The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries

Two years ago I purchased a copy of The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries, edited and with an introduction by Otto Penzler. It is one of those huge books– around 650 pages with two columns per page, and 60 stories. I don't really like reading large books like that, too awkward, but every year now I pull it out and read a few of the stories.

A quote from Penzler's introduction:

Mystery fiction set during the Christmas season has been with us for a long time, and it is astonishing how many authors have turned their pens and wicked thoughts to this time of year. Perhaps this is because violence seems so out of character, so inappropriate, for this time of year that it takes on extra weight. Think of how often terrible events have been recounted with the sad or angry exclamation, "and at Christmas time!"

These are the stories I read and enjoyed this year.

“Dead on Christmas Street” by John D. MacDonald

A police detective investigates a murder with his girlfriend, who just happens to be the DA's secretary, in the days leading up to Christmas. A clever and entertaining story. Not Christmassy but with descriptions of decorations on the streets, which I enjoyed.

A woman who worked in an office 17 stories up has just fallen to the pavement, into the rush of Christmas shoppers...

Some of the spectators, laden with tinsel- and evergreen-decorated packages, turned away, suppressing a nameless guilt. 

But the curious stayed on. Across the street, in the window of a department store, a vast mechanical Santa rocked back and forth, slapping a mechanical hand against a padded thigh, roaring forever, “Whawhaw ho ho ho. Whawhaw ho ho ho.” The slapping hand had worn the red plush from the padded thigh. 

The ambulance arrived... Wet snow fell into the city. And there was nothing else to see. The corner Santa, a leathery man with a pinched, blue nose, began to ring his hand bell again.

“Dead on Christmas Street” was first published in the December 20, 1952, issue of Collier's. The story is featured at The Trap of Solid Gold, Steve Scott's blog devoted to celebrating the works of John D MacDonald. The post has an illustration from the story as published in Collier's.

"A Reversible Santa Claus" by Meredith Nicholson

This was a new discovery for me, a story from 1917. The story begins...

Mr. William B. Aikins, alias "Softy" Hubbard, alias Billy The Hopper, paused for breath behind a hedge that bordered a quiet lane and peered out into the highway at a roadster whose tail light advertised its presence to his felonious gaze. It was Christmas Eve, and after a day of unseasonable warmth a slow, drizzling rain was whimsically changing to snow. 

The Hopper was blowing from two hours' hard travel over rough country. He had stumbled through woodlands, flattened himself in fence corners to avoid the eyes of curious motorists speeding homeward or flying about distributing Christmas gifts, and he was now bent upon committing himself to an inter-urban trolley line that would afford comfortable transportation for the remainder of his journey. Twenty miles, he estimated, still lay between him and his domicile.

This is a long short story, really novelette length. Billy the Hopper is a retired thief who has settled down on a chicken farm with his wife (a retired shoplifter) and another retired criminal who has expertise in the care and feeding of poultry. One night he succumbs to an ill-advised impulse, and takes a roadster parked in front of a cottage. He soon discovers that the unattended car contained a small child, a 2 year old boy. Now Billy has to figure out how to return the child to his family without going back to prison. This is a fun, old-fashioned story.

Per the preface to the story:

ALONG WITH BOOTH TARKINGTON , George Ade, and the poet James Whitcomb Riley, Meredith Nicholson was part of what was regarded as the Golden Age of literature in Indiana in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Although not an author whose works have stood the test of time well, he was a bestseller in his day whose fiction was governed by the invariable triumph of love and by insistence on the virtues of wholesome, bourgeois life, always told with good-natured humor. “A Reversible Santa Claus” was first published as a slim, illustrated book of that title (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1917).

“Death on Christmas Eve” by Stanley Ellin

This story was not my favorite but it certainly is atmospheric. It is the formidable and harsh story of a brother whose wife has died and the sister he lives with. It was first published in the January 1950 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.

Moira at Clothes in Books has also covered this story.

This year I read two stories that featured cats.

In "The Trinity Cat" by Ellis Peters, a lop-eared church cat helps a detective in his investigations.

Using the name Ellis Peters, Edith Pargeter wrote two series of mysteries, the Cadfael Mysteries set in the twelfth century and the George Felse series. This story was first published in Winter's Crimes #8 (London, Macmillan, 1976).

"The Christmas Kitten" by Ed Gorman is another long story with chapter divisions featuring characters from Gorman's series about lawyer Sam McCain and Judge Eleanor Whitney, and set in the 1950's. Each title in the series is the title of a song from that time.

The kitten is incidental to the story and does not solve the crime, but is a very nice touch. I enjoyed revisiting these characters, if only briefly, and must get back to reading the series. “The Christmas Kitten” was first published in the January 1997 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.

Last year I noted several Christmas stories I read in this book in this post.

Five Years of Blogging

Today I am celebrating the fifth anniversary of my first blog post.

