Christmas murder stories

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Adam Dalgliesh, Agatha Christie, Camden Town, Christmas, country house murder, Hercule Poirot, P D James, Suffolk, whodunits

Each year I try to write a Christmas short story, usually with a murder in it. With varying success. I find I have contradictory emotions on just having finished The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories by the great PD James. On the one hand I realise that what I produce comes nowhere near the quality of these stories. On the other, I’m spurred to greater effort.

These four stories aren’t festive tales.  And at the same time they are so atmospheric. PD teases us about what we’re reading: in one she says that the butler and his wife, the cook, are “indispensable small-part characters in any country-house murder”; and in another Adam Dalgliesh is flagged down on a country road on Christmas Eve, when “… his first thought was that he had somehow become involved in one of those Christmas short stories written to provide a seasonal frisson for the readers on an upmarket weekly magazine.”

The Mistletoe Murder (1995) is set in wartime, at a Christmas house-party in a practically empty country house. The period is well evoked, as is a pervading sadness. A gruesome killing takes place and there are very few suspects. The clues are there for us, but I didn’t manage to work it out. The ending was beautifully unexpected. A story told with real atmosphere.

A Very Commonplace Murder (1969) is a sordid story set in Camden Town, involving a voyeur who spies on lovers in a house opposite his place of work. The scene of adultery becomes a scene of murder.

The Boxdale Inheritance (1979) is an Adam Dalgliesh story.   He is asked by an elderly Canon (his godfather) to investigate a murder that happened in 1902. An inheritance depends on it. That ancient crime took place in another gloomy large house, with a family assembled for Christmas, a family riven (as is de rigueur in such a setting) by jealousy and greed. Unbreakable alibis abound. The principal clue to the solution is presented to the reader but in such a way that I sailed straight past it.

The Twelve Clues of Christmas (1996) also features Adam Dalgliesh. One Christmas Eve he finds himself at an unwelcoming Harkerville Hall, deep in Suffolk, faced with a bizarre apparent suicide. Again, members of a divided family are in attendance. Our hero solves the mystery by spotting the twelve clues of the title.

He concludes that story by observing, ”My dear Aunt Jane, I don’t think I’ll ever have another case like it. It was pure Agatha Christie.’” You’re too modest, Lady James.

Talking of Agatha Christie – one of the few whodunits I’ve read a second time is Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, which I reread in order to see where the clues to the solution were. And yes, the main clue is there: as clear as day when you know its significance, but when read the first time it’s hidden in plain sight as just a piece of description. Similar to that in The Boxdale Inheritance.

So: if at this early stage you’re looking for a seasonal stocking-filler for a whodunit-lover, The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories would fit the bill. And if you’re yourself a writer of Christmas short stories, here’s a standard to aim for!

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The British Library’s Crime Classics continue to delight

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Belsize Park, British Library, Christmas, College bursars, Cornish coast, J Jefferson Farjeon, John Bude, John Rowland, Kent, London Underground, Mavis Doriel Hay, Oxford, River Cherwell, Sussex Downs, whodunits

Another hurrah for the British Library Crime Classics series!  It reissues whodunits from the Golden Age by authors who have dropped from general sight but who still can give much pleasure.

I found Mystery in White – A Christmas Crime Story, by J Jefferson Farjeon (1937), a most atmospheric piece.   A group of strangers are trapped by heavy snow on Christmas Eve in a country house, which mysteriously has fires burning and food ready, but no-one is home … Then murder is done. I could almost feel the cold, see the snow on the ground outside. A great gift for Christmas for an aficionado of the genre.

The Sussex Downs Murder (1936) is set north of Worthing, in real Sussex countryside, based on the village of Washington near Chanctonbury Ring. Written by John Bude. The Rother brothers run a quarry. Soon after John Rother’s disappearance bones turn up in the quarry, and then in loads of lime sent to local customers. The plot includes delights such as a mysterious runner in a broad-brimmed hat, an anomaly in the amount of petrol in an abandoned car, a false telegram sent to lure one of the protagonists away, etc. Superintendent Meredith is the sleuth on the case.

