Book Review : Murder After Christmas

If ever a book needed a list of characters, it’s this one, along with an explanation of how they are related to each other, and most importantly, to the murder victim Sir Willoughby Keene-Cotton, known as Uncle Willie. Most of Uncle Willie’s extended family are gathered for Christmas at a large house called Four Corners owned by one part of the Redpath family. People arrive, people leave and don’t come back, and people leave and do come back.

There is a lot of dialogue in this book and this is wonderful, but almost all the characters are incapable or unwilling to tell the complete story of their behaviour in any given situation. And then they contradict themselves. A lot of them admit that they’d like to murder Uncle Willie but then say they didn’t actually commit murder. Another character says he dumped Uncle Willie on the lawn after they found him on a footpath because he didn’t want to spoil a treasure hunt.

There is a shoal of red herrings and your credulity will be stretched by characters who hide food inside a snowman, sew mince-pies inside a chair, and forget to tell their loved ones that a relation has died.

Having said that, it’s an enjoyable read and I’m glad that the British Library is publishing over a hundred of these stories from the ‘Golden Age’ of British detective fiction from the 1930s and 1940s.