Having looked at Silent Nights [ss] (2015), the first collection of Christmas-themed short stories in the British Library Crime Classic collection a fortnight ago, I move on to Crimson Snow [ss] (2016), the second such collection, edited once again by Martin Edwards.

Eleven stories — quite a lot taking place on Christmas Eve, interestingly — of frequently snowbound misdeeds and murder amidst the merriment await, so how do we fare in this second sampling? Let’s have a look…

“In such an interesting house I did not think to pass a dull Christmas, but — God help me — I did not anticipate so tragic a Yuletide as I spent.” Thus is the expectation raised for ‘The Ghost’s Touch’ (1899) by Fergus Hume, an appropriately melodramatic and gloomy Christmas story of a haunted room, a wealthy relative with a weak heart, and…well, you can probably fil in the rest. I very much enjoyed the Olde Worlde feel of this, from its clear machinations to the way out narrator calmly goes to bed with a gun under his pillow lest anyone play a prank on him in the night.

A shame we get only one death after such a gaudy setup, but it’s nicely wrangled and would make a good story to tell a group of marooned travellers in a dusty old library as dying flames flicker in the grate.

Do you say either h in ‘The Chopham Affair’ (1930) by Edgar Wallace? No matter, I’m just curious. The story itself is Wallace’s usual mix of supreme invention and absolute hogwash — why would Archibald Lenton, “the most brilliant of prosecuting attorneys”, know a criminal because he acted for his, the criminal’s, defence, for one? — but the structure is pleasingly off so that you figure out the truth about Alphonse Riebiera slowly, and the eventual picture only very late on.

I’m feeling very favourably inclined to Wallace just lately — I had a superb time with one of his books a little while back, and need to get a review of it up on here soon — so I forgive him the weaknesses in this. Doubtless he wrote better stories than this, but as a random selection from his vast library it’s not a bad choice at all.

‘The Man with the Sack’, a.k.a. ‘The Case of the Man with the Sack’ (1936) by Margery Allingham is more readable than the Allingham story included in Silent Nights, which I gave up on halfway through, but it’s still pretty thin fare which fails to ignite in me any passion for the good lady’s writing. A children’s Christmas party, some stuffy hangers-on, the son of a disgraced businessman who is dressed up to play Santa Claus…I enjoyed the festive bonhomie and occasional quirk of humour (“The…children’s party had been in full swing for what seemed to Mr. Campion at least to be the best part of a fortnight.”), but the general enthusiasm expressed for Allingham’s fiction continues to elude me.

‘Christmas Eve’ (1936) is a Sherlockian stage play by S.C. Roberts which, while leaning a little into the ‘Watson is an idiot’ trope, is quite enjoyable in its own way. The crime is what’s becoming something of a trope of Christmas stories — the theft of some valuable jewels — but the criminal’s motive and justification for their actions are interestingly well-realised, raising it above the common. I’m not aware of having read any of Roberts’s Holmes pastiches previously, but I’d very much like to track some down on this evidence.

An interesting departure for these BL collections next in that ‘Death in December’ (1943) by Victor Gunn is arguably a novella, normally the preserve of Tony Medawar’s Bodies from the Library collections. This one sees Chief Inspector Bill ‘Ironsides’ Cromwell invited to spend Christmas with the family and friends of his subordinate Johnny Lister. A motley crew of the great and good are assembled at the mighty Lister family pile, and before long rumours of a “death room” haunted by the family spirit begin to circulate…

Gunn writes well about the sensation of being cut off by snow, and this barrels along with a pleasing briskness, throwing out unusual events — a figure leaving no footprints in the snow, a body appearing and then vanishing — and a few suitably sinister passages following the unknown murderer:

[N]o matter how much this figure resembled a normal man, his soul was that of a demon from hell.

Gunn’s also pretty witty at times, such as Johnny being “forced to admit that the carol singing, as carol singing, was both poor and unmelodious, and especially unmelodious”, or at one point “drawing on a pair of evening dress trousers with creases that could have been used to carve a joint”, which adds to the overall enjoyment of this. A shame the mystery isn’t even slightly fairly clued, but the atmosphere and sheer chutzpah of this carry it a long way, and that no footprints solution is bonkers fun.

‘Murder at Christmas’, a.k.a. ‘The Holly Bears a Berry’ (1951) by Christopher Bush brings a touch of horror to proceedings by making you read about the characters playing golf, but otherwise this short case for Ludovic Travers never quite caught my imagination, feeling rather tepid and relying on some frank hearsay to join its dots. I couldn’t keep the various flat characters straight, either, so the reveal meant even less than it might have done.