Death on the Cherwell by Mavis Doriel Hay (1935) is in the sub-genre of Oxbridge murders.   A group of students at the all-female Persephone College in Oxford meet one wintry afternoon on top of the boathouse to form a secret society dedicated to the cursing of the unpopular College bursar: and what should float down the River Cherwell, right past their meeting place, but a canoe containing the said bursar’s corpse ….   Here the traditional detective sent from Scotland Yard is Inspector Braydon. The cast of suspects includes exotic types such as Draga Czernak, a Montenegrin student at Persephone who feels insulted by the bursar; Ezekiel Lond, a misogynist old man who lives in a ramshackle house next to Persephone, and who much resents the sale by his father of the land on which the College stands; and James Lidgett, a farmer-cum-builder who wishes to develop land next to Persephone. Great stuff. For once, I guessed the villain early on.

Those are the three in the series I’ve read so far. Three pleasures still to come are:

Calamity in Kent (1950), by John Rowland, in which a corpse is found locked inside the carriage of a cliff railway at the seaside resort of Broadgate – given me by a ninevoices friend who knew of my liking for this stuff (thanks, Val).

Murder Underground (1934), by Mavis Doriel Hay (she of the Cherwell): the rich but unpopular Miss Pongleton is killed on the stairs of Belsize Park tube station.  I’ve given this to my Londoner daughter as a present. She commutes to work on the Metropolitan Line but as Belsize Park is on the Northern Line she might not hold it against me. I hope she’ll lend it back to me to read in due course.

The Cornish Coast Murder (1935), by John Bude (he of the Sussex Downs): a local magistrate is found shot dead in the house of the local vicar (not in his library, surely?). Looking for something else, I found this in a place my dear wife might be using for storing this year’s Christmas presents, so I have high hopes for Christmas morning! I must put it back secretly.

Thanks, BL. Go to http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/publishing/crime-classics-booklet.pdf for the complete list.

Killing your darlings

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BBC Radio 4, Poisons, whodunits

Crime writers beware … Especially if you’re half of a whodunit-writing duo, appearing at a literary festival, and you’ve just killed off your successful sleuth, famous for his knowledge of poisons. Let last night’s short story on Radio 4 in their ‘The Crime Writer at the Festival’ series be a warning. ‘A Marriage of Inconvenience’, 14 Minutes, available on I-Player at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07m4v8n for the next 29 days.

‘The Shape of Water’

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Andrea Camilleri, Inspector Montalbano, Lunch, Poirot, Sicily, Venice, whodunits

Our creative writing teacher would have not have allowed us to interrupt the narrative simply to describe the meal our hero was sitting down to enjoy. No, no, I hear, you’re breaking the flow, this isn’t relevant to the plot, you’ll lose your reader.

I’ve just read my first Inspector Montalbano story. I’d seen a few episodes on TV and thought I’d try one of the books. And, sure enough, just as on TV he goes to his favourite restaurant and discusses the menu with his host, here we also break for lunch. And it’s great. We are, after all, in Italy. Lunch is important. A few years ago on an anniversary trip to Venice my wife and I had foolishly allowed ourselves to be transported to the glass island of Murano; we were fearful of how we could possibly escape the inevitable hard sell at the end of the tour without too much damage to our bank balance, but to our relief we were spared because it was LUNCHTIME ON SUNDAY. All the hard sellers just disappeared, and we slipped away unnoticed.

So eat on, Salvo. The nearest I can think of a parallel in English whodunits would be Poirot stopping his ratiocination to lovingly prepare a meal for Captain Hastings or Inspector Japp.

The Shape of Water, by Andrea Camilleri (translated by Stephen Sartarelli) is, as I’ve said, my first Montalbano. A complex and occasionally comic Sicilian whodunit. It wasn’t possible for me to work out the solution – we get the clues at the same time as the good Salvo himself (and sometimes afterwards). It was a quick read – with generous spacing on the page, and lots of dialogue. As well as lunch we get glimpses of Sicily, and a picture of corruption in local government and of the bureaucratic confusion of the various Italian law enforcement agencies. There are some helpful notes at the end explaining especially Sicilian and Italian references.

