Merry Murder
BREEN, JON L.
Merry Murder Crime fiction for Christmas. BY JON L. BREEN The tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas has a venerable lineage, reaching back well into the Middle Ages. Christmas detective...
...Refreshingly in the current market, Hall is a pure entertainer, with no great themes or underlying seriousness...
...Christmas detective stories have a shorter history...
...As with all Queen problems, the reader is given enough clues to work out the incredibly elaborate solution, provided (as Manfred Lee once observed) the reader is a genius...
...A frequent contributor of essays on mystery fiction to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Jon L. Breen is the winner of two Edgar awards...
...During rehearsal for a village Christmas pageant, in which Cora reluctantly plays one of the seven maids-a-milking, a threatening acrostic (to be followed by several more) is substituted for the partridge in a pear tree...
...Be warned, though, that there is not nearly as much holiday trimming in the novel as may appear from the picturesque television adaptation with David Suchet as Poirot...
...But the reader has no shot at solving it, the amateur sleuth's relation with the police is absurd, and the climax is one of the sillier into-the-killer's-clutches sequences in the mystery genre...
...They set the first chapter in 1905, the year of birth of Ellery and his creators...
...Cyril Hare, pseudonym of the English barrister and judge Alfred Alexander Gordon Clark (1900-1958), was less famous and prolific than Ellery Queen or Agatha Christie, but in An English Murder (1951), he produced one of the finest snowbound Christmas mysteries, notable both for its puzzle and its portrait of Britain's changing politics and social classes at mid-twentieth century...
...Approaches vary with the authors' styles...
...Wenceslaus Bottwink"), but the novel is an under-appreciated classic of detective fiction...
...The hideously ill-assorted "family" house party, containing enough social, political, and personal conflicts for a much larger group, consists of a dying peer, his neo-Nazi son, the Labour chancellor of the exchequer, the wife of a whiz kid who wants the latter's job, a Jewish history scholar from Eastern Europe, and a titled ingenue once romantically involved with the son...
...As one of the few active practitioners of the elaborate Golden Age-style detective novel, Hall should be cherished...
...The running joke of Parnell Hall's "Puzzle Lady" mysteries, continuing with A Puzzle in a Pear Tree, is that amateur sleuth Cora Felton is neither the master puzzle-setter nor the sweet little old lady her public image suggests...
...There is some sly social satire, as when the local PTA doesn't want actors in the village's "living manger" scene to change clothes in a local church—because they don't want the Nativity associated with organized religion...
...By contrast, hardboiled private eyes and jaded big city cops live in a world of emaciated Santas, barroom wreaths, and other symbols of the grim loneliness of a mean-street Noel...
...Christmas mysteries in the classical tradition often take the favored sleuth to a deceptively cozy holiday house party, preferably snowed in, at which the family and friends gathered only pretend to be jolly—and sometimes they don't even pretend...
...The holiday content is also slight until the feelgood final chapter at the Eldridge family feast...
...Chesterton's Father Brown in "The Flying Stars" (1911), and John Mortimer's Rumpole of the Bailey in "Rumpole and the Old Familiar Faces" (in this year's Rumpole Rests His Case...
...The best of James Yaffe's intricately plotted novels about a Jewish mother detective, Mom Meets Her Maker (1990), provides a non-Christian's view of the holiday...
...Two of these are from the highly specialized sub-genre of crossword-puzzle mysteries, which dates back to Dorothy L. Say-ers's Lord Peter Wimsey short story "The Fascinating Problem of Uncle Meleager's Will" (collected in Lord Peter Views the Body, 1928...
...Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle" (1892) is an early example, but Yuletide mysteries remained relatively rare —until, in recent years, their commercial possibilities began to be exploited with a stack of new books every year...
...To make a crossword the key to the solution is a formidable challenge even in the context of formalist artifice...
