
There’s something about reading a seasonal mystery during the actual season, and I do such a poor job of this. Every winter I find myself binging on a wide spread of stories (due to extra spare time), but rarely an actual winter mystery. And then, inevitably come some time around April, I find myself hitting a snowbound story and wondering why I didn’t read it back when my house was surrounded by two feet of white. And so this year, I decided that I’ll actually pack my winter with winter-appropriate reads… although I’ll tell you now that I’m probably going to fail at that resolution. It’s just that I have all of these other recent acquisitions that I’m dying to get to, and I don’t know that I’ll make time for Mystery in White, Portrait of a Murderer, or Envious Casca… this year. And inevitably, come the spring, I’ll find myself regretting…
It’s been half a year since I read a Christie, and she just seemed like the natural fit for my mission for a solid holiday read. The problem though is that A Holiday for Murder (more famously published as Hercule Poirot’s Christmas and Murder for Christmas) has zero feeling of the holidays. Other than the premise of the characters gathering together for the holidays (and the question of whether to feed the servants beef instead of chicken), there’s really nothing wintery about the story, much less Christmasy. It might as well have taken place in July.
Continue reading “A Holiday for Murder – Agatha Christie (1938)”