"There is, at Christmas, a spirit of goodwill. It is, as you say, "the thing to do." Old quarrels are patched up, those who have disagreed consent to agree once more, even if it is only temporarily."- Hercule Poirot (Agatha Christie's Murder for Christmas, 1938)
Back in May, I reviewed Resorting
to Murder: Holiday Mysteries (2015), edited by Martin Edwards, who
is known as an award-winning crime novelist, genre-historian and the author of The
Golden Age of Murder (2015), but now Edwards is building a reputation as
the resident anthologist of the British Library
Crime Classics – compiling a rapidly growing number of themed mystery
anthologies for them.
Thus far, the stack includes Capital
Crimes: London Mysteries (2015), Murder at the Manor: Country House
Mysteries (2016) and Serpents in Eden: Countryside Crimes (2016),
but potentially the best collection of short stories is still in the pipeline: Miraculous
Mysteries: Locked Room Murders and Impossible Crimes (2017). But that
anthology won't be released for another six or seven months. So, for the
moment, I will have to make do with what has already been published, which
brings us to the subject of today's blog-post.
Crimson
Snow: Winter Mysteries (2016) is an offering of
"vintage crime stories set in winter" and a sequel, of sorts, to Silent
Nights: Christmas Mysteries (2015), which became "one of the UK's
fastest-selling crime anthologies" and this lead to the commission of a
second compendium of wintry tales – as there's "no denying that the supposed
season of goodwill" is "a time of year that lends itself to detective
fiction." Edwards succeeded in cobbling together a collection of rare,
interesting and often excellent detective stories breathing the spirit of
Yuletide. Let's take these stories down from the top.
Fergus Hume's "The Ghost’s
Touch," culled from the pages of The Dancer in Red (1906), acts as this
collection's curtain-raiser and some aspects of the plot anticipates John
Dickson Carr's other famous radio-play, "The
Devil’s Saint," which has several versions – two of them I discussed here
and here.
Hume's story is narrated by Dr. Lascelles, who relates the terrible Christmas
of 1893, when he accompanied a friend, Percy Ringan, to his ancestral home.
Percy's father accumulated wealth as a gold prospector in Australia, but his
poorer cousin, Frank, inherited the family title and estate. So their
relationship is both familial and mutually beneficial.
Frank invited both of them to spend
Christmas at the Ringan estate, Ringshaw Grange, which resembles "the
labyrinth of Daedalus" and has a cursed chamber, the Blue Room, haunted by
the ghost of Lady Joan – who reputedly touches occupants of the room "who
were foredoomed to death." As to be expected, one of the cousins decide to
sleep in the Blue Room, but Dr. Lascelles intervenes in their plans and
effectively demonstrates the mortality of the accursed ghost of the room. Not
really a rug puller of a detective story, but a good, solid example from "The
Room That Kills" category (i.e. a ghost story with a logical explanation).
The second story comes from "The King
Kong of the Thriller," Edgar
Wallace, whose predilection for lurid sensationalism and hoary dramatics
has a repellent effect on me, but the few short stories I read seem to
contradict his reputation as a writer of dated melodrama – which is certainly
true for "The Chopham Affair."
Originally, the story was published in one of
Wallace's own collections, The Woman from the East (1934), and can be
described as a crime story with a twist: one of the main characters of the tale
is an old-fashioned rogue, "Alphonse or Alphonso Riebiera," who passes
himself off as a Spaniard, but has a passport from one of those shady South
American republics. Riebiera eked out a living as a blackmailer of women of
rich husbands and turned this in "a well-organized business," but one
day, the husband of one of his victims accidentally receives a blackmail note.
As a result, the husband decides (as Sherlock Holmes would call it) to extract
some private revenge. However, this result in an unusual and hard to explain
situation: the blackmailer is found in the snow, shot through the head,
alongside the body of a car thief. How this situation came about is the twist
in the tail of the story. I liked it and should try one of his full-length
novels in the not so distant future.
