A HOLIDAY FOR MURDER

by Nicholas Fuller

‘There is, at Christmas, a spirit of goodwill. It is, as you say, “the thing to do”. Old quarrels are patched up, those who have disagreed consent to agree once more, even if it is only temporarily…

‘And families now, families who have been separated throughout the year, assemble once more together. Now under these conditions, my friend, you must admit that there will occur a great amount of strain . People who do not feel amiable are putting a great pressure on themselves to appear amiable! There is at Christmas-time a great deal of hypocrisy , honourable hypocrisy, hypocrisy undertaken pour le bon motif , c'est entendu , but nevertheless hypocrisy!…

‘Under these conditions – mental strain, physical malaise – it is highly probable that dislikes that were before merely mild and disagreements that were trivial might suddenly assume a more serious character. The result of pretending to be a more amiable, a more forgiving, a more high-minded person than one really is has sooner or later the effect of causing one to behave as a more disagreeable, a more ruthless and an altogether more unpleasant person than is actually the case! If you dam the stream of natural behaviour, mon ami , sooner or later the dam bursts and a cataclysm occurs!'

Hercule Poirot's Christmas reflections are entirely justified. No sooner has he told his friend Colonel Johnson that too much Christmas pud and Auld Lang Syne lead to murder than Superintendent Sugden rings with the news that just such a murder has been committed. The elderly and tyrannical millionaire Simeon Lee (who made his money in South African diamonds) has been found with his throat cut in a welter of blood – in a room locked and barred on the inside, and with (as it later turns out) the entrance watched while the old man was giving vent to his final dreadful inhuman scream. All of Lee's family had reason enough to kill him: his pompous politician son George and Magdalene, his aptly-named wife; his son Alfred and his wife Lydia , both tired of living under Lee's thumb; David, devoted to the mother for whose death he blames Simeon, and his stronger wife Hilda; and the family black sheep Harold. Then, too, there are Lee's Spanish granddaughter Pilar Estravados and the son of his prospecting partner back in South Africa , Stephen Farr. Lee's conduct justified Poirot's remark, for it seems that he gathered his family – very few of whom got on with anyone else – simply for his own sadistic glee, to watch them bicker and quarrel – and worry about the intended changes to his will. The book – described by Robert Barnard as “a highly superior example of Christie's habitual procedures in her classic phrase” – shows the way in which Christie used clichéd ingredients (the locked room mystery, a family gathering at Christmas, bastard sons and multiple impostors) to fool the reader, an approach she would use in (for instance) The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The Body in the Library, The Moving Finger and After the Funeral . Fortunately Poirot – amusing, wise, discerning and jealous of Superintendent Sugden's moustache – is not at all fooled, and uses a portrait, a calendar and a much stressed family resemblance to reveal a murderer it is safe to say the reader never once suspected.

While Hercule Poirot's Christmas suggests that murder may be the result of intolerable emotional pressure at Christmastime, HC Bailey's brilliant and horrible “Unknown Murderer” (in Mr. Fortune's Practice , 1923) commits a murder solely because it is Christmas, to ruin people's enjoyment of the festivities. Dr. Emily Hall, the resident medical officer at the Home of Help, has her throat cut during the children's party. ‘It spoilt the children's party. Why did it happen at the children's party? Lots of other nice days to kill the resident medical officer', demands Reggie Fortune, Bailey's pathologist sleuth. The fiend – motivated by a sadistic delight in human misery, ‘a devilish passion for cruelty' – is also responsible for the death of Sir Humphrey Bigod, ‘who was found dead in a chalkpit on the eve of his marriage', and poisons with arsenic Gerald, Captain Warnham's stepson, at another children's party. Although Bailey's early novels are very good, with some undoubted masterpieces ( Shadow on the Wall , 1934; The Sullen Sky Mystery , 1935; Black Land, White Land , 1937; and The Bishop's Crime , 1940), there is no doubt that his short stories are better than the novels. (Since they are as good as Sherlock Holmes or Father Brown, this is stating the obvious.) Reggie Fortune is in fine form, his sanity and reason opposed to the warped psychology of the sadistic philanthropist, and capable of dealing with those Bailey staples, children in danger and an overpowering atmosphere of psychological wrongness .

