A Christmas Feast Transcript

Caroline: There is a special affinity between murder mysteries and Christmas. It's not simply that we like to read these tales of dark deeds while slowing down for the festive period, although that is a factor, of course. The trappings and traditions of Christmas itself have been put to imaginative use by crime writers for at least a century. It's always satisfying in a mystery when a familiar setting is revealed to be the basis for a clever crime, but doubly so when it's a scenario so associated with wholesome feelings and general goodwill. Detective fiction is a genre built on contrasts and there's no greater contrast to be had than turning a day meant to celebrate the selfless best of humanity into a parade of our very worst attributes.

For those lucky enough to be celebrating together, food is generally considered essential to a good Christmas. The richness, the abundance, the historical recipes — it's all part of the festivities. Of course, detective novelists have turned that traditional festive fare to their own purposes, mixing it deftly into their Christmas murder mysteries. And so today, I thought we'd sit down for our own feast, and take in all the ways in which food is used as the key ingredient of the Christmas mystery.

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Welcome to Shedunnit. I'm Caroline Crampton.

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Every time Christmas food crops up in a classic mystery story, it will be as part of one of three types of plot mechanism. Either something is being hidden in the food, the food itself is being used as a means of murder, or the meal is narratively significant as a way to gather and unsettle characters.

Let's look more closely at our first category, which involves objects being hidden in Christmas food. And there's really only one place we can start, and that's with "The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding" by Agatha Christie. Although most people know this as the title story of Christie's 1960 short story collection of the same title, the plot did actually originate during the golden age of detective fiction. She first published a version of it under the title "Christmas Adventure" in The Sketch in 1923. The names are different and the plot is thinner, but the essentials are all there: Poirot is spending Christmas at an English country house, he is warned by a strange note not to eat any of the Christmas pudding, and then when said pudding is dished up on Christmas Day in addition to the traditional mix-ins — the bachelor's button, the coin, the ring and the pig — the squire finds a big hunk of red glass in his portion. Of course, this is actually a priceless ruby, and crucial to the eventual resolution of the mystery. In fact, when this story was published in America, it was under the title "The Theft of the Royal Ruby", and they used that title for the 1991 TV adaptation starring David Suchet as well.

That original story, "Christmas Adventure", was reprinted a couple of times in the 1940s in different collections, and then Christie repurposed it to create 1960's "Christie for Christmas". The newly-expanded story "The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding" became the title story of a collection titled The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding and a Selection of Entrées, with a new foreword from Christie. This is a fascinating piece of writing in its own right, especially relevant to our subject today, because Christie uses it to share an extended metaphor in which the book is a multi-course Christmas meal, of which she is the chef. "The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding" and "The Mystery of the Spanish Chest", as longer short stories, are the main courses she is serving up, with the other stories as her entrees and dessert.

Christie also talks about the Christmases of her youth, which she remembers with great fondness and nostalgia. After her father died in 1901 and her sister Madge married James Watts in 1902, Agatha and her mother Clara spent the festive season with James's family at their country house, Abney Hall, in Cheshire. These lavish Edwardian Christmases came with seemingly endless helpings of roast turkey, mince pies, plum pudding and chocolates, as well as Christmas music, games and decorations. Now seventy, she still remembers these festivities and dedicates the book to that memory.

This is important context for the collection's title story, "The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding". Christie clearly holds Christmas food traditions in high regard and mischievously enjoys working them into her mystery plot. The appearance of the ruby in the plum pudding is all the more surprising because the diners are supposed to find things in their dessert, just not that thing. It's so much better than if it had just plopped out of the gravy boat, because people are already on the lookout for sixpences and the like. And of course, Hercule Poirot, as a Belgian, is there to find all of this English adulation of plum pudding just a little bit silly. It's a wonderful and surprising scene, and probably the most festive thing Christie ever wrote. Her 1938 Poirot novel Hercule Poirot's Christmas is a bit of a red herring. It might have "Christmas" in the title and nominally be set during the festive season, but it's one of the least Christmassy novels there is.

