Short Story Wednesday: Short Stories from Christmas Stalkings

 

The subtitle for this book of Christmas short stories is "Tales of Yuletide Murder." Based on the cover, you might think the stories are all cozy, but one reviewer of the book described the stories as mostly dark. In the small sample I have read so far, one is on the cozy side, and two are definitely darker. Christmas Stalkings was published in 1991, and all of the stories in the book appeared in print for the first time in this book.

 

"The Santa Claus Caper" by Bill Crider

Bill Crider is one of my favorite authors. I have read nine books in his Sheriff Dan Rhodes series and I plan to read all of the Dan Rhodes mysteries. Another mystery series by Crider features Carl Burns, a professor of English Literature at a small college in Texas. (Crider was the chairman of the English Department at Alvin Community College in Alvin, Texas.) 

"The Santa Claus Caper" introduced me to the characters in the Carl Burns series, including R. M. “Boss” Napier, Chief of the Pecan City, Texas, police. Carl Burns has talked Napier into playing a part in a "reader's theater" version of A Christmas Carol. In turn, Chief Napier wants Burns to go undercover as a department store Santa Claus, because the store was having high losses due to shoplifting. Neither one of them is happy playing their new role.

"Family Christmas" by Patricia Moyes

I like Patricia Moyes' mysteries and I have read all nineteen books in her Inspector Henry Tibbett series. The short story in this book does not feature her series characters.

"Family Christmas" is a clever and poignant story. Robert Runfold and his wife, Mary, live a comfortable life with lots of money. They have two married daughters, who are coming home for Christmas. Robert is curmudgeonly and suspicious. He thinks that both of his daughter's husbands would gladly kill him for the money that their wives would inherit after his death. So he has changed his will so that they will not inherit any money until both daughters are over forty. I had no idea how this story would end.

"Miss Melville Rejoices" by Evelyn E. Smith

Evelyn E. Smith is new to me. Early in her career, she wrote science fiction and fantasy, both short stories and novels. In 1986, she started a five book series featuring Miss Melville, a middle-aged assassin. The story in this book, published in 1991, was her first short story featuring Miss Melville.

This story begins on Christmas Eve, with Miss Melville breaking into the Melville Foundation for Anthropological Research, where later in the evening there would be a party in honor of the deposed dictator of Mazigaziland, the infamous Matthew Zimwi, the man for whom Time magazine had established the category of Monster of the Year. Miss Melville is planning to assassinate Matthew Zimwi during the party. The story is very complicated and I enjoyed the outcome very much. 

I will definitely be reading the first novel in the Miss Melville series, Miss Melville Regrets.

Following is a list of the authors and short stories in this book:

• Charlotte MacLeod: Counterfeit Christmas 
• Reginald Hill: The Running of the Deer 
• Elizabeth Peters: Liz Peters, PI 
• Medora Sale: Angels 
• John Malcolm: The Only True Unraveller 
• Dorothy Cannell: The January Sale Stowaway 
• Bill Crider: The Santa Claus Caper 
• Patricia Moyes: Family Christmas 
• Evelyn E. Smith: Miss Melville Rejoices 
• Eric Wright: Two in the Bush 
• Mickey Friedman: The Fabulous Nick 
• Robert Barnard: A Political Necessity 
• Margaret Maron: Fruitcake, Mercy, and Black-Eyed Peas

Six Degrees of Separation: from The Arsonist to The Indigo Necklace

The Six Degrees of Separation meme is hosted by Kate at booksaremyfavoriteandbest. The idea behind the meme is to start with a book and use common points between two books to end up with links to six other books, forming a chain. Every month she provides the title of a book as the starting point.

The starting point this month is The Arsonist by Chloe Hooper, a non-fiction book about the man who started two fires that let to a bushfire catastrophe in Australia. The book sounds very disturbing, but it is of interest to me because of the devastating wildfires we have had in California in the last year or two.



My first link is to a fiction story about arson on a smaller level, in The Dark Snow and Other Mysteries by Brendan DuBois. One short story in this book is "Fire Burning Bright", about a small town plagued by an arsonist, this time burning down houses, which causes the people in the area to become suspicious and distrustful of their neighbors.

 This leads me to another anthology of short stories, Alfred Hitchcock's Happiness is a Warm Corpse. I collect books with skulls or skeletons on the cover, and this is a great example.

Thinking about Hitchcock leads me one of my favorite films directed and produced by Hitchcock, Vertigo. That film was based on a book written by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, titled D’entre les morts (1954). The film was set in San Francisco, but the book was set in France and originally written in French.

Another novel I read that was translated from French was Seeking Whom He May Devour by Fred Vargas. This book in the Commissaire Adamsberg series is set in the French Alps. Adamsberg is based in Paris, but in the first two-thirds of this book, the story centers on a group of people residing in the French Alps who are on a quest to stop a murderer.

For the next link, I move on to the Swiss Alps... to Season of Snows and Sins (1971) by Patricia Moyes, one of my favorite authors of mysteries. The story has several narrators, starting with Jane Weston, a sculptor who has moved to a small chalet in the Swiss Alps. She invites Scotland Yard Inspector Henry Tibbett and his wife Emmy to visit at Christmas, since she knows how they love to ski. And then, of course, there is a murder.