“[L]adies do not usually walk about on roofs unless their nerves are disturbed and their intentions self-destructive” Ianthe Jerrold tells us near the start of ‘Off the Tiles’ (1952). Thus is Inspector James Quy inclined to think when Mrs. Lillah Keer plummets from her roof. That a story of lost keys and a preoccupied nephew don’t seem to add up makes him look a little deeper, and, well, it wouldn’t be much fun if it was felo de se after all, eh? The slightly removed tone of this is difficult not to enjoy, and the last line amusing. Good fun.

‘Mr. Cork’s Secret’ (1952) by Macdonald Hastings starts with a dead body barricaded in its room in the ostentatiously upmarket Paradise Hotel, the very hotel that movie star Anton de Raun is about to spend his honeymoon, having married for the fourth time. From here it’s a short hop to death by bludgeoning (“If it were only one of the familiar suicide cases, he could have dealt with it quite simply…”), missing jewels (again…!) and insurance man Montague Cork, whose firm is responsible for those jewels, needing a room. Then the de Raun menage doesn’t appear, much to the chagrin of the gathered press, and Cork is galvanised into action to figure it all out.

I’ve not read any of the Cork novels — the Rue Morgue Press covers always put me off — but this ends up rather more thriller than detection, with a yegg, a newspaperman, and Mr. Cork barrelling around the country looking for a yacht. It pays off in the expected way, but is enlivened by Mr. Cork holding back a “secret” which at time of publication was only revealed to the readers in the following issue of Lilliput Magazine. Here, the secret is withheld until the end of the book, and published alongside the two winning reader entries who guessed the (rather obvious) disclosure — these additional two being an inspired inclusion due to the spirit in which they are written.

I haven’t read loads of Julian Symons‘s fiction, but that’s largely because every time I do I understand why he’s perhaps best-known for the non-fiction Bloody Murder (1972). ‘The Santa Claus Club’ (1960) is fine. The setup is fine, the murder is fine, the characters are perhaps deliberately unmemorable. It’s fine. I’m not going to complain about it, but I can’t get too excited about it either. It’s fine.

‘Deep and Crisp and Even’ (1958) by Michael Gilbert — another author whose fictional output leaves me a little bewildered — is perfectly enjoyable, too: he writes well about snowbound streets, and sets up an intriguing problem about a man visited by the waits who cannot be who he claims. Most interesting of all is the resolution of this, which raises it significantly in my estimation. I fared badly with Gilbert’s Calder and Behrens stories, so maybe Sergeant Petrella might be one to investigate further…

Finally, ‘The Carol Singers’ (1963) by Josephine Bell, by whom I have read just a single novel, Death in Retirement (1956). The date of this one indicates that it’s more likely to be a crime story than a tale of detection, and that’s borne out by the contents: the eponymous singers attacking a woman in her home and leaving her for dead, and lots speculation about useless young people and their miserable impact on a fracturing society.

It’s certainly not bad, and Bell writes in an engaging style that really brings home the heartbreak of the old woman at not being safe in her home, but I’m not so excited by crime stories and this sort of thing generally fails to excite my interest. I will not deny that it’s well written, and if you’re a fan of a lot of the Generic Local Detective fiction that fills the current crime shelves you’ll be in clover, but I left this somewhat nonplussed despite a couple of clever ideas.

A top five? A top five…

1. ‘Christmas Eve’ (1936) S.C. Roberts
2. ‘Off the Tiles’ (1952) by Ianthe Jerrold
3. ‘Death in December’ (1943) by Victor Gunn
4. ‘Deep and Crisp and Even’ (1958) by Michael Gilbert
5. ‘The Chopham Affair’ (1930) by Edgar Wallace

Overall, for my tastes, the standard here isn’t quite as high as in Silent Nights, but there’s still enough to show the depth of the Golden Age. The part of me that is taking an increased interest in pre-GAD is delighted to see the Fergus Hume story included, and I’ll certainly be tracking down more of S.C. Roberts’s Holmes pastiches when I figure out how to. I’d read the remainder of the book from which that Victor Gunn story was drawn, too, and Michael Gilbert’s Petrella stories have also floated on to my radar as a result of his inclusion herein.

So, yes, while I rate the former collection slightly higher, Crimson Snow has more than enough to offer those of you with an interest in festive malfeasance. I’ve been slow to get to these BL collections, but I’m enjoying them, and look forward to mopping up other volumes in the years ahead. Thanks and kudos to Edwards for his continued good eye in putting these together; expect more of his themed collections on here before too long.

In the meantime, a happy, healthy, and homicide-free Christmas to all who celebrate!