In having the main focus of her plot in "The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding" appear in a foodstuff, Christie was actually referencing a pre-existing tradition within crime fiction. She was a great fan of Arthur Conan Doyle and his creation, Sherlock Holmes, so I'm pretty confident in saying that she will have been familiar with the 1892 story "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle". The reference is fairly obvious, since both stories are concerned with jewels — Christie's the ruby that appears in the pudding, and Conan Doyle's a priceless "blue carbuncle" or jewel that has been stolen from a countess staying at a London hotel. This is one of my favourite Sherlock Holmes stories, because it's one where he enters the case organically, rather than being formally "called in" by a client. An acquaintance from a previous case, a commissionaire, has handed over to Holmes a battered hat and a Christmas goose that he found in the street after a scuffle. Both are without obvious means of identification, so he has given them to the great detective to try and trace ownership. I really enjoy Holmes's journey through the festive goose economy of working class London, as he works out where this particular bird was raised and slaughtered, eventually realising along the way that the true blue carbuncle jewel thief has tried to repurpose the Christmas dinner centrepiece as an unwitting mule for his stolen goods. Although hiding things inside roasted geese isn't a common practice, as the sixpence in the Christmas pudding is, this story achieves the same element of surprise by turning a familiar piece of festive food to a criminal purpose. And it has the added attraction of seeing Holmes exhibit a bit of Christmas goodwill, as he dispenses his own justice at the climax of the goose case. It's delicious, in more ways than one.

Christie wasn't the only writer to be inspired by "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle", though. Three years after "Christmas Adventure" was published, in December 1926, Edgar Wallace had a story published in the Saturday Evening Post that shows traces of the same influence. "Stuffing" is about an aristocrat, Lord Carfane, who keeps up the old feudal tradition of distributing bounty — in this case, turkeys — to his tenants and workers at Christmas time. The frozen turkeys, decorated with rosettes, are all lined up in the larder on Christmas Eve, awaiting distribution. At the same time, Lord Carfane is expecting a visitor from whom he is to purchase some jewellery. Except, the reader is let in from the start that this sale is actually a front for a burglary, and where better for the thief to hide the loot than one of those handy turkeys? Once again, the Christmas spirit of goodwill prevails in the end, and only worthy diners get to sit down to their festive meal — assured, this time, that they won't get a mouthful of anything apart from roast turkey.

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So much for jewels and riches being hidden in the Christmas food. What about cases where the food itself becomes the deadly element in a murder mystery plot? This usually means a murderer that is using poison, and taking dastardly advantage of the festive meal to commit their crime.

A novel that excels in this direction is Murder After Christmas by Rupert Latimer. This light-hearted novel from 1944 exhibits many of the classic features of a festive golden age mystery. It opens with a family, the Redpaths, living in the English countryside during WW2, preparing for the Christmas season. They are expecting their son to return for the holiday period, and are now also wondering whether an objectionable but rich elderly relative, Uncle Willie, will now be joining them too. There is heavy snow before and during Christmas itself, making travel difficult and the atmosphere seasonal. Footprints in the snow, or the lack thereof, also play a very important part in the murder plot itself, which is such a key part of the Christmas mystery tradition that I once did a whole episode of Shedunnit about it — I’ll link that in the episode description for anyone who hasn’t heard it or wants to revisit it. In this book we also have a vital role for gifts and gifting, which is very seasonally appropriate, as well as multiple Father Christmas costumes, a significant snowman, but best of all, plenty of Christmas food.

The WW2 context is relevant here, because there is some discussion of what can and can't be obtained with rationing and travel restrictions. However, the vital part of this book from our perspective is the fact that not one but two Christmas foods are implicated in a complicated poisoning plot. First, Uncle Willie eats some mince pies on Christmas Eve — which he has been told not to eat until Christmas Day but does anyway, a lovely touch — and he is ill. Then, he eats some festive peppermint chocolates. On Boxing Day morning, he's found dead in the snow outside the house, still in his Father Christmas costume. For most of the investigation, it's not clear which of these two Christmas foods is to blame, if either, and which member of his extended family, who all possibly stand to inherit some of his large fortune, by the way, might be to blame. Rupert Latimer is even clever in his choice of which foods to bring under suspicion: the strong flavours of a traditional English mince pie, laced with lots of sweet dried fruit and brandy, and the powerful minty taste of Uncle Willie's favourite peppermint creams, are both entirely plausible for disguising the taste of poison. Murder After Christmas is a wonderful confection of misdirection and mystery, all underpinned by the understanding that Christmas food is both irresistible and not necessarily as innocent as it might seem.