In the last year I have blogged less but enjoyed it just as much as ever. I am basing this mainly on numbers of posts; my average number of posts on the blog in 2016 was 8 a month. In 2015 I posted on the average 11 posts a month. I have noticed that my posts are longer now, more verbose, even though one of my goals is to cut down on the length of the posts. But I will continue blogging as long as I enjoy writing up my thoughts on the books, along with including some background on the authors.

What do I like best about blogging?

• The community of book bloggers. It is wonderful to be able to learn from others who share my love for books and reading. 
• The process of organizing and writing down my thoughts about the books I read. 
• Reminders of authors I need to check out or get reacquainted with.
• Discovering new authors. I thought I knew a lot about older mystery novels (pre-1960's) before I started blogging, but I am constantly amazed at how much more there is to learn.

Two vintage authors that I just read about recently were Christopher Bush (at Vintage Pop Fictions) and Roy Vickers, specifically The Department of Dead Ends (at Tip the Wink).

And I will end with some lovely books covers of books I hope to read this year.

                                      Reviewed at The Thrilling Detective.

                                                  Reviewed at Clothes in Books.

                                                 Reviewed at The Dusty Bookcase.

                                      In the Spotlight at Confessions of a Mystery Novelist...

Reading in November 2016

Another wonderful month of reading with a good bit of variety. Some relatively current crime fiction, a fantasy novel, a couple of mysteries set at Christmas, and some mysteries from earlier decades.

I started out the month with a book from the fantasy genre, one of Terry Pratchett's Discworld books. I read Mort, the first book in the Death series. I am glad that I have finally started reading Pratchett's books.

I also read a very short graphic novel, RED. This graphic novel by Warren Ellis was the basis for the movie of the same title, released in 2010, starring Bruce Willis, Mary Louise Parker, and a lot of other entertaining and talented actors. When I say it was short, it was only three issues when first published, for a total of 66 pages. The book also includes character design sketches and the script and layouts for issue 1. I found these very interesting since I don't know the processes for developing a comic.



These are the crime fiction books I read in November...

A Question of Proof by Nicholas Blake
(Originally published in 1935, this book is set in a boarding school. This was the first book in the Nigel Strangeways mysteries by Nicholas Blake. Nicholas Blake was the pseudonym of Cecil Day Lewis, a poet laureate in the UK in the late 1960's into the early 1970's.)

Thou Shell of Death by Nicholas Blake
(This was the second book in the Nigel Strangeways mystery series. It is set at Christmas, and is a traditional English country house mystery.)

The Dreadful Lemon Sky by John D. MacDonald (reviewed here)

Past Tense by Margot Kinberg (reviewed here)

Dupe by Liza Cody (reviewed here)

Telling Tales by Ann Cleeves
(This is the second book in Ann Cleeves’ Vera Stanhope series, which is also now a TV series. A woman was put in prison ten years before for killing a teenage girl, the daughter of her ex-lover. Now it has been discovered that the woman was innocent, and Vera is looking into the original investigation.)

Murder Goes Mumming by Alisa Craig
(Another book set at Christmas. This one is a cozy, a humorous tale set in New Brunswick, Canada. Alisa Craig is the pseudonym of Charlotte MacLeod, used for two series set in Canada . Review coming soon.)

The Dreadful Lemon Sky: John D. MacDonald

I took advantage of the Crimes of the Century meme for November, hosted at Past Offences, to get back into reading the Travis McGee series by John D. MacDonald. This month the year chosen was 1975. The 16th book in the series, The Dreadful Lemon Sky, was published in that year.

For readers not familiar with the Travis McGee series, McGee is essentially a private detective, although he describes himself as a "salvage consultant." He has also been described as a knight errant. He only takes jobs when he needs money; the rest of the time he spends in "retirement."

This story starts when a friend shows up in the middle of the night on Travis McGee's house boat, the Busted Flush. Carrie Milligan met McGee when she was very young (18), and got married shortly thereafter. He loaned her the Busted Flush for her honeymoon. Now, six years later she is back, having divorced her husband three years earlier. She brings with her around 100,000 dollars and asks McGee to hold it for her for a few weeks. If she returns for it, he gets $10,000 for keeping the money safe for her; if she doesn't, he still keeps the $10,000, but his job is to deliver the money to her sister. After some quick checking to satisfy himself that the money is actually hers, he agrees; two weeks later she is dead. McGee takes the Busted Flush to the small town on the Florida coast where she lived and worked .... to see if he can find out what happened.

This is pretty much the standard plot of the books in the series. McGee is approached by a woman needing help. He takes a break from his retirement to provide aid. Most of the books are set in Fort Lauderdale, Florida or other coastal towns.

What makes the books so good is MacDonald's storytelling. I was rereading sections of this book after the first read through, and they are just as good the second time around. There is a quiet humor in the writing.

