Mystery in White: A Christmas Crime Story (British Library Crime Classics)

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He delays his answer with the audacious question: ‘Why do you keep on going round and round the bush with me? Jefferson Farjeon novel I could find in the Kindle format: Mystery in White, first published the following year.

Thomson, the ill-fated group of characters never has cause to interact emotionally with one another, and Farjeon never encourages the need for (or interest in) casting mutual suspicion. Above all, it’s an exciting and intriguing story, and one you’d be well advised to read, or give away, over the Christmas period. When their train becomes stuck, these passengers for differing reasons and times decamp, aiming to find their way to the next station. We're a very small team operating in an environment that is quite tough on independent publishers, so we're extremely proud of our sales figures: up 400 per cent in November on the previous year. Some of them decide to leave the train and try and walk to another station which is supposed to be a walk away.Agree that the first half of the book was more promising than what the second half ultimately delivered. Trapped together for Christmas, the passengers are seeking to unravel the secrets of the empty house when a murderer strikes in their midst.

Everything felt too planned and the solution to all the murders was the most banal one with unrealistic motives. When the train gets stuck in the huge snowdrifts on the tracks, some of the passengers decide to walk to the next station. It is an interesting listen, especially knowing it is one of a number of forgotten British mystery classics republished by the British Library.Twisted Christmas: The story is set on Christmas, and the holiday plays an important part of events in the present and in the backstory of the plot. The summary of the crimes at the end helped pull it all together because by then i neither knew nor cared what had happened in the plot. Both the tale and its cast will have jumped the shark repeatedly and pleasurably, at least for fans of agreeably decorous thrills, by the time Christmas finally dawns. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. Fair story - if rather drawn out and repetitive - with several murderers off camera and not really any ghosts.

I usually really enjoy a classical detective story such as this one without any DNA, internet, video,. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. I can greatly appreciate a mischievous approach to structure that allows the police to appear only in the penultimate chapter, as Farjeon uses here. The uninvited guests decided to make themselves at home and discussions take place as to what happened on the train as one of the passengers explains that he saw a body in an adjacent carriage.I preferred Mystery in White to that one, but I have yet to find one of these BLCC mysteries that comes close to a Christie or a Sayers. Farjeon is now best known as the author of Number Seventeen, a play that was adapted for the big screen by Alfred Hitchcock.

Then Maltby reveals that he tripped over another dead body as he was making his way to Valley House (as their shelter is known). This author was apparently a very successful member of that group, but I had never heard of nor read him before. Fortunately, they are able to unravel it all and bring about a conclusion that is satisfactory to almost everybody. Sayers wrote that 'Jefferson Farjeon is quite unsurpassed for creepy skill in mysterious adventures'.By the time the storm ends, four people will have been murdered, and the survivors, not the police, will deliver justice in the satisfying ending. He follows footprints through the snow, sees this, that and the other, and encounters two important characters, a father and daughter, whom he leads back to the house by following his own trail. Mostly written by contemporaries of crime legend Agatha Christie, they are a time when without modern technology, crimes had to be solved by old fashioned sleuthing by detectives, police officers, or sometimes just those affected by the crimes.