Crime at Christmas
Crime at Christmas
A SEASONAL BOX
OF MURDEROUS DELIGHTS
Selected and introduced by
JACK ADRIAN
Illustrated by
Brian Denington
First published 1988
Selection and editorial matter © Jack Adrian 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
Crime at Christmas
1. Crime short stories in English, 1900
—Anthologies
I. Adrian, Jack, 1945-
823'.0872
ISBN 1-85336-031-7
Equation is an imprint of the
Thorsons Publishing Group,
Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, NN8 2RQ), England
Printed in Great Britain by The Bath Press, Bath, Avon
Typeset by MJL Typesetting, Hitchin, Hertfordshire
13579 10 8642
an ebookman scan
JACK ADRIAN has also edited:
E. F. Benson.
The Flint Knife: Further Spook Stories
Edgar Wallace
The Sooper—And Others
The Death-Room
The Road to London
Sapper The Best Short Stories
Sexton Blake Wins
Contents
Crime at Christmas
Contents
Introduction
1- A Problem in White by NICHOLAS BLAKE
2 - Detective's Day Off by JOHN DICKSON CARR
3 - Santa-San Solves It by JAMES MELVILLE
4 - Herlock Sholmes's Christmas Case by PETER TODD
II
Ill
5 - The Three Travellers by EDWARD D. HOCH
6 - Murder in Store by PETER LOVESEY
7 - Waxworks by ETHEL LINA WHITE
8 - Serenade to a Killer by JOSEPH COMMINGS
9 - Stuffing by EDGAR WALLACE
10 - No Room at the Inn by BILL PRONZINI
11 - Sister Bessie by CYRIL HARE
12 - Murder Under the Mistletoe by MARGERY ALLINGHAM
13 - Christmas Train by WILL SCOTT
14 - A Present For Christmas by ROBERT ARTHUR
15 - The Santa Claus Club by JULIAN SYMONS
16 - The Secret in the Pudding Bag by HERLOCK SHOLMES
17 – The Great Christmas Train Mystery by ANTHONY BURGESS
18 - The Plot Against Santa Claus by JAMES POWELL
Afterward – BIGGLES’ APPLE SNOWBALLS
Acknowledgements
Sources
Solution to A PROBLEM IN WHITE
End of Crime at Christmas
Introduction
DICKENS WAS to blame, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. As far as Christmas jollifications go, he has a lot to answer for.
And as the annual flood-tide of festive good cheer threatens once more to engulf us all (as I write, at the beginning of November—seven whole weeks before the dreadful day itself), it's hard not to sympathize with the putative villain of the piece, Ebenezer Scrooge, who, before his unhappy transformation into putty-hearted old duffer, struck the right note exactly: 'Every idiot who goes about with "Merry Christmas" on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.'
Indeed. And bring back the Poor Laws, bring back the workhouse; especially, bring back the treadmill, and let anyone who so much as whispers 'Compliments of the Season' be sentenced to thirty days on it, without the option.
I have a dream of a perfect Christmas, during which barrel-organs, bedecked with holly and rolled out on Saturday mornings by grinning buffoons with jingling collectors' tins to catch the shopping precinct crowds, will be grenaded. Hot-potato men will have their wares mashed, the resulting sludge stuffed down their trousers; hot-chestnut sellers, especially those dressed in Dickensian garb, dumped in their own braziers; street-actors impersonating Tiny Tim their crutches kicked from under them.
Special task-forces brandishing furled umbrellas with needle-sharp points will be directed to the street-corner pitches of balloon-sellers, there to wreak noisy havoc. Turkeys stuffed with Chinese firecrackers will be sold at knock-down prices, thus spelling ruin for the country's poultry farmers as well as creating mayhem in the kitchen. Carol-singers will be offered LSD-spiked mulled wine, and just let them try getting through 'God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen' when the words start soaring up off the page at them. I see flying-columns of misanthropic midgets dressed as children harassing Santa's Grottos throughout the land. And as for Santa himself, it's the Lucky Dip barrel for him. Head-first.