The characters in the books are well developed and interesting. His male characters are better than the women. The women characters, at least in this book, don't seem to have much depth and are very similar. Besides McGee and his sometimes sidekick Meyer, an economist who also lives on a boat in the harbor, in this book there is also a sleazy but very convincing politician and a very cynical policeman.

Also the setting and sense of place is very well done. I have never been to Fort Lauderdale, but I have been to Florida many times (in the sixties and the seventies). Mostly I visited the Gulf Coast so not exactly the same area and I was too young to see it in the same way he did. MacDonald was very concerned about the commercialization of the area and the damage to the environment.

The books have a good bit of social commentary and philosophy thrown in. I am sure this one of the aspects that attracted me when I first read the series, but some readers grow tired of this. In this book that aspect is not overdone.

I found a shopping center and found that they had left some giant oaks in the parking lot. This runs counter to the sworn oath of all shopping center developers. One must never deprive thy project of even one parking slot.

Does this book reflect life in the US in 1975? I would say yes. McGee attends a memorial service for Carrie. He describes some of the people at the gathering:

...I realized anew that there is a new subculture in the world. These were mostly young working people. Their work was their concession to the necessities. Their off-work identities were contra-establishment. Perhaps this was the only effective answer to all the malaise and the restlessness and the disbelief in institutionalized life, to conform for the sake of earning the bread and then to step from the job into almost as much personal freedom as the commune person.

When I read that paragraph, it took me back to my first job out of college. I worked and socialized with people like that. Amazing that he got it just right.

One of the elements of the books is that McGee usually (always?) ends up having sexual relations with at least one of the women that feature in the plot. I have read at least three reviews or analyses of this series that discuss the "sex as therapy" element in this series, so I feel I must mention it. I did not dislike that element in this book but I will admit to a bit of discomfort. In this particular case the woman involved with McGee was not so young, and she was using him as much as he was using her. McGee's attitude toward women is a lot like James Bond's, except that McGee often expounds on his attitude towards women, which may be the problem. To be clear, at least in this book, the sex is not graphic or offensive, in my opinion.

I do have an issue with the cover on my paperback edition. On the one hand it has a skull on the cover, on a hundred dollar bill. On the other hand, it shows a helicopter against a lemon yellow sky. I remember nothing about a helicopter in this story. An airplane yes, and it has a lot to do with the plot. I have even read a review that indicates a helicopter is used. I don't want to quote the passage that establishes it is a plane, not a helicopter, because it could be considered a spoiler. But still, why the helicopter on the cover?

 -----------------------------

Publisher:   Fawcett Gold Medal, 1988 (orig. publ. 1975) 
Length:       272 pages
Format:      Paperback
Series:       Travis McGee, #16 
Setting:      Florida
Genre:        Mystery
Source:      I purchased this book.

"Watch Me Kill You!" by Norbert Davis

The first card I drew for the Deal Me In Short Story Challenge this year was the 2 of Spades. Thus this was a Wild Card choice and I could pick any short story I wanted. This threw me for a loop as I was looking for more structure on that particular day, but I knew I had several books of short stories that I wanted to read in order, so I went looking for them. The book I chose was The Complete Cases of Max Latin by Norbert Davis, and the first story in that book is "Watch Me Kill You!".

Max Latin is a private detective with a difference; his office is a table in a restaurant where he spends much of his time. He presents himself as a shady character, and at the beginning of this story he has just gotten out of jail. He is approached by the husband of a very rich woman who is known as a collector of art; the wife wants some pieces of art painted by her cousin, who refuses to sell them to her. Even though this is an unusual assignment, Latin sees this as an easy route to some cash, so he takes it on. When he goes to visit the cousin, the cousin is lying on the floor, dead, in his studio. Much mayhem ensues and Latin investigates.

The Complete Cases of Max Latin consists of five stories originally published in Dime Detective magazine between July 1941 and October 1943. The book is 225 pages long and each story is 40-50 pages long, and divided into chapters. "Watch Me Kill You!" is 50 pages long (in trade paper format) and has six chapters. The book has a introduction by John D. MacDonald, written in 1988 for The Adventures of Max Latin published by Mysterious Press. The introduction alone is worth the price of the book.

Norbert Davis is known for the humor in his writing. Since humor in mysteries is not my favorite thing, I wasn't sure about his writing, but I have purchased all of the books in the Doan and Carstairs series, and I have been planning to read those for a while. This story gave me a taste, and I will be continuing with more of his works.

My list of short stories for the Deal Me In Short Story Challenge is here. Jay at Bibliophilopolis hosts the challenge.


If you want to know more about Norbert Davis or his Max Latin stories, you could start here:

• Norbert Davis at The Thrilling Detective Web Site, a piece which has links to other sources.
• Max Latin at The Thrilling Detective Web Site