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A SURPRISE FOR CHRISTMAS by Martin Edwards

A SURPRISE FOR CHRISTMAS

And Other Seasonal Mysteries

edited by Martin Edwards

Pub Date: Oct. 12th, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4642-1481-3
Publisher: Poisoned Pen

Edwards, who must either really love or really hate Christmas, presents yet another collection of seasonal mysteries originally published between 1893 and 1963, half of them during the 1950s.

The most serious disappointment is Catharine Louisa Pirkis’ “The Black Bag Left on a Doorstep,” the historically important but uninspired introduction of detective Loveday Brooke, which Edwards has evidently chosen to make the other 11 reprints look good. And so they do. The highlights are stories by celebrity authors tweaking their usual formulas. G.K. Chesterton’s ceremonious “The Hole in the Wall” replaces Father Brown with the lesser-known Horne Fisher. The vanishing knife in Carter Dickson’s “Persons or Things Unknown” offers a precursor to the historical mysteries he would perfect as John Dickson Carr. And the normally suave Julian Symons’ “Father Christmas Comes to Orbins” is an elaborately plotted jewel robbery that goes elaborately wrong. For the rest, Roderick Alleyn solves the mystery of an unpleasant bully electrocuted by his radio in Ngaio Marsh’s “Death on the Air”; raffish Arthur Crook rescues a student nurse and her doctor fiance when their innocent actions land them in the clutches of a gang of murderous drug dealers in Anthony Gilbert’s overlong “Give Me a Ring”; the short-shorts by E.R. Punshon, Ernest Dudley, Victor Canning, Cyril Hare, and Margery Allingham provide virtuoso lessons in how much action and atmosphere can be packed into 10 pages; and Barry Perowne’s “The Turn-Again Bell,” in which a Christmas miracle saves both a stubbornly anti-religious father who’s refused to participate in his daughter’s wedding to the rector’s son and the rector in question, ends the volume on the most Christmassy note of all.

Is the Yuletide well running dry? Only next year will tell.