Stocking killers — murder mysteries to add a fright to your festivities
There’s nothing more suited to Christmas than a good old-fashioned murder story — especially if it’s set in winter, writes Eilis O’Hanlon
FOR the Victorians, Christmas was made for ghost stories. The dark time of the year brought out all manner of spirits, the festive ghosts in Charles Dickens’s Christmas Carol being the most celebrated. These days, crime seems to have replaced horror as the genre most associated with Christmas, and since the festive season is a time for tradition, it’s classic mysteries from the Golden Age of crime fiction which fly off the shelves.
The phenomenon was first noted in 2014, when the splendidly named J Jefferson Farjeon’s Mystery In White was reported to be selling “in astonishing numbers”. The tale of a group of passengers on a snowbound train who take refuge in a nearby country house, where they start dying one by one — as all guests at a country house party should — was perfect winter fare. Since then publishers have sought to repeat that success with similar titles, which is why this year they’ve repackaged Gladys Mitchell’s Dead Men’s Morris, first published in 1936, as Death Comes At Christmas (Vintage, €7.55).
“A jolly good murder would make Christmas jolly well worthwhile,” observes the deliciously caustic Mrs Bradley’s great-nephew when she comes to stay, and sure enough that’s what happens. An elderly solicitor is found dead on Christmas Eve after going out to defy a local ghost for a bet. A heart attack, everyone thinks. Then another victim is found gored to death by boars.
Never let it be said that Mitchell was not original in her methods of despatching victims.
Mary Kelly’s The Christmas Egg, (British Library Publishing, €6.99), originally from 1958, was the last of three stories featuring Detective Chief Inspector Brett Nightingale, and is described in the introduction as “an unconventional Christmas crime novel by an unconventional writer”.
Kelly was certainly that. She lived until 2017 but never published another novel after 1974, and is largely unknown these days. This one begins with plenty of festive atmosphere in a down-at-heel north London neighbour- hood, where an elderly Russian princess has died after being robbed of her jewels. It’s a satisfyingly brisk read, and the set-pieces are vividly and cleverly done.
The appeal of snowbound mysteries has definitely been boosted by the rise of Nordic noir. Ever since Miss Smilla’s Feeling For Snow ,by Peter Hoeg in 1992, half the books on the shelves at this time of year seem to feature covers depicting wintry Scandinavian landscapes, though the underlying cosiness of the classic mystery is rarely in evidence within.
That’s certainly true of Helene Tursten’s Winter Grave (Soho Press,
€24.34), which finds Swedish Detective Inspector Embla Nystrom investigating the disappearance of two young girls, and the death of a policeman, in a small town on the border with Norway.
She’s haunted by the memory of her friend, who also vanished as a child. Could the two cases be linked? Embla’s spikiness and Tursten’s no-nonsense storytelling make an irresistible combination, and the Scandinavian setting is evocatively described.
The Snow Killer (Boldwood Books, €12.83) brings some of that gritty mood to the bleak east of England,
and begins with Detective Inspector
John Barton welcoming the forecast of a snowstorm, because “crime levels plummeted when it froze, and his job would get easier”. Naturally, things don’t quite work out that way. It’s the first of a new series by Ross Greenwood, and boasts a simple but intriguing premise. Every time it snows, someone dies, and each of the victims has received the same note before their death: “Fear the north wind, because no one will hear you scream.” The murderer gets to tell his side of the story too, and he’s not wholly unsympathetic, for a psychopath.
Asked to name one modern thriller set in the snow, Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park would be many reader’s immediate choice. That novel’s hero, Arkady Renko, has gone on to anchor nine books in total, the latest of which is The Siberian Dilemma (Simon & Schuster, €12.70), which finds Renko heading to the bitterly chilly north-east of Russia in search of a missing journalist who also happens to be his lover.
The author will probably never better that first iconic story, and it’s not entirely clear how old our hero is these days, having survived the Soviet era to his present, equally uneasy state under Vladimir Putin and the oligarchs, but it’s a compelling evocation of a country that remains climatically and politically icy.
Whether that’s particularly in keeping with the Christmas ambience is another matter, which is why it’s probably still best to stick to the Golden Age; and if there’s not much time to devote to reading among other duties, then what better solution than Murder At Christmas (Profile Books, €12.60). As she has for the past few years, publisher Cecily Gayford gathers 10 short stories from classic mystery writers, including Margery Allingham and Ethel Lina White, the latter best known for The Lady Vanishes. Think of them as the literary equivalent of mince pies to treat oneself to when non-ghostly spirits start to sag.