Silvio Luparello, a well-regarded engineer and local bigwig, is found dead of a heart attack in his car in the Pasture, a squalid area known for prostitution. Our hero smells a rat: Luparello had just three days before become Provincial Secretary, leader of the Council, and after years of careful politicking to achieve that dizzy (and profitable) height would not have risked his reputation thus. Pressure to close the case from the great and the good (including the local Bishop) only encourage Montalbano to continue his investigation.

There’s a complex cast of characters, including rubbish collectors, Mafiosi, journalists, various beautiful women, and other leading politicians.  One scene I especially enjoyed takes place in an abandoned chemical factory, both for the description of the place and for the comic action that takes place there. As the blurb says, “Picking his way through a labyrinth of high-comedy corruption, delicious meals, vendetta firepower, and carefully planted false clues, Montalbano can be relied on, whatever the cost, to get to the heart of the matter.”

A good read. I’ll read others. First published in 1994. English translation published by Picador.

Buon appetito!

‘Murder for Christmas’

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Christmas, country house murder, Francis Duncan, Mordecai Tremaine, Poirot, snow, whodunits

If you are so well-organised that you buy presents now for next Christmas, and there’s an aficionado of whodunits in your family, then how about Murder for Christmas, by Francis Duncan?

My daughter bought this for me this year and I’m very glad she did.   A snowbound country mansion; a mixed assortment of guests (with dark secrets) invited to spend Christmas in traditional manner by the genial owner of the house; mysterious footprints in the snow; a malevolent stranger standing outside the gate; and yes, the house has a secret passage! Then, Father Christmas is found murdered at the foot of the Christmas tree on Christmas Eve. What could be better?

Written in 1949, it features the amateur sleuth Mordecai Tremaine, a retired tobacconist who likes romance novels. (Why not? Why should a love of opera or of playing the violin be superior?)  Just like Poirot in Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, he has been invited to join the Christmas house party (by the host’s secretary) because it is feared that something nasty is afoot. The guests include star-crossed lovers, a self-important politician, an irascible alcoholic, an angry scientist who dislikes Christmas, two femmes fatales, an alarmed niece, and an apparently nondescript married couple.

The clues are there, and theoretically the reader could work out the solution before Mordecai explains it. That clever reader would have to exert some powers of imagination, but I think it could be done. I didn’t manage it.

Francis Duncan wrote over 20 crime novels between 1937 and 1959.  This is the first one I’ve read.

It’s published in the Vintage Murder Mysteries series. ISBN 978-1-784-70345-5 RRP £8-99

‘And Then There Were None’

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Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None, BBC TV, whodunits

I was in the happy position over Christmas, watching the amazing And Then There Were None on BBC TV, to be able to compare stage and TV versions of this classic Christie story. A group of ten strangers (each with a deadly and guilty secret in their past) find themselves cut off on an island, invited by the mysterious and apparently absent Mr U N Owen; they are then serially murdered, in the same sequence as in the nursery rhyme Ten Little Soldier Boys.

A group of us saw the Agatha Christie Theatre Company do this at Tunbridge Wells’ Assembly Hall in October, as part of their ten-months-long nationwide tour. (How well they must have known their words by the end!)   The cast included some names familiar to those of us of, er, more mature years: Paul Nicholas (star of the 1980s sitcom Just Good Friends), Mark Wynter (‘60s pop star, with hits such as Venus in Blue Jeans), and Deborah Grant (John Nettles’ ex-wife way back in Bergerac), to name but three.

The stage version gave us atmosphere and a storm, and the sense of being trapped. Unlike a film it couldn’t show us close-ups of bodies on jagged rocks, or transport us in momentary flashback to the Western Front or the drowning of a boy. But it did have the excitement of live theatre. Our group had a happy outing; I couldn’t remember whodunit, and the ending surprised me just as it had when I’d seen a film version years before. (This may have been the 1974 one with Richard Attenborough, Oliver Reed, Elke Sommer et al – this story does seem to appeal to all-star casts).

