Christmas Mystery Books for Adults: A Snowbound Classic

Picture a train stuck in deep snow on Christmas Eve, near a village called Hemmersby. A few passengers take shelter in a country house. Inside, a fire is burning in the grate and tea is set out on the table. There is nobody home. That is the opening of Mystery in White, a novel J. Jefferson Farjeon published in 1937. It spent decades out of print until the British Library brought it back in 2014, when it became, in the Library's words, "an instant Sunday Times bestseller". It is where any list of Christmas mystery books for adults should start.

It's the right place to start because it shows exactly why snow and mysteries belong together.

The short answer: Classic Christmas mystery books for adults include The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle (1892), Mystery in White (1937), Hercule Poirot's Christmas (1938), The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding (1960) and Tied Up in Tinsel (1972). They use Christmas in different ways: some shut a group in together with snow or a house party, while others build the mystery around a holiday object, gathering or tradition.

A train stops in the snow (1937)

Farjeon's setup is simple and eerie. Passengers from a stranded train take shelter in a deserted house that looks as if someone has only just left. Then a murderer strikes among them. The snow that trapped the train now traps the story, and nobody can walk away from the question.

Out of print, then a bestseller again (2014)

From the 1930s on, the book was out of print. The British Library reissued it in 2014 as Mystery in White: A Christmas Crime Story, and its success is credited with a wider revival of interest in golden-age detective fiction. Two more Farjeon novels were reissued the following year. It is still in print, now in a special edition with an introduction by the crime writer Martin Edwards.

Nothing in the story had changed since 1937. It was still an old book doing one thing well: it shut the doors and let readers work.

Why Christmas mysteries work: the closed circle

Detective fiction has a name for Farjeon's trick. A closed circle of suspects is a limited group of people isolated in one place, such as a remote house, an island or a train, so that the culprit must be one of them. Sometimes the thing doing the isolating is a snowstorm.

Christmas supplies all of it naturally. Families who rarely meet gather under one roof. The weather closes the roads. Everyone has a reason to be there and a history with everyone else. For a reader, a closed circle makes the suspect pool unusually clear: everyone who could have done it is already inside.

A suspect register is a closed circle written down: everyone who could have done it, in rows, with a column for each thing the clues can test. The Twelve Cases of Christmas gives you twelve of them.

Five classic Christmas mystery books for adults, with a warning label

Not every Christmas mystery is gentle, so each of these comes with a label.

• The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle by Arthur Conan Doyle, The Strand Magazine, January 1892. A Christmas goose and a battered hat are brought to Sherlock Holmes, who studies the hat for clues to its owner. Label: gentle. A stolen jewel, no murder. Don't read the last page first.
• Mystery in White by J. Jefferson Farjeon, 1937. The snowbound train and the empty house. Label: a murder among the stranded passengers.
• Hercule Poirot's Christmas by Agatha Christie, Collins Crime Club, 19 December 1938 (in the US, Murder for Christmas, 1939). A rich old man gathers his estranged family for Christmas. Label: not cozy. In her foreword, Christie said she had heard complaints that her murders were getting too refined, so this one would be violent.
• The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding by Agatha Christie, Collins Crime Club, 24 October 1960. A story collection whose title story sends Poirot to an old-fashioned country-house Christmas to trace a missing ruby. Label: the title story is a jewel mystery, not a murder.
• Tied Up in Tinsel by Ngaio Marsh, 1972. Inspector Alleyn's wife, the painter Troy, spends Christmas at a country house whose owner has staffed it with former prisoners, each once convicted of murder. Label: a darker premise.

"A Christie for Christmas": the habit that made it a tradition

If Christmas mysteries feel like a tradition, that's partly because publishers made them one. Christie's publishers timed her new books for the Christmas market, and "A Christie for Christmas" became a phrase of its own. Writing in 2019, the collector David Morris put its age at almost seventy years, and said the habit took hold once Christie settled into one new book a year, from the late 1940s. The timing was already there in 1938, though: Hercule Poirot's Christmas came out on 19 December, just in time for the stockings.

Christmas has older mysteries of its own. The poem many families read on Christmas Eve first appeared in 1823 in a small-town newspaper with no author's name on it, and who wrote it is still argued about. That's the Night Before Christmas poem and its 1823 mystery.

If you'd rather solve one than read one

Reading a snowbound mystery, you watch the detective narrow the circle. If you'd rather narrow it yourself, we built a whole town for it. The Twelve Cases of Christmas is a Christmas mystery puzzle book set in Tinselby, a made-up town snowed in from 19 December. It has twelve cases to solve by elimination, from 40 suspects to 1,500, and 5,550 suspects in all. You'll meet Nana Hester Pim and Sergeant Winifred Tolley, and the cases have titles like The Prize Pudding Recipe, The Runaway Reindeer, Marley's Missing Knocker and The Night Santa Went Missing.

If you like solving more than reading all year round, how to solve logic grid puzzles teaches the same elimination habit on a grid.

Back at Hemmersby, the train is still stuck, the fire is still burning and the tea is still on the table. That's the gift of a snowbound story: nobody is going anywhere, so you might as well put the kettle on and work out who did what. The snow will come whether you're ready or not. Pick one from the list and let the roads close.

Sources

• Mystery in White's setup, its years out of print and the 2014 reissue: British Library Shop.
• Farjeon's 1937 publication date, the revival and the 2015 reissues: J. Jefferson Farjeon, Wikipedia.
• The closed circle of suspects: Closed circle of suspects, Wikipedia.
• The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, Wikipedia.
• Dates, the US title and Christie's foreword: Hercule Poirot's Christmas, Wikipedia.
• The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding, Wikipedia.
• Tied Up in Tinsel, Wikipedia.
• "A Christie for Christmas": David Morris, Collecting Christie, 20 December 2019.
• The golden age of detective fiction: Wikipedia.
• The 1823 poem, printed anonymously: Troy Sentinel, 23 December 1823, Wikisource; the authorship debate: A Visit from St. Nicholas, Wikipedia.

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