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Another good example of Christmas food being turned to poisonous purpose can be found in the short story “The Santa Claus Club” by Julian Symons. The club of the title has been formed by ten wealthy men, who meet every year all dressed as Father Christmas to hold a charity raffle and eat a Christmas dinner together. The author makes clear that the reader is supposed to slightly disapprove of this act of conspicuous philanthropy. Any one of the Father Christmases could easily afford to change the lives of many others with anonymous generosity, but instead they stage this stunt so that "the help given should not go unrecorded", as Symons rather sarcastically puts it at the start of the story.

The Father Christmases assemble on the appointed evening at an exclusive Mayfair eatery — again, Symons's authorial voice interjects dryly to tell us that "perhaps the food is not quite the best in London, but it is certainly the most expensive". The dinner itself is luxurious: turtle soup, grilled sole, and then three huge roast turkeys. The soon-to-be murder victim is seen to attack his turkey leg with "Elizabethan gusto". Finally, a vast plum pudding glowing blue with lighted brandy is brought in and devoured. Symons makes quite a pageant of the Christmas food, the reason for which becomes clear after one of the Father Christmases topples over and dies at the table, from poison — obvious because of the smell of bitter almonds emanating from the body. But how can he have been the only one to consume it, when the reader has so painstakingly been shown that everybody present ate the same food and drank the same wine? Part of the theatre of the Christmas dinner was that the turkey and pudding were carved up and handed round at the table, emphasising the communal nature of the charity endeavour and the general spirit of goodwill. Administering poison to just one person at such an occasion is surely impossible. Or is it? A man is certainly dead. I'll leave you to read the story for yourself to find out how it was done, but rest assured that the Christmas dinner and its trappings remain central to the story throughout.

Before we leave the topic of poisoned food in Christmas mysteries behind, I do want to give an honourable mention to The Corpse in the Snowman by Nicholas Blake, which was the pseudonym of the poet laureate Cecil Day-Lewis. As the title indicates, the key to this mystery is a snowman built in the grounds of Easterham Manor in Essex, the home of the Restorick family, where Blake's detective Nigel Strangeways is spending Christmas with his wife Georgia. As the thaw sets in, the snowman cracks open, revealing a dead body that has been hidden inside. An apparent suicide discovered in the house and both Nigel and the Scotland Yard detectives are baffled: is there a murderer at work or not? But the part that most interests me about this book is all the milk. This isn't strictly a Christmas food, I know, but it is a comforting beverage, reminiscent of childhood and ages past, and it crops up as a vehicle for questionable substances throughout this story. A kitten named Scribbles drinks what seems to be a drugged saucer of milk and then behaves very strangely during the family's midnight ghost-hunting expedition, and later some humans have cause to be suspicious of their milk too. And this isn't even the only Christmas murder mystery to infuse milk with sinister properties: I highly recommend seeking out the spooky and atmospheric 1925 festive short story "Cambric Tea" by Marjorie Bowen, which revolves around a potentially poisoned cup of the aforementioned cambric tea, a Victorian-era milky drink often given to children and invalids. So while not an explicitly Christmas food, milk is a beverage that has its part to play in the tradition of the festive murder mystery.

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Finally, we come to the third of our three categories of Christmas food mystery. This type concerns not the food itself, but the act of gathering around it — something I think we all agree is an intrinsic part of a holiday celebration. In real life, I think this is largely a positive phenomenon: getting to see loved ones you don't encounter often and sharing food with them is one of life's great pleasures. But in detective fiction, authors tend to focus on the negative side of such a gathering, that is, its potential for bringing buried tensions to the surface and forcing confrontations between friends and family members who dislike and even despise each other.