One of the motifs of the story is that there is on display in the house a group of ten toy soldiers. After each death the remaining characters discover that one of these has disappeared. That is easily effected in a film, but how did it happen on stage? In the interval I asked a fellow member of the audience, and he told me he’d seen one of the actors (one who was killed shortly afterwards) surreptitiously put one in his pocket. Maybe whichever cast member was nearest the toys at the time had the job of secreting one.

In our family we’re still enthusing about the TV version, shown on Boxing Day and the two successive nights in one-hour chunks. Wow! The atmosphere, the tension, the menace – and the absence of the semi-humorous tone you often get in Christie films – more, more! One by one the cast are killed, and they know it and can see it coming, and they fear each other. No supersleuth is there to explain the complexities of what is happening and to unmask the villain.  They just get killed, all ten …

I can see that some folk will have found too long the ominous pauses, but not us. To see Toby Stephens, Charles Dance, Sam Neill, Miranda Richardson and the rest put on their turns was just right for the dark evenings after Christmas when the festive supplies of food and drink need to be finished off.   I can’t see it myself, but the female half of our viewership were also much taken with Aidan Turner’s torso. Once displayed, why it then had to reappear quite so often I don’t know.   Yes, you guessed it – this was the role Oliver Reed played in the 1974 film: I can’t remember whether he kept showing us his chest.

Knowing who did it didn’t spoil my pleasure – indeed, it was fascinating to see the story unfold with that knowledge. What was difficult was not letting anything slip that would give the game away to my fellow viewers. Reader, I managed it.

The Twittersphere raved about the production – and the aforesaid torso was the detail most mentioned in that raving.

My favourite tweet was “They’ve really upped the stakes in the latest series of Big Brother.”

I don’t know why the BBC changed the skeleton in the policeman’s cupboard. In the play (and, I think, the original book) he has been bribed and has committed perjury, resulting in an innocent man being hanged. On TV he has instead kicked a young gay man to death in a police cell. One can only speculate why this change was made. 

Sometime I must read the novel to see how the Queen of Crime herself imagined the story. And to find out how it was that Mr U N Owen came to know all these terrible secrets.

I’ve heard it muttered somewhere that next year we may get Witness for the Prosecution (which I also saw the Agatha Christie Theatre Company do this at the Assembly Hall a few years ago). Bring it on!

 

Stay away from Oxford

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British Library, Death on the Cherwell, Endeavour, Lewis, Morse, Oxford, whodunits, Zuleika Dobson

The arrival in my Christmas stocking of Death on the Cherwell has prompted me to reflect on what a dangerous place Oxford is if you are a fictional character.   Death on the Cherwell is by Mavis Doriel Hay, was first published in 1935, and is in the wonderful British Library Crime Classics series. It looks a cracker (groan …): the body of the Bursar of Persephone College is found floating on the eponymous river by member of an undergraduate secret society ….

Were Oxford not such a perennial nest of ingenious murderers Messrs Morse and Lewis would have had to seek employment elsewhere (possibly Midsomer).

In my collection I see I also have:

• Dorothy L Sayers’ Gaudy Night (of course, what a classic – also first published in 1935; though I do think that Agatha Christie would have told the story in half the length);
• When Scholars Fall, by my former work colleague Timothy Robinson (1961);
• Death at the President’s Lodging by Michael Innes (1936); and, still to be read,
• Landscape with Dead Dons by the broadcaster Robert Robinson (1956).

My favourite fiction read in 2015 was Max Beerbohm’s preposterous Zuleika Dobson (1911) which, while not a whodunit, does involve mass violent death in Oxford on a scale that dwarfs all the corpses in Endeavour, Morse and Lewis put together. (I was fortunate enough to read an edition with the author’s own illustrations, which fit the story so well.)

You will know of others?