MURDER UNDER THE CHRISTMAS TREE 🎄

What a delight Murder  Under the Christmas Tree  turned out to be.  This book really was under my Christmas tree, a perfect gift  to myself. It was first published in 2016, by Profile Books.

As the title suggests, it is an anthology of ten short stories  with a festive theme. All the authors are very well known. Here is the impressive contents list.

The Dorothy Sayers contribution is the first, shortest (only seventeen pages.) and perhaps my favourite story. So very clever.  No murder, in this instance, but the disappearance of pearl necklace during a country house  Christmas party.

G.K. Chesterton’s The Invisible Man was also  wonderful, featuring the inimitable Father Brown.  The ingenious solution centres on psychology, and the human condition.

Of all the stories, the one that I found rather disappointing was A Traditional Christmas, by Val McDermid.  It even opened with a jarring note, ‘Last night, I dreamed I went to Amberley.’ What possessed McDermid to invoke Daphne Du Maurier’s  classic Rebecca I cannot imagine. Somehow the rest of the story was a bit ‘clunky’ too. However, full marks for her fascinating information about a certain aspect of nature. I had to consult Dr Google to confirm whether it’s true. And yes, it is!

The only murder where I guessed ‘whodunnit’ was the creation of New Zealand author Ngaio Marsh. The title, Death on the Air, refers to a very unpleasant fellow being dispatched by means of his Bakelite radio late one Christmas Eve. An intriguing  weapon I must say, involving  some devilishly clever manipulating of knobs. 😎

An even stranger weapon featured in Carter Dickson’s Persons or Things Unknown. An alternative title could have been The Invisible Knife. Carter Dickson was a pseudonym of  American  writer John Dickson Carr.

Source – Wikipedia.

Incidentally, Dickson Carr wrote a biography of Arthur Conan Doyle, whose story The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle involved a  plump Christmas goose.

By the way, sometimes no murder occurs, only a crime. This was so in Margery Allingham’s  The Case is Altered. The main female character in this story was repeatedly referred to as having, ‘eyes like licked brandy balls‘ , surely one of the creepiest and most distracting  similes  ever!

No spoilers, but as a keen  gardener I enjoyed the fact that in several mysteries plants played a part, including birch, lavender and festive mistletoe.

I had to search hard to find out who selected and edited the collection. It’s in very fine print; Cecily Gayford. While studying English at Oxford university Gayford wrote a thesis on detective stories of the 1930s and 40s.  Seems to me that makes her well qualified to edit Murder Under the Christmas Tree. The book is one of a number of similar collections she has produced, and I look forward to reading more.

NOTE – I FOUND THE BOOK IN THE STREET LIBRARY AT BLACKHEATH (WENTWORTH STREET) NOW I HAVE TO PUT IT BACK,

FOR A LIST OF OTHER  SEASONAL CRIME COLLECTIONS FROM CECILY GAYFORD, CLICK HERE.