The Mistletoe Murder

The Mistletoe Murder - review

Still on my search for the perfect Christmas murder mystery, my next port of call is with one of the top names in the business, P. D. James.

You know when you get a book with just four short stories in at (admittedly relatively meaty ones) that it was intended as a gift book - but in the case of this collection of four Christmas-set P. D. James stories it is certainly a worthy addition to any list of seasonal favourites.

There is no doubt that James very deliberately sets out to push the boundaries, and though some of the stories have very traditional, Agatha Christie style country house and snow settings, there is a darker feel here. In two of the stories, she adopts the same approach that Jane Austen used in Northanger Abbey of stepping outside the fictional viewpoint to make knowing remarks on the format to the reader. So, for example, in The Twelve Clues of Christmas, she remarks that Adam Dalgleish felt he was 'involved in one of those Christmas short stories to provide a seasonal frisson for the readers of an upmarket weekly magazine' - this being a story James wrote... for an upmarket weekly magazine.

Despite this playfulness, these are stories with plenty of interest and effectiveness as mysteries. Two feature a young Adam Dalgleish, allowing us to get snapshots of the earlier career of her great detective. The plots are generally as satisfying as is possible in a short story and the twists and turns suitably unexpected. Like the Sherlock Holmes stories, these are long enough short stories to get enough in, without wasting too much effort on character building and scene setting.

My only real criticism is that I would have liked the book to be at least twice as long - but it certainly fits well as a useful addition to the Christmas reading pile.

The Mistletoe Murder is available from amazon.co.uk and amazon.com
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

... and if you're still hunting, my murder mystery novel A Timely Confession is also a Christmas-set mystery.

Comments

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp...

Murder by Candlelight - Ed. Cecily Gayford ***

Nothing seems to suit Christmas reading better than either ghost stories or Christmas-set novels. For some this means a fluffy romance in the snow, but for those of us with darker preferences, it's hard to beat a good Christmas murder. An annual event for me over the last few years has been getting the excellent series of classic murderous Christmas short stories pulled together by Cecily Gayford, starting with the 2016 Murder under the Christmas Tree . This featured seasonal output from the likes of Margery Allingham, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ellis Peters and Dorothy L. Sayers, laced with a few more modern authors such as Ian Rankin and Val McDermid, in some shiny Christmassy twisty tales. I actually thought while purchasing this year's addition 'Surely she is going to run out of classic stories soon' - and sadly, to a degree, Gayford has. The first half of Murder by Candlelight is up to the usual standard with some good seasonal tales from the likes of Catherine Aird, Car...

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5. However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor...

Search This Blog