Crimson Snow: Winter Mysteries (British Library Crime Classics)

This is one of the best of the British Library Crime Classics short story collections. I liked all but one selection (the Sherlock Holmes spoof). The other stories I found highly original and absorbing.There are murderous carolers, jewel thieves, and relatives bent on murder... The investigators include inspired amateurs and clever professionals. The victims are diverse, from a nasty swindler to a sweet old lady. Yuletide atmosphere abounds.One story entertained me so much that I see it as a compelling reason to buy the book. Death in December is long enough to be a novella rather than a short story, and it even has chapters. The setting is a snowbound ancestral castle full of convivial Christmas guests. The castle has a ghost and a haunted room that's been locked for a hundred years. One of the guests is a grumpy, morose, ant-social Scotland Yard man who gets to the heart of the ghostly doings.As always with these collections edited by Martin Edwards, I appreciated the informative author biographies. The majority of the writers were members of the Detection Club, the first social network for crime writers.

Christmas Season themed mysteries! What's not to like?! However, this mystery anthology has only 11 stories, which makes it meager compared to paperbound anthologies I've purchased. But some of these stories have some great writing. The "Crimson Snow" anthology is part of the British Library Crime Classics series. If you've read another of its anthologies,  Silent Nights (British Library Crime Classics) , the only author who is also collected in the Silent Night set is Margery Allingham (though with a different story).The editor, Martin Edwards, gives a nice introduction to each author, with interesting information. One of the stories, "Mr. Cork's Secret" by MacDonald Hastings, "was published in the form of a Christmas prize competition. It appeared in the December issue of the monthly magazine "Lilliput," and the solution was printed several months later after all the entries had been judged. The prize winners proved themselves to be excellent detectives, and readers of this book will have the chance to emulate their success: the solution to Hasting's conundrum appears at the end of this book."Here's an image I loved from "Mr. Cork's Secret":"The salty wind came up to meet them with an enquiring, penetrating lick."I have a soft spot for Sherlockian parodies and pastiches. S.C. Roberts offers one such for this book, "Christmas Eve". As it happens, he actually played golf once with Arthur Conan Doyle. Maybe it helped his story.All in all, a nice set of mystery short stories., 4.4 stars rounded down to 4.Happy Reader

This is my favorite of the Christmas books I ordered for myself this year. The collection contains short stories by famous British writers. While I knew many of the writers, I was delighted to find new ones I hadn't known before; I will now seek out everything they've written. The stories are set from the mid-1930s with a few wandering into the 1940s and 1950s. Every story is preceded by a brief introduction to its author written by book editor Martin Edwards. The book is one of the British Library Crime Classics. I highly recommend it and will read it again during the 2021 holidays. If you like period British mysteries, I can promise you that you will love this book.

I thought this collection had better stories than "The Christmas Card Crime." There are a few lame duds but the good ones are standouts.Ghost's Touch: A doctor is invited to a historic Elizabethan house to experience firsthand a haunted bedroom. There's not much of a mystery in this story. The narrator tells you exactly what to expect. It's not scary as a ghost story, and very dull as detective fiction.Chopham Affair: A blackmailer gets what's coming to him, but the real kicker is the identity of his murderer. A surprising twist on the usual detective theme.Man With a Sack:. A detective is called to watch over the VIP guests during a Christmas party because some of them bring a lot of ostentatious bling. A burglary occurs and one of the guest (whose father was convicted of another crime) is accused. A very enjoyable story.Christmas Eve:. This is a pastiche of S. Holmes and written in the form of a play. A woman pleads Holmes to help solve a case involving stolen pearls. The story has too much sentimental cheesiness.Death in December: This 75 page novella is the longest but also one of the best. It was written to be a page turner and to keep the reader's attention. Two detectives are invited to spend Christmas at a castle. One of the guest is dared to spend a night in the Death Chamber, and that's when events get exciting. Here, the theme of Christmas, creepy castles, and crime mix to produce a wonderful tale.Murder at Christmas: A detective is invited to spend Christmas with another colleague in a village. Together they investigate the murder of a swindler, whose body was found in the woods. This is a terribly cut and dry police case; nothing special about it.Off the Tiles: Police investigate the death of an artist who fell from the roof. It has nothing to do with Christmas nor snow. Next, please.Mr Cork's Secret: The police, a burglar, a newspaper man, and an insurance agent investigate the stolen jewels belonging to a groom-to-be, who is also a millionaire. Much of the plot involves the tracing of the missing groom and his bride (a film star). The setting is fancy enough (big hotel, yahct, etc.) I had a hard time relating to or liking any of the characters in this novella (50 pages). There is little that is attractive about the pompous detective Cork. His "Secret" is published in the book.Santa Claus Club: A very entertaining short case of magnate receiving death threats. The murderer makes an appearance during a Christmas dinner where the guests dress as Father Christmases.Deep, Crisp, Even: Policeman trails a suspicious new resident in his neighborhood. This should have been included in the Long Arm of the Law. It's a plain, unfulfilling dud.Carol Singers: A very long (40 pages) and depressing case of an elderly women killed on Christmas Eve and the lengthy investigation of the crime.

Good read.

