Murder in the Falling Snow: Ten Classic Crime Stories (Vintage Murders)

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But for shivers down the spine, the opener Haunted House by Gladys Mitchell is well worth reading by candlelight before turning in on Christmas Eve. Some of the stories are a little obscure, but I really enjoyed The Chopham Affair, The Adventure of the Abbey Grange and The Mystery of Felwyn Tunnel. The Chesterton was a bit boring and since most of the action was set in South America, seemed a weird inclusion.

A quick and easy read - while some were interesting most we pretty mediocre, no real twists or turns, they seemed to get more lame as the book went on - the best stories being at the front of the book. It begins with the description of the cushy and immoral life of an international gigolo and ends with justice being dealt out on a cold, snowy Christmas Eve in freezing London.Several of these stories have been published in various other anthologies and I had certainly read some of them before. Innes was reliably clever, Sayers terse and entertaining with a well crafted red herring character, but I did rather enjoy R. This series of books, being a collection of murder stories by well known authors, is a regular Christmas present for my wife. The Michael Innes story is also great - less wordy than his full-length Appleby novels, and very clever.

What you do get though is ten early to mid-twentieth century, male centric murder tales with a tenuous link to winter. By today's standards these stories are quaint but may be worth a read if you are interested in early detective fiction. T. Meade and Robert Eustace, possibly the standout story here for me, but I remembered it fairly well from reading it somewhere else, possibly in one of the British Library collections.In The Mystery of Felwyn Tunnel by LT Meade and Robert Eustace, our narrator investigates the mysterious deaths of two signalmen on a remote section of the mountainous Welsh railway.