...The mystery writer who has turned most often to Christmas for inspiration is Ed McBain, whose 87 th Precinct cops pull holiday duty in The Pusher (1956), Sadie When She Died (1972), and Money, Money, Money (2001...
...Though Doyle gave Sherlock Holmes only one holiday case, recent writers of Holmes parodies, imitations, and pastiches have filled two volumes with them: Holmes for the Holidays (1996) and More Holmes for the Holidays (1999...
...For the best of the Christmas mysteries, turn to the classics...
...title Murder for Christmas), in which a dying patriarch uses his Christmas gathering to announce his gleeful plans to change his will, is widely admired as one of her finest puzzles...
...Ellery Queen's The Finishing Stroke (1958) was originally intended by the authors (Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee) to be the last bow of detective Queen...
...Also present are a Scotland Yard man guarding the chancellor and one of detective fiction's most fully realized butlers since Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone appeared in 1868...
...The husband-and-wife team (Cordelia Frances Biddle and Steve Zettler) who write as Nero Blanc manage it in A Crossworder's Holiday, gathering five agreeably written and trickily plotted short stories about their sleuthing team of puzzle designer Belle Graham and her private eye husband Rosco Polycrates...
...Several of the prominent British sleuths solve cases involving traditional Christmas pantomimes: Ngaio Marsh's Roderic Alleyn in Tied Up in Tinsel (1972), G.K...
...The last and best is "A Ghost of Christmas Past," about a Cotswolds house with a history of vanishings...
...The nostalgia mystery of The Finishing Stroke, rich in period allusions, is commonplace now, but it was unusual when the book appeared...
...With the separately published short story And All Through the House: Christmas Eve at the 87th Precinct (1984), a station-house Nativity metaphor with an ironic final line to cut the sentimentality, McBain produced a Christmas novella—a cash-cow formula that has well served such bestselling crime writers as Mary Hig-gins Clark (several times), John Grish-am, William Bernhardt, and Janet Evanovich...
...Ghost (1980) uses the Christmas season to provide the only supernatural moment in McBain's long-running series...
...Murder follows among a variety of horticultural hangers-on, many with reason to loathe rival television host Bunny Bainfield, whose breasts are more notable than her knowledge of botany...
...All the elements of a classical detective story are here: a despicable murder victim, a large cast of potential suspects, an unusual weapon, even a half-baked locked-room problem...
...Gather up all of these, and you'll have plenty of good mysteries to see you through the twelve days of Christmas...
...Ann Ripley's The Christmas Garden Affair is a more typical contemporary cozy in its emphasis on specialized background and disdain for fair-play clues...
...Over the years, some long-running sleuths have followed Holmes in investigating Yuletide crime, including Nero Wolfe in Rex Stout's "Christmas Party" (1957) and Simenon's great police detective in "Mai-gret's Christmas" (1954...
...Hall has fun with hoary genre conventions, including the curare-tipped blowgun dart, the near-miss falling sandbag during a stage rehearsal, and the witness who fears talking to the amateur sleuth will mark him for murder as the Man Who Knew Too Much...
...Cozy writers are more likely than their noirish brethren to produce Yule-tide mysteries, as shown in three examples from the 2002 crop...
...and the final section in 1957, when Ellery at last solves the case that had stumped him all those years before: a Christmas house party of theatrical, artistic, and publishing people disrupted by murder and the appearance of mysterious verses based on "The Twelve Days of Christmas...
...Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot's Christmas (1938...
...Hare keeps the reader guessing about everything: Who will die, who will kill, and who will detect...
...Louise El-dridge, PBS garden show host and heroine of several earlier Ripley novels, attends the new first lady's garden party, designed to celebrate native American plants...
...the main body in 1929, the year the first Queen novel was published...
...The solution is ingenious, surprising, and perfectly fair if you follow the historical clues...
...There's not much Christmasy, apart from the snow, the cold, and the foreign scholar's name ("Dr...
Vol. 8 • December 2002 • No. 15