Do I mean any of this?
Of course not.
Not really.
Well, not entirely. There's no getting away from the fact that Christmas—or at least its extended overture—can at times be an ordeal that tries the bravest heart, the strongest nerve, the mightiest patience.
Hence Crime at Christmas, a Box of Murderous (and other) Delights to take your mind off the rigours of the festive season. Here are eighteen short stories and no old sweats—absolutely no stories which, however excellent, you must have read a score or more times before. Most have never appeared in book-form and two, by British crime writer James Melville and American suspense-writer Bill Pronzini, have been written especially for this anthology.
There are tales of tension, tales of brain-racking ingenuity; grim tales, comic tales, atmospheric tales, undeniably acidic tales, tales with twists to their tails. There is a puzzle-story to ponder over, perhaps while cracking nuts beside the fire. There's even a recipe (and a very good one too; and from a surprising source). And all illustrated in fine style by Brian Denington.
All that remains for me now is to wish you, the readers, a downright Dickensian Christmas.
After all, Dickens may be guilty of first-degree assault and battery in the matter of popularizing roast turkey, plum pudding, holly-wreaths, six-foot spruces laden with glitter, and boisterous, back-slapping good cheer; but he had his good points too. Never forget what lay in store for Edwin Drood at the Festive Season. . .
Back to Table of Contents
1- A Problem in White by NICHOLAS BLAKE
TO OPEN the entertainment, a very special—and very seasonal—story by Nicholas Blake who, of course, wasn't really Nicholas Blake at all but the British poet (later Laureate) Cecil Day Lewis (1904-72), one of a small clutch of critics, academics, and donnish litterateurs who for one reason or another chose to cloak their sub-literary activities beneath a pseudonym.
Blake wrote twenty detective novels, many excellent, and most distinguished by acute observation, a lightly leftish perspective, and (not unnaturally) a sensitive use of language, although the earlier books are a bit over-ripe in literary allusion; at times a bit too larky for real comfort. His main detective was Nigel Strangeways (usefully, a nephew of one of Scotland Yard's assistant commissioners) who, in the early books, had more than a touch of Blake's friend the poet W. H. Auden about him. The best Blakes are those published during the 1940s and 1950s—Minute For Murder (1947), for instance, Head of a Traveller (1949), and End of Chapter (1957)—although his final book, the semi-autobiographical The Private Wound 1968, (sans Strangeways) is a fine novel which just happens to be a very good puzzle as well.
Blake did not write many short stories (too busy, as C. Day Lewis, attending to his various academic chores); on the evidence of those he did, he ought to have written more. 'A Problem In White' first appeared in 1949, in one of the final issues of the Strand Magazine—last and gre
atest of the grand old periodicals to survive from the Golden Age of fiction magazines that stretched from Edwardian times up to the Second World War, although now somewhat shrivelled in size and format. Still, even in those austere times its editor could spring a surprise or two—such as this ingenious puzzle story set against that most beguiling of backgrounds (at least for the reader, ensconced in an armchair toasting toes in front of the fire): the night-express to Scotland trapped in a snowdrift on the Shap.
There are sub-plots, red herrings, and some very suspicious characters—and there is, of course, a murder. But who, of all the suspects, is the murderer? The answer is not at the end of the story because the end of the story has, as with its first appearance in the Strand, been shifted elsewhere. The clues are all laid out, just waiting to be spotted. But can you spot them. . .?
SEASONABLE weather for the time of year,' remarked the Expansive Man in a voice succulent as the breast of a roast goose.
The Deep Chap, sitting next to him in the railway compartment, glanced out at the snow swarming and swirling past the window-pane. He replied:
'You really like it? Oh well, it's an ill blizzard that blows nobody no good. Depends what you mean by seasonable, though. Statistics for the last fifty years would show—'
'Name of Joad, sir?' asked the Expansive Man, treating the compartment to a wholesale wink.
