A review by thecommonswings
A Very Murderous Christmas: Ten Classic Crime Stories for the Festive Season by Cecily Gayford

3.0

A lot more hit and miss than the previous Christmas crime collection, mainly because all three modern attempts at the form are absolute stinkers: Colin Dexter’s central idea here is a great one but the Morse story feels like it’s his notes for a proper tale that he submitted in a panic, with most of the story just a précis; Rendell’s contribution feels like a scanty idea for a Vine novel that she realised would’ve been terrible so instead turns it into a terrible short story instead; Horowitz is the worst, with a thin joke of a story trying desperately to feel like a classic crime story but instead sounding like a jocular uncle laughing in a really strained way at you at a Christmas party to cover the fact he’s going through a bitter divorce (plus a really, really weird joke about Estonians that just dribbles out)

All the others? Absolutely great. Blake’s story is a nice touch with a puzzle for the reader; the Allingham story is a bit more conventional than the one in Murder for Christmas but still allows Campion to shine at his best; the Hoch story threatens to get very, very weird but at the last minute just about saves itself despite a decidedly dodgy motive... it just reminds you that the golden age writers were better at short stories because there was a regular audience to hone your skills with them. That’s pretty much gone now (unlike horror, which has a significantly smaller but still thriving short form world tootling along nicely) and it really tells when the modern writers try and apply it