Christmas Crimes

Christmas Crimes

Agatha Christie: Karácsonyi krimik (Christmas Crimes*, Európa Könyvkiadó 2019)

Agatha Christie: Midwinter Murder (HarperCollins Publishers 2020)

Cecily Gayford: Murder at Christmas (Profile Books Ltd. 2019)

Christmas was a very important holiday for Agatha Christie. It provides the background for several of her stories and she always wanted to wish her readers a pleasant holiday with a new book every year. The three Poirot and one Miss Marple Christmas stories were first collected in one volume in 2019 for the benefit of Hungarian readers.

In Midwinter Murder, we can read stories that take place not only at Christmas but throughout this time of the year as well. We find stories starring the two most famous detectives, as well as the adventures of perhaps the lesser-known Parker Pyne, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford or the mysterious Mr. Quin. It is very pleasant to read short stories with winter wibes during this period and at the beginning of the volume we also find an excerpt from the writer’s autobiography describing her own childhood Christmas.

Cecily Gayford studied English at Oxford University and wrote her thesis on the detective stories of the 1930s and 1940s. She is Editorial Director of Profile Books and already has several thematic anthologies. In this volume, we read the stories of 10 prominent crime writers, all of which take place at Christmas. My personal favorite was the short story by Ellis Peters, in which two person both want to rob the same house on Christmas Eve…

*my translation