A much more agreeable Christmas is to be found in Gladys Mitchell's 1936 novel Dead Men's Morris , as rich in imagination and human warmth as the rest of her early novels. Mrs. Bradley, Mitchell's inimitable saurian and sorcerian psychiatrist sleuth, goes to stay with her favourite nephew Carey Lestrange at his Oxford pig farm for Christmas. All goes swimmingly until a disagreeable lawyer named Fossder is chased by the ghostly Sandford coach (driven by a headless Catholic priest executed in the time of Elizabeth ) and dies of a heart attack, and an even more unpleasant farmer named Simith is gored to death by a boar on Shotover Hill. The case is a complicated mixture of amatory antics, heraldic messages, Shakespeare, folklore and psychology, but fortunately Mrs. Bradley is at the height of her powers. She attacks one suspect, plays at Jael and Sisera and defends herself from an attack with an iron bar by another, and runs cross-country clad only in her knickers – a burst of energy she maintains until she catches the murderer during the Morris Dance. Mitchell, an amateur folklorist, draws on the ancient symbolism of the Morris Dance and mediaeval Christmases. The Morris Dance banished evil from the community, specifically the Lord of Misrule, ‘who reigned from Christmas to Twelfth Day', the period when the murders were committed, and which brought about ‘one of those periods of general licence and suspension of ordinary government, which so commonly occur at the end of the old year or the beginning of the new one in connexion with a general expulsion of evils'. (Paul Halter also draws on this theme in Le Roi du Désordre , 1994.) The Morris Dance was also a fertility ritual, which banished ‘the evil spirits of blight and infertility', and woke ‘the spirits of vegetation from their long winter sleep'. The crimes take place at winter, a time when the plants are dead and the world is covered by a blanket of ice and snow, while the murderer is arrested and the Morris Dance, the festival of resurrection, take place at Easter, the time of Christ's resurrection.

For the true meaning of Christmas we must turn to the most famous short story detectives, Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown. Just as Ebenezer Scrooge reformed after a visitation by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future, in ‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle' and ‘The Flying Stars', the detectives find criminals whose tastes run to other people's Christmas presents and give them a chance to start again. ‘The Blue Carbuncle', in which Holmes and Dr. Watson go on a wild goose chase, retrieve a fabulous jewel and ‘save a soul' in this ‘season of forgiveness', is too well known to need any more analysis. GK Chesterton's little Essex priest is also involved with stolen jewels – the eponymous ‘Flying Stars', three South African diamonds – at a suburban Christmas party, which boasts an extraordinary harlequinade. The story has all of Chesterton's genius – his gift for atmosphere, his humour and generosity, his fertility of word and deed, the entirely unexpected yet logical plot. The repentance of the great French criminal Flambeau, like that of Scrooge alluded to at the start of the story, reminds the reader of the true meaning of Christmas: an infinite compassion which gives us the opportunity to take stock of what we have done over the last year, forgives sin and gives us all the chance to start afresh, in acceptance and understanding, regardless of our words, thoughts or deeds.

Agatha Christie, Hercule Poirot's Christmas , in Robert Barnard (ed.), The Best of Poirot , Collins, London , 1980, pp. 380 – 1.

Robert Barnard, Agatha Christie: A Talent to Deceive , p. 86.

HC Bailey, Mr. Fortune's Practice , McKinlay, Stone & Mackenzie , New York , 1924, p. 220.

Bailey, Mr. Fortune's Practice , pp. 210, 246.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle', in The Original and Complete Illustrated ‘ Strand ' Sherlock Holmes , Wordsworth Editions, Ware, Hertfordshire, 1999, p. 213.