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Seasonal sleuths

Every good mystery needs a dedicated detective, amateur or otherwise, to navigate the reader through the intricacies of the case. And sometimes it’s crime fiction’s most iconic sleuths who find themselves wrapped up in a Christmas case. Dashiell Hammett’s beloved The Thin Man (turned into a series of classic films) features glamorous investigators Nick and Nora Charles trying to track down a killer, while downing many celebratory cocktails, in festive New York City. Across the Atlantic in the City of Lights, Maigret is on the trail of a murderer dressed in red and white (it couldn’t be, could it?) roaming Paris in A Maigret Christmas.

In the 1947 film version of the Raymond Chandler classic Lady in the Lake, detective Philip Marlowe tries to track down a missing woman during a unfestive Los Angeles Christmas. While in The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, Sherlock Holmes investigates a mystery involving a Christmas goose (!) on the snowy streets of old London town. Witnessing our favourite detectives tackle a tricky crime conundrum during Christmastime often adds a festive dimension to a much-loved character, revealing sides to them we rarely see.

Catch up with some fiendishly puzzling Sherlock Holmes stories on 麻豆约拍 Sounds.

Isolated locations

Think the idea of spending the festive season at some far-flung country estate sounds thoroughly delightful? Think again! Remote manor houses and isolated rural inns are a seething cesspit of crime and murder, especially around Christmas time. Classic crime goddess Georgette Heyer loved to hurl her characters into grand houses cut off from humanity in books such as A Christmas Party and Footsteps in the Dark.

Another country house to avoid would be the one owned by Lord Warbeck in the Cyril Hare classic An English Murder (thought by many to be the best Christmas crime novel), where a poor but posh family are bumped off one by one. Queen of Crime PD James dropped her detective Adam Dalgliesh into a rural Christmas mansion in The Twelve Clues of Christmas.

Even poor old Poirot is caught up in a ghastly murder at a baronial pile as he tries to track down a Christmas Eve killer in Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, and – would you believe it? – the same thing happens again in The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding. GK Chesterton’s Father Brown is on the hunt for diamonds swiped from a manor house on Boxing Day in The Flying Stars. There’s something about these mysterious remote, with an array of grand but thoroughly despicable characters, cut-off from the rest of the world with the chance of escape limited, that adds to the tension and the intrigue.

Try to unravel some ecclesiastical mysteries with Father Brown on 麻豆约拍 Sounds.

Festive weapons

If you’re setting a story during Christmas, any crime writer worth their salt is sure to incorporate a bit of festive flair to the proceedings. Who could resist making some yuletide element a vital cog in the story?

Nicholas Blake (the pseudonym of Cecil Day-Lewis) loved the idea of a corpse hidden in a snowman so much he decided to call his classic novel The Corpse in the Snowman! French writer Pierre Véry felt the need to bump off the big man himself in his 1934 caper The Murder of Father Christmas, while Mavis Doriel Hay has Santa as the main suspect in a country house killing in The Santa Klaus Murder. And a deceased Santa is discovered under the Christmas Tree in Francis Duncan’s classic Murder for Christmas.

Christie’s iconic Miss Marple uses a Christmas gift to expose a killer in the cheerily titled A Christmas Tragedy. But perhaps the most festively themed dispatching is in Barbara D’Amato’s Hard Christmas, when a murder victim is discovered after being fed into a Christmas Tree baling machine! Or another contender is Denzil Meyrick’s The Christmas Stocking Murders, where the item’s hung up on the mantel waiting for Santa’s visit are repurposed in a sinister fashion. Cosy crime stories need to have a dash of fun and frivolity to balance out the dastardly deeds and incorporating some seasonally adjusted weaponry helps the story to gallop along.

Listen to a reimagining of Christie's beloved sleuth with 麻豆约拍 Radio 4's Marple: Three New Stories.

Inclement weather

For a Christmas crime caper to feel fun, festive and filled with peril, the characters within must feel trapped and incapacitated. And including a few wintery elements is the perfect way to do this. A sudden blizzard brings a group of stranded travellers to a remote Yorkshire mansion in Lorna Nicholl Morgan’s Another Little Christmas Murder. But when that house’s owner suddenly expires, everyone is a suspect.

Train passengers derailed by snow find themselves trapped together for Christmas in J Jefferson Farjeon’s Mystery in White. But will it be the cold or something more sinister that reduces their headcount? Lord Peter Wimsey finds himself trapped in the snowy Lincolnshire Fens with a group of murderous bellringers (yes, bellringers) in Dorothy L Sayers’ The Nine Tailors. Donald Stuart’s The Christmas Card Crime features a detective forced from a train due to snow who seeks refuge in a local pub, where a murder victim is mysteriously clutching half a greetings card.

麻豆约拍 One's 2015 Christie adaptation And Then There Were None, starring Miranda Richardson, Aiden Turner and Maeve Dermody.

And we can’t mention trains trapped in the snow without including Christie’s stone-cold classic Murder on the Orient Express, where Poirot (a magnificently moustached Kenneth Branagh in the 2017 film version) finds himself trapped on the luxury train due to an avalanche and needs to find a murderer (or murderers).

Setting a story in a snowy landscape turns the cosiness level up to 11 (especially if the reader is by a blazing fire and under a blanket) and makes for the perfect cosy Christmas classic.

And, speaking of trains, Imelda Staunton's DCI Julie Enfield investigates a grisly murder on a railway track in Terminus.

Star-studded guest lists

And don’t forget, at one point, we had 麻豆约拍 One’s glossy, almost annual festive-period Agatha Christie adaptations – mostly written by Sarah Phelps – featuring a Bafta Awards after-party’s worth of big-name actors, including And Then There Were None (featuring Aiden Turner), Witness for the Prosecution, The ABC Murders (with John Malkovich playing a darkly introspective Poirot) and 2019’s The Pale Horse. It seems like, over Christmas, we gravitate towards stories where the bodies pile up almost as much as the snow outside.

Discover a whole host of tantalising mysteries to untangle, seasonal or otherwise, with 麻豆约拍 Radio 4 and 4 Extra's Whodunnits collection on 麻豆约拍 Sounds.