Margery
Allingham's "The Man with the Sack" was first published as "The Case of the
Man with the Sack" in a 1936 issue of the illustrious Strand Magazine,
which plays a familiar tune on the theme of stolen jewels during a Christmas
house party. Reluctantly, Mr. Albert Campion accepts Lady Turrett's invitation
to come to Pharaoh's Court on Christmas Eve, because she fears one of her
guests, Ada Welkin, is in danger of being relieved from her valuables. Campion
is, however, unable to prevent the place from being burglarized, but promptly
identifies the guilty person and finds the place where this person stowed away
the loot. It's not one of the most original short stories in this anthology,
but good and competent enough for what it is.
S.C.
Roberts was a renowned publisher and a distinguished Sherlockian, who once
played a round of golf with Conan Doyle, which was enough to brag about as a
fanboy, but Roberts also wrote and published several pastiches – one of those
stories, "The Case of the Megatherium Thefts," is apparently very good.
However, the Sherlockian pastiche that's collected here is a short stage-play,
"Christmas Eve," in which a problem is brought to Holmes and Watson by Miss
Violet de Vinne. She acted as a secretary to Lady Barton, "the owner of a
very wonderful pearl necklace," but the pearls have gone missing. Holmes
immediately sees there’s a second story hidden beneath her account and cleverly
ferrets the truth out of her.
The resolution of the case tore a page
from "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle," from The Adventures of Sherlock
Holmes (1892), which also happened to be a Christmas-time story about a
lost gemstone. As a matter of fact, I think that story may very well be the
arch-type of these festive tales about stolen and/or lost stones.
One of the main reasons for jumping on
this anthology is the next novella-length story: Victor Gunn's "Death in December,"
originally published in Ironsides Sees Red (1948), which is an
impossible crime tale set in a snowbound castle during Christmas – solved by a
wonderful character in the mold of Sir Henry Merrivale, Andy Dalziel and Arthur
Bryant.
Chief Inspector Bill "Ironsides"
Cromwell, or simply "Old Iron," is a grumpy character who is dragged by his highborn
subordinate, Johnny Lister, to the ancestral seat of his family. A place as
dark and gloomy as the past, named Cloon Castle, perched on the top of desolate
mountain in the Peak District. So "Old Iron" had enough material to grumble for
the entire length of the journey, but, upon their arrival, the holiday is
slowly turning into a busman's holiday for the two. On the driveway of the
castle, they saw "an extraordinary figure," garbed in a dark cloak,
stumbling across a snowy field and vanish, but the figure failed to leave any
footprints in his wake. And this would not be the only apparently supernatural
event at the castle.
Cloon Castle has one of those haunted
rooms, known as the Death Room, but the head of family, General Lister, refuses
to tell the back-story of the room to his guests. However, this fails to dampen
the enthusiasm of the house party and one of them ends up sleeping in the
haunted room. As is pointed out in the story, these experiments usually end
with the house party finding "the occupant of the haunted room stretched out
cold and stark on the floor," but this time around the events take a
different turn: a blood-spattered corpse appears inside the room in the middle
of the night. But when everyone goes back to check, the body has vanished and
not a trace of blood is found on the floor! This cannot be tagged as a locked
room, but how the bloodstains vanished can be marked as an impossible
situation.
The subsequent investigation by "Old Iron"
was quite fun, which lead from the Death Room to "a cold, gloomy, family
crypt" and back to his bedroom where a nasty surprise was waiting, but I
have a bone to pick about the impossible situation regarding the footprints. I
do not believe the trick would leave behind a spotless field of unbroken snow
and it would be very easy to make a slipup in its execution, which would ruin
the whole effect. All in all, I liked this novella and have written Victor Gunn
down as a person of interest for the near future.
