Christmas 2022: A Christmas in mystery novels

In Agatha Christie’s novella The Adventure Of The Christmas Pudding, a minor work by the prolific queen of crime, Hercule Poirot is reluctantly dragged to a sprawling country manor in the depths of winter to experience a “real English Christmas” — with “all the family gathered round, the children and their stockings, the Christmas tree, the turkey and plum pudding, the crackers, the snowman outside the window”. Christie herself didn’t take it too seriously; in the foreword to the short story collection in which it first appeared in 1960, she writes, “The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding is an indulgence of my own, since it recalls to me, very pleasurably, the Christmases of my youth.” It is not the only Poirot novel set around the holidays — in Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, the detective is stuck in a very different kind of household, where a cantankerous old millionaire gathers his not-very-loving family together, introducing some strangers into the mix—a long-lost brother and niece, a son of an old friend, and Hercule Poirot. Like special Christmas and Thanksgiving episodes on beloved TV shows, it seems writers from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, or even earlier, couldn’t resist setting stories around the holiday season—Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story, The Adventure Of The Blue Carbuncle, published in 1892, has Holmes and Watson going on a literal wild-goose chase as they follow in the footsteps of a man who lost a goose he was taking home for Christmas dinner. In the 2015 short story collection Silent Nights: Christmas Stories, crime fiction writer Martin Edwards compiled several Golden Age stories set around Christmas, from Conan Doyle’s to stories by G. K. Chesterton, Dorothy L. Sayers and Ethel Lina White to Marjorie Bowen and Edmund Crispin.