The Christmas Card Crime: And Other Stories

by Martin Edwards (Editor)

Overview

Mystery crime fiction written in the Golden Age of Murder

A Christmas party is punctuated by a gunshot under a policeman's watchful eye. A jewel heist is planned amidst the glitz and glamour of Oxford Street's Christmas shopping. Lost in a snowstorm, a man finds a motive for murder.

This collection of mysteries explores the darker side of the festive season—from unexplained disturbances in the fresh snow, to the darkness that lurks beneath the sparkling decorations.

With neglected stories by John Bude and E.C.R. Lorac, as well as tales by little-known writers of crime fiction, Martin Edwards blends the cosy atmosphere of the fireside story with a chill to match the temperature outside. This is a gripping seasonal collection sure to delight mystery fans

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781464210921
Publisher:	Sourcebooks
Publication date:	04/02/2024
Series:	British Library Crime Classics
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	242
Sales rank:	120,544
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Martin Edwards is an award-winning crime writer best known for two series of novels set in Liverpool and the Lake District. He is series consultant for British Library Crime Classics, the Vice Chair of the Crime Writers' Association, and President of the Detection Club. The Golden Age of Murder, his study of the Detection Club, was published in 2015 to international acclaim, and has been nominated for both the Edgar and Agatha awards for the year's best book about the genre. He received the CWA 2020 Diamond Dagger Award for sustained excellence in crime writing and significant contributions to the genre, joining the ranks of Sue Grafton, Ian Rankin, and Lee Child.

Editorial Reviews

★ 11/18/2019

Edwards’s outstanding third winter-themed anthology (after 2017’s Crimson Snow) showcases 11 uniformly clever and entertaining stories, mostly from lesser known authors, providing further evidence of the editor’s expertise. The title tale by Donald Stuart is one of the most memorable, featuring multiple murders in snowbound conditions. Passengers traveling to Cornwall find their trip disrupted by a heavy snowfall that blocks their train, forcing them to make their way to the nearest lodging, a seedy inn, where one of their number is fatally stabbed in the chest with half of a Christmas card grasped in his hand. Writing as Carter Dickson, John Dickson Carr is at his creepiest in “Blind Man’s Hood,” in which a couple arrive at a country house for a Christmas celebration and are bewildered to find it abandoned apart from an odd woman. The woman explains that there’s a tradition to leave the home for an hour on Christmas Eve, derived from an unsolved impossible murder years earlier. This entry in the British Crime Classics series will be a welcome holiday gift for fans of the golden age of detection. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"Edwards’s outstanding third winter-themed anthology showcases 11 uniformly clever and entertaining stories, mostly from lesser known authors, providing further evidence of the editor’s expertise...this entry in the British Crime Classics series will be a welcome holiday gift for fans of the golden age of detection." — Publishers Weekly, STARRED review

From the Publisher