Crimson Snow

Starred review from November 14, 2016
Edwards’s second winter-themed anthology (after 2015’s Silent Nights) in the British Library Crime Classics series is a standout. As in the most successful of such volumes, the editor’s expertise results in a selection of unusual suspects, expanding readers’ knowledge. The longest and best of the 11 selections is by Victor Gunn, whose “Death in December” features Bill “Ironsides” Cromwell, an endearingly irascible Scotland Yarder. Ironsides joins a young colleague on a family visit to Derbyshire, only to encounter multiple impossibilities, starting with a man who crosses their path without leaving footprints in the snow and continuing with the appearance, and disappearance, of a bloody corpse from a locked and supposedly haunted room. Fergus Hume, best known for the novel The Mystery of the Hansom Cab, offers a nice whodunit with supernatural trappings in “The Ghost’s Touch.” More familiar contributors include Margery Allingham and Julian Symons. Edwards even offers an entry with a challenge to the reader, “Mr. Cork’s Secret,” featuring Macdonald Hastings’s canny insurance investigator, which originally came with a cash prize for the most logical solution.

October 15, 2016
Indefatigable author/editor Edwards (Serpents in Eden, 2016, etc.), diving once more into the past, dusts off 11 mostly forgotten seasonal reprints from the golden age of the detective story.The good news is that none of these tales is a clunker; all are at least readable. The better news is that their value as Yuletide nostalgia is intensified by excavating them between 50 and more than 100 years after their initial publications. The best news is that by far the longest of them, Victor Gunn's "Death in December," is one of the most effective, packing into its 75 pages a wraithlike figure that walks in the snow without leaving footprints, a mysterious corpse dressed just like a notorious earlier family fatality, the disappearance of said corpse, and a tidy set of logical explanations. The other standouts are Ianthe Jerrold's "Off the Tiles," a briskly efficient inquiry into who pushed an inoffensive lady off the roof of her flat, and the best-known of these stories, Margery Allingham's "The Man with the Sack," an aggressively traditional tale that packs a most unwilling Albert Campion off to a Christmas party, where he'll be needed to investigate a well-anticipated jewel theft. Felonious holiday parties are also the order of the day for Christopher Bush, Julian Symons, and Michael Gilbert. Fergus Hume supplies a shivery seasonal ghost, Edgar Wallace a free-wheeling fantasia whose two murder victims richly deserve what they get, S.C. Roberts a charming Sherlock-ian playlet with an ending right out of "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle," and Josephine Bell a grim tale of theft and casual murder disappointing only because the crime is so much more memorable than the detection. Just the thing for readers who crave a retreat from their own rounds of obligatory social events and a rationale assuring them that attending Christmas parties can provide quite a shock to other people's systems.

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