“You complained that my murders were getting too refined,” notes Agatha Christie in the dedication to Hercule Poirot’s Christmas (1938) – the novel she wrote in response to criticism from her brother-in-law, James Watts. “You yearned for ‘a good violent murder with lots of blood’. A murder where there was no doubt about its being murder! So this is your special story… I hope it may please.” It no doubt did: less than a quarter of the way through the novel, someone is already lying “in a great pool of blood”, jugular severed. Quoting a line from Macbeth, one character asks, “Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?”
It’s not exactly the cosy, fireside Christmas story readers might be hoping for, but Hercule Poirot’s Christmas is the most polished example of a perplexing subgenre of crime fiction: the festive murder mystery. These novels trade in the juxtaposition of Christmas cheer and violent crime, and the results are often – as in Christie’s tale – unsettlingly graphic. Take the murder scene from the extravagantly pen-named Noelle Albright’s The Christmas Eve Murders (2024): when the lights come back on after a power cut during a Christmas-themed scavenger hunt, a body is found with “a corkscrew sticking out of his neck”. Albright makes much out of the scene’s festive grotesquerie, writing: “The Christmas music had started again when the power had returned. The volume was low and yet the song felt so intrusive. Alex stood checking his stepbrother’s pulse to the soundtrack of ‘Silver Bells’ by Dean Martin until he was certain there were no signs of life.” Feeling warm and jolly yet?
Things are no better in Alexandra Benedict’s Murder on the Christmas Express (2022): after descriptions of domestic abuse and rape, we are shown into the train compartment of a recently deceased passenger whose corpse is surrounded by handmade paper decorations and sprigs of mistletoe. Worse still is Ada Moncrieff’s Murder Most Festive (2020), in which a guest at a large country estate is found with his shotgun-blasted brains seeping into the Christmas-morning snow. “Absurd, isn’t it?” asks one of his fellow guests. “Here I am in my dressing gown, all the presents under the Christmas tree in the drawing room… And outside… David’s lying dead.” Absurd? Yes. But also – perversely – rather entertaining.
As Christie’s novel shows, there’s nothing new about killing people at Christmas. Still, the festive crime novel has become something of a trend in the past decade. In 2014, the British Library Crime Classics list republished J Jefferson Farjeon’s Mystery in White (1937), its cover adorned with the new subtitle A Christmas Crime Story and a vintage illustration of a train surrounded by snow. The repackaged novel was, according to series consultant Martin Edwards, “a huge bestseller in the UK” – and its surprise commercial success started a wave of publishers rereleasing festive crime novels with new covers and, in some cases, titles. Georgette Heyer’s Envious Casca (1941), for instance, became A Christmas Party in 2015, while Lorna Nicholl Morgan’s Another Little Murder (1947) was more subtly retitled Another Little Christmas Murder in 2016. Dozens of largely neglected novels are now back in bookshops, appealing to a new readership – and sparking a swathe of Christmas crime novels by contemporary writers. The 2025 season has seen additions including Nicola Upson’s The Christmas Clue, the Reverend Richard Coles’s Murder Under the Mistletoe and Alexandra Benedict’s The Christmas Cracker Killer. The appeal isn’t immediately obvious: murder and a mince pie are not the most logical of pairings. So, what is it about this quaint subgenre of crime fiction which appeals to readers – and writers?
When a police constable suggests that “Christmas time is an unlikely season for crime”, Poirot disagrees. “Families who have been separated throughout the year,” he observes in Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, “assemble once more together. Now under these conditions, my friend, you must admit that there will occur a great amount of strain… There is at Christmas time a great deal of hypocrisy, honourable hypocrisy, hypocrisy undertaken pour le bon motif, c’est entendu, but nevertheless hypocrisy!” The appeal for crime writers isn’t hard to see: Christmas is the perfect time to knock someone off. Moncrieff’s Murder Most Festive is set in 1938 at the country estate of the Westbury family. Tensions are, as is often the case during large family gatherings, high; the novel’s first line of dialogue is: “Must you be quite so incessantly unbearable?” Janice Hallett stages The Christmas Appeal (2023) amid an amateur-dramatic troupe’s annual pantomime; you get the feeling that everyone could have a motive for killing anyone. And in Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, an ageing patriarch invites his estranged children for Christmas, providing the perfect excuse for Christie to gather a group of characters who have a great deal of bad blood – and kill at least one of them.
Christmas, and its attendant drama, is a gift for crime writers. What’s more, the subgenre is a lucrative one. Detective novels make good presents and genre writers are evidently being encouraged to churn out festive contributions which are almost guaranteed to provide strong sales in the run-up to Christmas. In the acknowledgements to The Christmas Appeal (2023), for instance, Janice Hallett writes that she had “no inclination to revisit the world of The Appeal ” – her bestselling (and non-festive) 2021 novel – until her “exceptionally talented editor… mentioned that a Christmas story might be an exciting adventure”. Exciting and lucrative, given that The Christmas Appeal became a Sunday Times bestseller.
This leaves one glaring question: why do we want to read the stuff? As Poirot notes, the Christmas period can be rife with tension, bringing out the worst in people – and festive crime novels have a pleasing mimetic function. When readers are knee-deep in the drama of their own seasonal nightmares, it can be a useful diversion to read a book which pokes fun at the festive period. Reflected in Christmas crime novels are the insufferable guests that appear in many households: “What is it the French say?” asks one particularly noxious (and sherry-drunk) visitor in Murder Most Festive. “Cherchez le frightful bore droning on about ‘social injustice’ and the frightful bore droning on about ‘social injustice’ shall appear?” Later in the novel, a game of charades becomes heated: “Stephen was very loudly berating Freddie for failing to decipher his… depiction of the Spanish Inquisition.” All this feels rather familiar: these novels reflect our own suffering back to us with humour. However, for readers who might be feeling faint homicidal urges, the books also offer catharsis: here, someone will pick up the carving knife and stab their vaguely fascist cousin, or lace the trifle with strychnine, or garrotte their stepfather with a garland of tinsel.
Still, for most readers the real appeal of Christmas mysteries is likely slightly less psychological: like a Hallmark movie, the tropes of crime fiction are familiar to the point of comfort – and so, paradoxically, there’s something reassuring about the moment when the bodies begin to drop. From there, everything’s under control: a detective will begin to investigate; clues will be revealed; red herrings will be planted; and, by the last chapter, everything will be tied up with a bow. This is the fantasy of a genre that presents the mess of murder but, ultimately, gives us tidy resolution. Throw in some stock festive imagery, a good amount of campy drama, a group of ridiculously extravagant suspects, and the Christmas crime novel makes sense: it’s easy reading for cold nights.
At one point in Murder Most Festive, one of the guests makes a suggestion: “Can we please swear an oath to ensure that next Christmas will be one of tranquillity and goodwill to all men?” A good idea, perhaps – but where would the fun be in that?
[Further reading: Books of the year 2025]
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This article appears in the 12 Dec 2025 issue of the New Statesman, All Alone: Christmas Special 2025
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