Die Bandbreite der Fälle, die verschiedenen "Detektive", die Qualität des Ganzen ist einfach unglaublich.Lohnt sich sehr, in Häppchen oder im Ganzen! 😉

This selection of stories is nicely varied and is better for the fact that there are no old familiar favourites. There is also the bonus that there is no Reggie Fortune story! The stories are discussed individually below. I have also included relevant bibliographical information in cases where I have been able to find it.‘The Ghost’s Touch’ by Fergus Hume is a straightforward, unoriginal, entirely predictable, and so not very mysterious mystery. The reader will be ahead of the story all the way through. But, for some reason I cannot quite describe, none of this matters. It is competently told and the familiarity of it all provides a satisfying and strangely relaxing and comforting bedtime read. It is from The Dancer in Red and Other Stories (1906).‘The Chopham Affair’ is an above-average Edgar Wallace story. An imaginative plot and good pacing makes it easy to overlook the elements of casual execution and the omissions which, although present, are less pronounced here than in many Wallace stories. The story was first published in The Strand Magazine in December 1930 as ‘The Chobham Affair’. It was reprinted as ‘A Christmas Present for His Wife’ in Physical Culture in Jan 1931, and then collected as ‘The Chopham Affair’ in The Woman from the East (1934). The opening of the story was modified for publication in The Woman from the East, and this is the version given here. I do not think the change is an improvement. ‘The Case of the Man with the Sack’, by Margery Allingham, is a Campion story that is readable but relies heavily on co-incidence and the clues are so obviously presented that no reader could fail to solve the puzzle in all its detail ahead of time. Like many Allingham short stories it lacks suspense and surprise. Additionally, readers must bear the chestnuts of arriviste American bounders, and not overly bright but salt of the earth English gentry. The story originally appeared in the Strand Magazine in 1936. There is a later shortened version titled ‘The Man with the Sack’. The longer version is produced here but, for some reason, has been given the title of the shorter one.‘Christmas Eve’ by SC Roberts is a Holmes pastiche in the form of a (very) short play. It has an apposite cheery Christmassy good will to all men touch. Roberts was a noted early ‘Sherlockian’. (He also had more substantial achievements to his name.) This was originally privately published in 1936, and it should probably have been left at that. It is well enough done, but best regarded as a pleasantry among friends. Even as early as 1936 there were far too many Holmes pastiches.‘Death in December’ is by Victor Gunn. This is the pseudonym used by Edwy Searles Brooks for his books that featured the Scotland Yard detective Bill ‘Ironsides’ Cromwell. The story is one of the three stories that make up Ironsides Sees Red, published in 1943. It is the longest story in this BLCC anthology, and also the weakest. While Gunn attempts to make a character out of Cromwell he is over-drawn. There is the germ of a good, albeit well-worn, plot, but Gunn was a hack writer who favoured quantity over quantity and there is much padding and a lack of attention to detail that amounts to more than mere carelessness. For instance, there is no explanation of how the murderer obtained his duplicate keys. Probably this is because Gunn simply could not be bothered to invent one. There is also writing of the following order: ‘For no matter how much this figure resembled a normal man, his soul was that of a demon from hell’. The reader should compare this story with the one by Fergus Hume, with which it shares some common features. ‘Murder at Christmas’ by Christopher Bush features his series detective Ludovic Travers, who appears in about 60 odd books dating from 1926 to 1968. However, I have not been able to locate any bibliographic information about this particular story. It is bland and unoriginal, best described as a stocking filler.‘Off the Tiles’ by Ianthe Jerrold is a very short, tightly constructed whodunit. An excellent example of what it is. It first appeared in the London Mystery Magazine, Feb/Mar 1952.‘Mr Cork’s Secret’ by Macdonald Hastings was published in Lillput in its Dec 1952/Jan 1953 issue. The initial humour is not sustained, and the story goes more or less continuously downhill from that point. The fraud is very unrealistic in its detail, and one needs to look very hard the other way to ignore this fact. The climax is pure hokum. At the end of the story Mr Cork refuses to answer a(n unspecified) question from journalists. Readers were given a challenge to identity the question and its answer and a prize was offered for the best answer. This adds some interest, although the challenge is not too demanding. The solution is provided at the end of the anthology.‘The Santa Claus Club’ by Julian Symons is a who and howdunit, rescued from the mundane by its setting. The choice of poison is not very practical, but that is something of a quibble. The story was first published in the magazine Suspense in Dec 1960 and then collected in Francis Quarles Investigates (1965).‘Deep and Crisp and Even’ by Michael Gilbert first appeared in Argosy (Jan 1958). It is a slight but very amusing tale.‘The Carol Singers’ by Josephine Bell was published in John Creasey’s Crime Collection 1979 (1979) (and appears in several later anthologies also) but it presumably dates from earlier. It is not without faults. The crime is unlikely, there are loose ends left unexplained, and the ending tends to farce. But it is genuinely poignant. Taken overall it also has a naturalistic tone that sets it a long way apart from the other stories in the collection. It is an odd but effective choice to finish with.

Parfait pour les périodes festives, ce livre nous fait découvrir les écrivains de 'l'age d'or du crime'. En anglais bien sûr...

Twelve crime stories from masters of the genre are collected together in this book. Some authors represented here will be well known to readers of crime fiction, though some authors may be unfamiliar. All the stories are set in and around the Christmas season.The story which has remained in my mind after I finished the book is The Carol Singers by Josephine Bell which involves a particularly unpleasant murder in circumstances which could easily have happened in the twenty first century.The other story which sent a frisson down my spine is the first one in the collection called The Ghost's Touch by Fergus Hume - an author I hadn't heard of before.If you're looking for a collection of crime stories to read after Christmas lunch then this would be ideal. All the stories are well written and have stood the test of time. I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley for review.

Some of the stories haven't aged so well - and some of the characters are clichés - but that's always an issue in a short story where there's no room for character development. As to the stories that didn't age well... only to be expected as they go back a 100 years or so and the values of authors were different then. That all said the collection was an enjoyable, undemanding read - perfect post-lunch/late night pre-sleep reading. I'll definitely be going through more British Library classics.