'No, Stansfield, Henry Stansfield.' The Deep Chap, a ruddy-faced man who sat with hands firmly planted on the knees of his brown tweed suit, might have been a prosperous farmer but for the long, steady meditative scrutiny which he now bent upon each of his fellow-travellers in turn.
What he saw was not particularly rewarding. On the opposite seat, from left to right, were a Forward Piece, who had taken the Expansive Man's wink wholly to herself and contrived to wriggle her tight skirt farther up from her knee; a desiccated, sandy, lawyerish little man who fumed and fussed like an angry kettle, consulting every five minutes his gold watch, then shaking out his Times with the crackle of a legal parchment, and a Flash Card, dressed up to the nines of spivdom, with the bold yet uneasy stare of the young delinquent.
'Mine's Percy Dukes,' said the Expansive Man. 'PD to my friends, General Dealer. At your service. Well, we'll be across the border in an hour and a half, and then hey for the bluebells of bonny Scotland!'
'Bluebells in January? You're hopeful,' remarked the Forward Piece.
'Are you Scots, master?' asked the Comfortable Body sitting on Stansfield's left.
'English outside'—Percy Dukes patted the front of his grey suit, slid a flask from its hip pocket, and took a swig—'and Scotch within.' His loud laugh, or the blizzard, shook the railway carriage. The Forward Piece giggled. The Flash Card covertly sneered.
'You'll need that if we run into a drift and get stuck for the night,' said Henry Stansfield.
'Name of Jonah, sir?' The compartment reverberated again.
'I do not apprehend such an eventuality,' said the Fusspot. 'The station-master at Lancaster assured me that the train would get through. We are scandalously late already, though.' Once again the gold watch was consulted.
'It's a curious thing,' remarked the Deep Chap meditatively, 'the way we imagine we can make Time amble withal or gallop withal, just by keeping an eye on the hands of a watch. You travel frequently by this train, Mr—?'
'Kilmington. Arthur J Kilmington. No, I've only used it once before.' The Fusspot spoke in a dry Edinburgh accent.
'Ah yes, that would have been on the 17th of last month. I remember seeing you on it.'
'No, sir, you are mistaken. It was the 20th.' Mr Kilmington's thin mouth snapped tight again, like a rubber band round a sheaf of legal documents.
'The 20th? Indeed? That was the day of the train robbery. A big haul they got, it seems. Off this very train. It was carrying some of the extra Christmas mail. Bags just disappeared, somewhere between Lancaster and Carlisle.'
'Och, deary me,' sighed the Comfortable Body. 'I don't know what we're coming to, really, nowadays.'
'We're coming to the scene of the crime, ma'am,' said the expansive Mr Dukes. The train, almost dead-beat, was panting up the last pitch towards Shap Summit.
'I didn't see anything in the papers about where the robbery took place,' Henry Stansfield murmured. Dukes fastened a somewhat bleary eye upon him.
'You read all the newspapers?'
'Yes.'
The atmosphere in the compartment had grown suddenly tense. Only the Flash Card, idly examining his fingernails, seemed unaffected by it.
'Which paper did you see it in?' pursued Stansfield.
'I didn't.' Dukes tapped Stansfield on the knee. ' But I can use my loaf. Stands to reason. You want to tip a mail-bag out of a train—get me? Train must be moving slowly, or the bag'll burst when it hits the ground. Only one place between Lancaster and Carlisle where you'd know the train would be crawling. Shap Bank. And it goes slowest on the last bit of the bank, just about where we are now. Follow?'
Henry Stansfield nodded.
'O.K. But you'd be balmy to tip it off just anywhere on this God-forsaken moorland,' went on Mr Dukes. 'Now, if you'd travelled this line as much as I have, you'd have noticed it goes over a bridge about a mile short of the summit. Under the bridge runs a road: a nice, lonely road, see? The only road hereabouts that touches the railway. You tip out the bag there. Your chums collect it, run down the embankment, dump it in the car they've got waiting by the bridge, and Bob's your uncle!'
