Mysterious Bookshop edited by Otto Penzler is an excellent anthology featuring stories from contemporary crime writers such as Lawrence Block or Anne Perry. If you like Sherlock Holmes, there are two older anthologies: Holmes for the Holidays and More Holmes for the Holidays. The stories are not startlingly original but there are worse pastiches. The Late Clara Beame by Taylor Caldwell is more of a thriller but takes place around Christmas and New Year. You may also take a look at this blog post, where the blogger Kate Jackson has ranked her favourite Christmas mysteries: crossexaminingcrime.wordpress.com/2019/12/09/kates-epic-ranking-of-christmas-mysteries/ |
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Post by Nalkarj on Dec 13, 2019 23:29:12 GMT
Gah, forgot the classics. Two great short stories:
Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” and G.K. Chesterton’s “The Flying Stars.” It’s the Chesterton story that directly references Dickens, but it’s the Doyle story that feels more Dickensian—as blogger Nick Fuller pointed out, Doyle was definitely reading A Christmas Carol. The Doyle isn’t much of a mystery, while the Chesterton is pure mystery (one of his best deceptions), but they’re both first-class stories.
One I’m not sure if I should recommend or not is Paul Halter’s The Lord of Misrule. The writing’s not good, though it’s better than most of Halter’s typical abysmal prose, but it has one of the simplest, most ingenious, most Chestertonian impossible crime solutions not written by Chesterton or Carr.
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Post by Nalkarj on Dec 21, 2019 3:41:44 GMT
Sorry, another one:
I’m rather fond of a collection called The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (2009), mostly because it has an interesting and unpredictable mix of Holmes pastiches, in that one story is a straightforward pastiche, say, while the next one has ghosts and demons and Cthulhu, and the next one is left ambiguous, etc. Good medley.
That said, like all collections it’s a mixed bag, quality-wise, and of the 28 stories only six (Stephen King’s “The Doctor’s Case,” Barbara Roden’s “The Things That Shall Come Upon Them,” Sharyn McCrumb’s “The Vale of the White Horse,” Tanith Lee’s “The Human Mystery,” and Neil Gaiman’s “A Study in Emerald”) are genuinely excellent, though several others are good. (Several of the bad ones even have good ideas at their centers but squander them. The biggest malefactor is Bradley H. Sinor’s “The Adventure of the Other Detective,” which has Watson sent over to another world where Mary Morstan is still alive, but where Professor Moriarty is the detective and Sherlock Holmes the criminal—yet does nothing with this great concept.)
Anyway, one of the excellent ones is “The Human Mystery,” and that’s a Christmas-set tale, with a grand, Hound of the Baskervilles-esque Yuletide legend to boot. Recommended.
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Post by theravenking on Dec 21, 2019 14:54:59 GMT
Sorry, another one: Anyway, one of the excellent ones is “The Human Mystery,” and that’s a Christmas-set tale, with a grand, Hound of the Baskervilles-esque Yuletide legend to boot. Recommended.
The "Human Mystery" is very good indeed, it was also included in The Big Book Of Sherlock Holmes Stories edited by Otto Penzler.
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Post by louise on Dec 22, 2019 10:39:42 GMT
Hercule Poirot's Christmas by Agatha Christie is my favourite, I reread it most Christmases.
Envious Casca by Georgette Heyer is a good one too.
Murder Under the Mistletoe by Amy Myers is an amusing period murder mystery set at Christmas 1900.
I just bought an anthology called Murder at Christmas which I haven't read yet but it looks good. It has short stories by Margery Allingham, Ellis Peters, Dorothy L. Sayers, Michael Innes, among others.
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Post by Nalkarj on Dec 25, 2019 17:51:04 GMT
And the day itself has arrived, and I have still more suggestions, two Ellery Queens.
The first one is The Finishing Stroke (1958), which is set at Christmastime 1929 and abounds in Yuletide tradition and atmosphere, with inexplicable clues and an unexpected corpse. It’s all tons of fun—until the end, when we get one of EQ’s worst solutions. Not only is it hardly clued at all, but it also has nothing to do with everything else in the book. It’s all too bad because, until that end, it’s one of EQ’s best… If you read it, I’d suggest coming up with your own solution, one that actually factors in the clues and the big surprise at the end of Part 2.
A much better Queen Christmas story is “The Dauphin’s Doll,” available in Calendar of Crime and several different anthologies. It’s possible to guess the thief and how he stole the doll, but it’s fun, well-clued, and well-paced.
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