Christopher
Bush's "Murder at Christmas" was first published in 1951, in The
Illustrated London News, under the title "The Holly Bears a Berry," which
features his series-character, Ludovic Travers, who is spending
Christmas-weekend as the house guest of the Chief Constable of Worbury – which is
usually a quiet, peaceful place. However, one of the neighboring inhabitants is
a rather notorious characters and an ex-convict, named John Block Brewse, who was "the last of the line of financial swindlers." So hardly surprising when
someone strangles him to death in the nearby woods and Travers solves the case
by smashing the murderer's alibi to pieces, but I always wonder if these
alibi-tricks work when you have to manually strangle the victim. Otherwise, a
fairly good short-short detective story.
The next entry in this anthology is also a
fairly short-short story, but one that quickly became a favorite of mine, "Off
the Tiles" by Ianthe
Jerrold, who also authored the magnificent Dead
Man's Quarry (1930) and the splendid There
May Be Danger (1948). Jerrold has undergone a personal renaissance, after
all four of her mystery novels were reissued by the Dean Street Press, which were
supplemented during the 1950s with a handful of short detective stories in The
London Mystery Magazine.
This one is a great showcase of her
talent as a writer, as well as a demonstration of her cleverness, as Inspector
James Quy investigates the deadly fall of a woman from a roof onto the street
below. Was it an accident or a cleverly contrived murder? The plot that Quy
uncovers is fairly original and one that could be considered both a success as
well as an abject failure. So I really hope all of Jerrold's short stories gets
gathered in a single volume. I would love to read more from her.
Macdonald
Hastings' "Mr. Cork's Secret" was printed in the December, 1952 issue of
the monthly magazine of Lilliput magazine, which was offered as a
Christmas competition and promised a reward of 150 pounds to everyone who could
deduce the titular secret. The solution and winners were announced several
months later. Interestingly, Edwards posted the answer to the secret at the end
of the book. So you can try and challenge yourself. Plot-wise, this twist in
the tail turned this fairly ordinary crime story into one of the best and most
original Christmas stories about stolen jewelry. A genuinely clever piece that
involves bloodied corpse in a hotel room, several famous thespians, a newspaper
reporter and a well-mannered burglar. A very fun and eventually clever story.
Unfortunately, I did not care all that
much for the next pair of stories, Julian Symons' "The Santa Claus Club" and Michael
Gilbert "Deep and Crisp and Even," which is convenient excuse to skip them and
not further bloat this blog-post.
Finally, the last entry, Josephine Bell's "The Carol
Singers," was first published in Murder Under the Mistletoe (1992) and the
story ends this collection on a fairly dark, grim and sad note – even for a
collection of detective stories about bloody murder and thievery. Old Mrs.
Fairlands occupies the ground floor flat of a converted Victorian family home,
which once housed her entirely family and a domestic staff, but this became
untenable by the late 1940s. So the house was converted and the floors rented
out as apartments. The reader is also told how old age is catching up with the
poor woman, who needs a solid hour to get dressed and sometimes too tired to
make supper, which leaves her faint and thirsty, but the worst is yet to come.
Circumstances
lead her to be all alone in the large house on Christmas, which provided an
opportunity to a small group of home-invaders, pretending to be carol singers,
to overtake Mrs. Fairlands. She was tied to a chair and gagged. And there she
was left and eventually take her last, labored breathe after being completely "exhausted
by pain, hunger and cold." It's even sadder when you realize the carol
singers who did this were children! However, the ending showed Bell was not willing
to plunge the reader in an all-encompassing darkness and provided a cop-out
ending, but it remains a well-written, powerful and chilling story. In
particular the part up until her death.
So, all in all, Crimson Snow is a
nicely balanced collection of holiday-themed detective-and thriller stories,
which managed to avoid all of the usual suspects and consists almost entirely
of rarely anthologized short stories – even a couple of genuine rarities. And
that's always a plus for these kind of short story collections. I really
enjoyed breezing through all of these stories and will have to take a look at
some of these other collections. I just hope I haven't breezed through this review too fast. By the end, it was basically just banging on the keyboard.
Well, that's it for this blog-post and I'll try to lay-off the Christmas/wintry mysteries for now, because last year it actually burned me out.