'You oughta been a detective, mister,' exclaimed the Forward Piece languishingly.
Mr Dukes inserted his thumbs in his armpits, looking gratified. 'Maybe I am,' he said with a wheezy laugh. 'And maybe I'm just little old PD, who knows how to use his loaf.'
'Och, well now, the things people will do!' said the Comfortable Body. 'There's a terrible lot of dishonesty today.'
The Flash Card glanced up contemptuously from his Fingernails. Mr Kilmington was heard to mutter that the system of surveillance on railways was disgraceful, and the Guard of the train should have been severely censured.
'The Guard can't be everywhere,' said Stansfield. 'Presumably he has to patrol the train from time to time, and—'
'Let him do so, then, and not lock himself up in his van and go to sleep,' interrupted Mr Kilmington, somewhat unreasonably.
'Are you speaking from personal experience, sir?' asked Stansfield.
The Flash Card lifted up his voice and said, in a Charing-Cross-Road American accent, 'Hey, fellas! If the gang was gonna tip out the mail-bags by the bridge, like this guy says—what I mean is, how could they rely on the Guard being out of his van just at that point?' He hitched up the trousers of his loud check suit.
'You've got something there,' said Percy Dukes. 'What I reckon is, there must have been two accomplices on the train—one to get the Guard out of his van on some pretext, and the other to chuck off the bags.' He turned to Mr Kilmington. 'You were saying something about the Guard locking himself up in his van. Now if I was of a suspicious turn of mind, if I was little old Sherlock H. in person'—he bestowed another prodigious wink upon Kilmington's fellow-travellers—'I'd begin to wonder about you, sir. You were travelling on this train when the robbery took place. You went to the Guard's van. You say you found him asleep. You didn't by any chance call the Guard out, so as to—?'
'Your suggestion is outrageous! I advise you to be very careful, sir, very careful indeed,' enunciated Mr Kilmington, his precise voice crackling with indignation, 'or you may find you have said something actionable. I would have you know that, when I—'
But what he would have them know was to remain undivulged. The train, which for some little time had been running cautiously down from Shap Summit, suddenly began to chatter and shudder, like a fever patient in high delirium, as the vacuum brakes were applied; then, with the dull impact of a fist driving into a feather pillow, the engine buried itself in a drift which had gathered just beyond the bend of a deep cutting. The time was five minutes past seven.
'What's this in aid of?' asked the Forward Piece, rather shrilly, as a hysterical outburst of huffing and puffing came from the engine.
'Run into a drift, I reckon.'
'He's trying to back us out. No good. The wheels are slipping every time. What a lark!' Percy Dukes had his head out of the window on the lee side of the train. 'Coom to Coomberland for your winter sports!'
'Guard! Guard, I say!' called Mr Kilmington. But the blue-clad figure, after one glance into the compartment, hurried on his way up the corridor. 'Really! I shall report that man.'
Henry Stansfield, going out into the corridor, opened a window. Though the coach was theoretically sheltered by the cutting on this windward side, the blizzard stunned his face like a knuckleduster of ice. He joined the herd of passengers who had climbed down and were stumbling towards the engine. As they reached it, the Guard emerged from its cab: no cause for alarm, he said; if they couldn't get through, there'd be a relief engine sent down to take the train back to Tebay; he was just off to set fog-signals on the line behind them.
The driver renewed his attempts to back the train out. But, what with its weight, the up-gradient in its rear, the icy rails, and the clinging grip of the drift on the engine, he could not budge her.
'We'll have to dig out the bogeys, mate,' he said to the fireman. 'Fetch them shovels from the forward van. It'll keep the perishers from freezing, any road.' He jerked his finger at the knot of passengers who, lit up by the glare of the furnace, were capering and beating their arms like savages amid the swirling snow-wreaths.
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