A Christmas Feast (of Murder Mysteries)
Dear listeners,
This is seventh time December has rolled around during the time I've been making Shedunnit, which means that I've had plenty of opportunity to think about festive and wintry themes in murder mysteries. And, with the exception of 2022 (when I lost my voice because I had Covid!), each year I have made a different episode about how the authors of the golden age of detective fiction handled this in their fiction. I've looked at everything from the publishing phenomenon that was the Christie for Christmas to the surprisingly large number of fictional corpses that show up dressed as Father Christmas. I thought I was done! Surely, I said to myself, there can't be anything left to say about the phenomenon of the Christmas mystery.
But then, while I was reading the Shedunnit Book Club's book for December — The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L. Sayers — I suddenly realised that there is a very important part of the traditional Christmas celebration that I have never addressed. The food! That book isn't particularly forthcoming on what Lord Peter Wimsey and Bunter eat during their rural Norfolk Christmas, but the mere mention of the cold roast beef and trifle they have at the vicarage on Christmas Eve was enough to give me inspiration. My research assistant Leandra and I sent to work, scouring our memories and our bookshelves for the most interesting examples of Christmas food in murder mysteries. The resulting episode, A Christmas Feast, has just landed in your podfeeds this morning and I hope you will enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed making it.
For the full line-up of Christmas food related books and stories you'll have to get into the episode proper, but while I have you hear I thought I might just highlight three slightly less well-known titles that you might want to have a look at over the next couple of weeks.
I re-read An English Murder at top speed while I was making this episode and marvelled anew at how incredibly good it is. It's technically a post golden age detective novel, being published in 1951, but in a way this makes it even better because Cyril Hare is able to play with the reader's expectations of the form. A country house, a tense Christmas dinner, family members with political differences — there's a lot to enjoy here.
Who Killed the Curate? by Joan Coggin was the Shedunnit Book Club's reading selection for December 2024 and we all ended up enjoying this sprightly village Christmas mystery.
Crime at Christmas by C.H.B. Kitchin was a book I hadn't read for many years but it has plenty to recommend it, not least its wry first-person narrator. I would also recommend this one to anyone who enjoys either stories set in Hampstead (niche, but a little mini-genre, I promise) or books that bring out the nuances of class snobbery in the interwar years.
That's it for me on the subject of Christmas for this year. Will I be inspired to make another festive episode in 2026? We'll all find out together... That isn't all from Shedunnit this year, though. There will be another newsletter next week with some reading recommendations from myself and Leandra, and then on the 24th an extra-special green penguin episode drops, so make sure you're looking out for that.
Until next time,
Caroline
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