My final book in the chain, The Indigo Necklace (1945) by Frances Crane, also features a husband and wife detecting duo. The books in the series  were set in a variety of locations. In this one, Pat and Jean Abbott are living in a rented apartment in an old house in the French Quarter of New Orleans, where Pat is stationed toward the end of World War II.

Next month (April 6, 2019), Six Degrees of Separation will begin with Ali Smith’s award-winning novel, How to be Both.

Season of Snows and Sins: Patricia Moyes

Patricia Moyes wrote a series of 19 mystery novels about Henry Tibbett, Scotland Yard Inspector, whose wife Emmy usually gets involved with an investigation in some way. I have always considered these to be police procedurals, considering that Tibbett is a policeman, but there is often very little police procedure involved. Her books are puzzle mysteries, and are usually fairly clued, but Tibbett does depend on intuition to get him headed in the right direction.

Even though this is a short book, only 217 pages, the plot covers a lot of ground. The story has several narrators, starting with Jane Weston, who has moved to a small chalet in the Swiss Alps. She is a sculptor and befriends a young woman who models for her. Her young friend, Anne-Marie, marries a local ski instructor, Robert Drivaz, and Jane helps them find a place to live. She invites Emmy and Henry Tibbett to visit at Christmas, since she knows how they love to ski.

Months later, Robert gets involved with a group of visitors who are either rich or famous and becomes infatuated with a film actress. He is murdered and everyone, including Jane, think that Anne-Marie killed her husband because she was jealous. In fact, it is Jane's evidence that convicts Anne-Marie of the crime. Emmy and Henry return for another vacation visit in September, and Henry begins to think that the conviction was a mistake.

This is a very simplified version of the setup for this book and it really tells more than I like to reveal about a book, but I could not come up with anything better that conveyed the story at all. Every summary of this book that I find uses the description that is on the back of my paperback edition, and it is full of errors.

I picked this book to read at this time because of its connection to the Christmas season, which is slim. As a confirmed fan of Henry and Emmy Tibbett, I found this to be an enjoyable read, but I would hesitate to recommend it to first time readers of the Henry Tibbett series. Henry and Emmy are less involved in this one and I would not consider it representative of the series. However, the structure of the plots varies from book to book in this series, and I consider this a plus.

For me, the best aspect of this book is the shift from one narrator to another throughout the story, from Jane Weston, to Emmy, to the rich wife of a government official, and back to Emmy. On the negative side, the characters seemed to be either very, very nice or very sleazy and self-centered. And the plot was overly complex and a bit slow.

The books in the Henry Tibbett series are often set in exotic and interesting locales. This one and the first in the series, Dead Men Don't Ski, are set in the Alps, and feature skiing. Others are set in Holland and the Caribbean.

Recent reviews of other novels by Patricia Moyes:

• Margot's Spotlight on Dead Men Don't Ski (1958) at Confessions of a Mystery Novelist
• Moira of Clothes in Books: Death on the Agenda (1962) and Murder a la Mode (1963)
• My review of Johnny Under Ground (1965) 
• Sergio at Tipping My Fedora reviews Who is Simon Warwick? (1978)

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Publisher:  Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1983. Orig. pub. 1971.
Length:     217 pages
Format:     Paperback
Series:      Henry Tibbett, #10
Setting:     Alpine village
Genre:      Mystery
Source:    Purchased at the Planned Parenthood book sale, 2014.

Johnny Under Ground: Patricia Moyes

Patricia Moyes wrote nineteen mysteries starring Inspector Henry Tibbett between 1959 and 1993. Inspector Tibbett and his wife Emmy were a well-known fictional sleuthing couple at that time, and many readers still enjoy the books. I read most of the books during that time period, and loved them all. Rereading this book was a joy.

If I remember correctly, most of the mysteries in this series do not start out as normal police investigations. Often they originate during or from some event in the Tibbett's lives.  They may be on vacation and a murder occurs, that type of thing. That is not always true, however, as in Murder a la Mode (covered here and here by Moira at Clothes in Books).

In this mystery, Johnny Under Ground, Emmy Tibbett plays a much larger part than usual. The mystery revolves around an event in her past. Emmy attends the reunion of officers, RAF and WAAF, who served at Dymfield. She was just nineteen when she was stationed there, and had a crush on one of the RAF officers, who later died tragically. After the reunion, Emmy is asked to help write a history of Dymfield. Her partner in the writing project dies, possibly a suicide but maybe not. It is assumed that someone is trying to keep a secret from the past buried. Henry, of course, is concerned for Emmy's safety and gets involved in the investigation.

This book is one of my favorite of the series because of the the focus on Britain during World War II and how the war affected peoples lives. The book was published in 1965 and looks back at a time twenty years earlier.

The review of Johnny Under Ground at In Reference to Murder gives some of Patricia Moyes' background, including her work during the war as a flight officer in the WAAF. Obviously Moyes used her experiences in writing this book. At Rue Morgue Press, there is an article with even more information about her life, written by Katherine Hall Page.

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Publisher:  Henry Holt and Co., 1987. Orig. pub. 1965.
Length:     253 pages
Format:     Paperback
Series:      Inspector Henry Tibbett, #6
Setting:     UK
Genre:      Mystery
Source:    I purchased my copy.