Christmas? It’s a Mystery
Simon Lee, Professor of Law at the Open University writes about his interest in Christmas crime novels and recommends trying your hand at one....
The Twelve Days of Christmas run from Christmas Day itself to the eve of the Feast of the Epiphany, which is therefore also called, not least by William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night. A good challenge for Law students would be to take a break from your normal routine to read one short story on each of these days, ideally crime fiction set at Christmas. An even better discipline is to see if you could also write two or three hundred words a day towards your own short Christmas mystery story of around two thousand words.
Since many of the classic examples are out of copyright, you can find them for free on-line. If you can afford to buy a book of such stories, there are many compilations. Several have been edited by someone I knew when we were law students. When I was a first year undergraduate in 1976, the other student who spent the most time in our college law library was in his final year, Martin Edwards. He became a solicitor and then an award-winning crime-writer. He is also the series editor of the British Library crime classics and edits the volumes of Christmas short stories which are so popular. So if you put his name into a search engine or a bookseller’s website, you will see anthology titles such as this year’s A Surprise for Christmas, which follows Silent Nights, Crimson Snow, and The Christmas Card Crime, available for under ten pounds each new or for a few pounds each second-hand. With (you guessed it) twelve stories each in A Surprise for Christmas, for example, this sets your reading for the season. Martin Edwards’ introductions show what fun can be had in research, in this case by tracking down stories, still benefiting from the company you keep in a library, in this case the British Library.
Or you may have a favourite author of your own who might be asked by magazines and newspapers to write a Christmas short story, which you might be able to find in their on-line archives. Four examples by the great P D James have been brought together, with a preface by Baroness James herself and a foreword by Val McDermid in The Mistletoe Murder. The foreword and the preface are both short masterpieces in the art of detective novels, crime writing and short stories. It turns out that the skills involved have much in common with those expected of law students.
If you can’t find, or afford to find, any stories through these routes, you will at least be able to read for free on-line summaries of these stories, or of full-length crime novels set at Christmas.
So why is this worth doing? It is enjoyable in its own right. It is sufficiently different to normal legal study to be refreshing but it is sufficiently similar to keep you in training, so to speak, for life as a law student which does require reading and reflecting on texts, then writing about them or writing in ways which apply the lessons learned from them. It encourages you to think about law, about justice and about life. Writing well comes from reading well and reading widely.
Some will think that this is a waste of time as it is not part of a module and most of our students have significant responsibilities beyond degree work, for instance, in jobs, in families, in volunteering in the community, especially in this extraordinary year and over such an unusual Christmas. If you think like that, then this challenge may not be for you or at least not this year.
On the other hand, this might be a Christmas like no other in the sense of more time alone or just more free time. It is a good interview question for jobs or further studying opportunities or for volunteering roles to ask if you have read outside your course materials and if you have written beyond required assignments. If one of your possible answers is that you have met this challenge and written your own short story, you will be confident of surprising your interviewer. Despite the reputation of law studies and of legal practice, both require imagination.
I also think that the genre needs rejuvenating. We cannot all emulate Martin Edwards or P F James or Val McDermid but there are gaps. I will have a go myself. For a start, many of these stories are not really about Christmas but merely use the fact that people often gather in a different house as the setting for a murder mystery. It is a convention of the genre that there should be a limited number of plausible suspects and so a temporarily closed community is a common choice by authors, which explains the popularity in the 1930s, for instance, of the country house weekend murder mystery. Some could have happened at any time and have simply been re-packaged, with new titles to play on the popularity of Christmas murder mysteries. So if you could genuinely relate your story in some way to Christmas itself, and/or to the twelve days of Christmas, that would mark you out from hundreds of other writers. You do not have to celebrate Christmas yourself to be able to contribute. Indeed, a perspective from another faith or from someone without any religious belief could be refreshing.
Moreover, the twelve days of this particular Christmas in lockdown, with the different rules in the different nations of the United Kingdom, present novel opportunities for novelists to imagine surprising stories. At the end of the transition period after the UK left the EU, 2020 presents political opportunities aplenty to explore.
Why, though, is it murder mysteries which dominate Christmas reading and indeed fiction-reading at other holiday times and throughout the year? It is, literally (see what I did there?), macabre. The introductions by Martin Edwards, Val McDermid and other editors of anthologies often address this phenomenon. It is a little like asking why study law? Crime fiction and legal degrees are, in their different ways, each a way of learning about justice and character, about interpreting events, and about keeping an open mind. I touched on the importance of open-mindedness, including through a different kind of fiction, in my essay on ‘Open and Shut Cases’ in the book just published by the Open University Law School, which is freely available on-line to download, Law in Motion: 50 Years of Legal Change, edited by my colleagues, Lisa Claydon, Caroline Derry and Marjan Ajevski:
http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/50YearsOfLaw/?p=210
As you will see in that essay, I encouraged law students thirty years ago to read fiction and to write their own mini-sequels. Former students frequently tell me that they found that an enjoyable and instructive lesson. Please let me know in 2050 or 2060 if you have found the same through reading this year, or next or when you are ready, a short story a day for the twelve days of Christmas.
To encourage you, without any plot-spoilers, I will reveal three gifts by three wise women in the 2020 anthology, A Surprise for Christmas. Its first short story is by Catherine Louisa Pirkis, first published in 1893, ‘The Black Bag Left on a Doorstep’, introducing one of the great fictional female detectives of the Victorian era, Loveday Brooke. A sample opening line, which could fire your imagination, is Ngaio Marsh’s in ‘Death on the Air’, from 1937: ‘On the 25th of December at 7.30 am Mr Septimus Tonks was found dead by his wireless set.’ The first words of Anthony Gilbert’s 1955 (very long) short story ‘Give Me A Ring’ are ‘It was Christmas Eve’. Wait a minute, how is that a gift by a wise woman? Anthony Gilbert was one of Lucy Malleson’s pen names.
Finally, please use your imagination to think about a book cover for a collection of Open Justice short stories. One lesson of the British Library’s publishing is that the titles and the covers do matter. Whether or not you should judge a book by its cover, you can uncover a judge’s life by her attitude to books. Although Lord Reed, now the President of the UK Supreme Court, told law students in Hong Kong in 2018 not to spend too much time in the library
my recollection is that when Robert Reed was a doctoral student, he had taken over from Martin Edwards as the person most likely to be found in my college law library. If you can incorporate law students and a virtual library, as well as all twelve days of Christmas, lockdown and Brexit into your own short story, there is every possibility that next year it will be part of this Open Justice initiative. Happy Christmas!
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Professor Simon Lee
Simon Lee is Professor of Law at The Open University. In the run-up to his 60th birthday, he re-read and wrote about 60 of his favourite books in 60 days:
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