Christmas creeps ever-closer, and every year I promise myself I’ll read and review some festive mysteries…then I forget and review them in springtime instead. But The Christmas Appeal (2023) by Janice Hallett…that’s positively screaming for a December review. So let’s look at it in November.

Hallett is, I imagine, an increasingly familiar name to readers of crime fiction, having penned three very clever novels which play with the presentation of information in key ways — emails, text messages, transcripts of voice recordings, fragments of TV scripts, Hallett has used them all, and shown a remarkable sense of acuity in how to obfuscate while doing so. As no particular fan of modern crime fiction, I’d go so far as to call myself a big fan of her work to date.

This novella, then, is a sequel to her debut, The Appeal (2021), and follows the essential same core idea: an amateur dramatics group are caught up, alongside plenty of petty politics and backbiting, in a murder investigation as they try to put on a play — here a festive fundraiser in the form of Jack and the Beanstalk. The story is told through the emails, WhatsApp messages, voice messages, and texts exchanged by members of the Fairway Players over the period in question, as Hallett demonstrates her not inconsiderable skill in making the people involved at once very real and human, whose characters come across trenchantly in their communiqués.

It opens gloriously, with a smug middle-class round-robin email from the magnificently awful Celia Halliday, deposed chair of the Fairway Players, clearly seething at what she sees as her demotion.

Spring saw the first production this year by The Fairway Players. Current chair Sarah-Jane MacDonald, who insisted on retaining her post despite giving birth to baby Sammy last year, chose the so-called “comedy” An Evening with Gary Lineker by Arthur Smith and Chris England. Kevin MacDonald directed and Sarah-Jane produced. Despite a few last-minute cast changes that saw the part of Gary Lineker played by sixty-seven-year-old Joyce Walford, the play was surprisingly watchable.

Plenty of sniping will follow, with Celia keen to undermine the efforts of Kevin and Sarah-Jane MacDonald, the new co-chairs, as everyone is rallied, new members sought (though only from certain of the new estates that have sprung up in recent years…), and the group gear up for the pantomime to help raise money to repair the church roof. A section of wall is removed to allow for the use of a gargantuan prop beanstalk Sarah-Jane considers the crowning glory of the show (“Those of us who saw the Mendham Players stage the same production last year will remember they wrapped green tinsel around a stepladder and you could clearly see their Jack step off it onto a stack of pallets.”) and tensions ebb and flow as the events of previous years are hinted at but never openly discussed.

The first half of The Christmas Appeal is wonderfully funny, with a positive plethora of great lines which both get across the people involved and feel surprisingly organic. Tensions between parents and children, and the way we lie to each other in little ways to make life easier, are explored lightly, as are the different faces people wear: see the craven Emma emailing both Celia and Sarah-Jane to tell them each how right they are and how wrong the other is. The politics of such an undertaking feel acutely observed here, too, not least because there are fewer characters to keep track of and so each new introduction feels as if it’s adding something meaningful to the edifice.

Some of what unfolds is pure middle class farce — the purchasing of £1900 worth of sweets, and the bags in which they are to be handed to the children on the night, say — but in other regards Hallett’s targets are less clear-cut and play both sides well: see the email from Victoria Mayhew, interested in the group but full of the sort of awkward queries which have sprung up as a result of the current cultural climate…

1. Is the group committed to recycling, with the aim of net-zero emissions?
2. Is the environment gender-neutral?
3. Is there a trigger-warning for language, characters, or ideology?

And some of the jokes work because of their sheer simplicity: the character names, say (“In your absence, you have been cast in our pantomime as Buxom Betty and Mr. Ugly the Village Idiot. Apologies for the names; this panto was written in the 1970s…”) — honestly, that made me smile every time. I’d very happily read an entire book of this sort of thing, and it’s almost a shame when a dead body appear mid-performance and everything begins to take on more sinister implications. Why does new member Dustin look so familiar? What of the rumours that a convicted murderer is living in the town? The plot, it acquires the thickness.

Given the lesser space available this time around, it will surprise no-one that the dark arts of misdirection are not deployed as keenly as in our first visit with these characters, but the mystery is fun and the solution an enjoyable, low-key payoff that speaks of plenty of sadness as well as some canny tinkering. You’ll not be able to solve it in advance, and the late introduction of the key piece of evidence rings a little false, so don’t come to this for the mystery — do, however, enjoy the late reappearance of Hallett’s best creation, who casts new light on a few throwaway moments in a way that is so effortless it’s worth reading the book for.

Best enjoyed if you’ve read The Appeal, The Christmas Appeal isn’t quite the barnstorming success that novel deserves for a sequel, but it does show Hallett’s lightness, economy, and mastery of character. It’s difficult to believe these people would end up involved in a third murder, but the simple truth is that I’d love to come back in a few years and see how things have changed again. And that’s the brilliance of what Hallett created with her debut: she gave you people you recognise, in a situation you can believe, and made it all breathe so seamlessly that it’s very hard indeed to remember that none of this is real. And if that’s not excellent writing, regardless of genre, then I don’t know what is.