The marquee title for me in this area is An English Murder by Cyril Hare, also sometimes found in the US, appropriately enough, under the title The Christmas Murder. Hare adapted this story from his own 1948 BBC radio play Murder at Warbeck Hall, first publishing the novel version in 1951. Of course, this is after the official end of the golden age of detective fiction, but Hare is so self-consciously using the tropes and style of that period that I think it's reasonable to include it in our discussion. In fact, because he's able to assume a certain amount of knowledge about the structure of detective fiction in his readers, he's able to be all the more whimsical and clever with his plot. And he adds touches of the post WW2 austerity atmosphere to really emphasise that this is not a cosy Christmas mystery.

The Warbeck family and certain invited friends have gathered for the season at Warbeck Hall. They are a mismatched group, from the old invalid peer, his son, the leader of a fascist organisation, his first cousin, a socialist MP, a social climbing political wife, and a Jewish historian who is also a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp. They sit down to Christmas Dinner at eight o'clock on Christmas Eve in a country house that has been rather depleted in comfort and luxury by taxation and the servant problem. The room is cold, the company is inclined to be quarrelsome, and as Hare states, this all makes for "a remarkably cheerless Christmas dinner", which is salvaged only by the historian's skill at smoothing over awkward social occasions with bawdy humour. We are told very little about the food on the table, but it certainly isn't remarkable enough to persuade anyone to lay down their resentments and partake with good cheer.

Then at midnight, just as the village church bells can be heard ringing in the start of Christmas Day, one of the guests topples over after the festive champagne toast, dead. Other guests will soon follow, as the body count of the snowed-in country house party rises — at least two of them being the victim of poisoning. The extraordinary tension at that Christmas Eve dinner party has boiled over and become something murderous. We don't need to know what was on the menu to see how significant the meal is to the mystery.

The same effect can be seen in several other festive murder mysteries — I'll recommend you two. The first is Who Killed the Curate? by Joan Coggin from 1944, the first of a quartet of novels she wrote about Lady Lupin, an accidental detective who is married to a vicar. She is a good-natured, well-meaning person with a habit of conversational rambling, who doesn’t appear to be at all the kind of person who would enjoy parochial vicarage life, and yet she ends up thriving. In this story, when the widely disliked curate is discovered murdered, Lupin enlists the members of her Christmas house party to get at the truth. But the scene that stands out to me is the awkward Christmas dinner at the vicarage the day after the curate has been found dead. Despite the quality of the food, we are told that "no one had the heart to do more than toy with their portion, and when the pudding came in decorated with holly and in a dish of flame, they all averted their eyes". The festive meal does a good job of conveying the collective unease at the possible presence of a murderer at the table.

The second book I would point you towards for strained Christmas dinner atmosphere is Crime at Christmas by C.H.B. Kitchin. On Christmas Eve, an "ill-assorted" group of family and friends sit down for a festive meal in a large house in Hampstead, followed by an even more tense game of bridge and an undignified and fairly miserable round of party games. The narrator, Malcolm Warren, falls over during one of these and is put to bed in pain with a sleeping draft by a fellow guest, a doctor. When he wakes on Christmas morning, he looks out of the window and sees a dead body lying skewered by the railings in front of the house. A grisly sight for Christmas day, to be sure. Once again, the festive meal the night before has allowed the author to set up the tensions and problems among the house party, which then lead to this deathly climax.

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The detective novel can sometimes be a literary form that is rather light on description, preferring to focus instead on plot and character development. Unless it is relevant to either of those things, we tend not to learn what the houses these mysteries take place in look like, or what sort of music is played in the background, or what people are wearing. It's not relevant and we don't really miss it. But the Christmas murder mystery, we get to indulge in descriptions of dinners and decorations precisely because it does matter to the story. These festive elements are integrated into the mysteries, and, as we've seen, every course from turkey to pudding has a part to play.

In a murder mystery, Christmas dinner is never just Christmas dinner.

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This episode of Shedunnit was written, produced and hosted by me, Caroline Crampton.

You can find links to all the books and sources I referenced in the episode description and at shedunnitshow.com/achristmasfeast. I publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.

If you'd like to stay in touch with the podcast between episodes, sign up for the weekly Shedunnit newsletter at shedunnitshow.com/newsletter. It's the best way to get more murder mystery reading recommendations and know what's coming up on the podcast before anyone else.

Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece and production assistance came from Leandra Griffith.

Thanks for listening.