Cocktail Talk: Death in December
Here’s another Cocktail Talk quote from one of the super swell British Library Crime Classics anthologies. We’ve had a number of them on here in the past, as I’ve been slowly picking these collections up – there are a fair amount, all well edited by the hardest-working editor (at least it seems so from the many collections and individual novel reprints he’s edited) in fiction, Martin Edwards. Each, as a reminder or if you missed them in the past, features an assortment of mystery stories from better-known and lesser-known British writers who put pen to paper around the beginning of last century, with a little wiggle room on dates, all around a central theme. Today, the anthology is called Crimson Snow, and as you might expect, all the mysteries within it take place in winter, many around the holidays proper. Like in other collections in the series, some of the stories are known, some lesser-known, and some recovered by Mr. Edwards from deep in the pile, so to speak (meaning, they’d not be known at all today if he hadn’t dived deep into the British Library archives to find them). Being able to read these latter stories is amazing, to me, as nearly all are worthy reads, and ones I’d never have found on my own. Even some that were by authors very popular in their time, such as Victor Gunn (aka Edwy Searles Brooks), who wrote the story the below quote is from, a story called, straightforwardly enough, Death in December. Mr. Brooks wrote a fairly massive amount of books, and while he isn’t read as much today, perhaps he should be – these anthologies are great for introducing you to writers you don’t know but can hunt down more books by. This particular story features a sturdy, no-nonsense police detective named Bill “Ironsides” Cromwell (who featured in 43 books!) and his sidekick younger sergeant Johnny Lister, who find themselves trapped at country-house holiday party in a snowstorm, with a corpse (or two), lots of holiday merrymakers, an impossible crime, a ghost (?), and more chilly fun. As well as some excellent hot toddy.
Bill Cromwell and Johnny Lister quite naturally found themselves in a little gathering of men round the library fire after the ladies and more of the other guests had retired for the night. There was some excellent hot toddy going, and, incidentally, going fast. Everybody round the first was very talkative and affable; men who had not met one another until that same evening were pouring confidences into one another’s ears, and forgetting all about them the next minute.
–Victor Gunn, Death in December
