The Christmas Stocking Murders (A Frank Grasby Mystery, 2)
The Christmas Stocking Murders is, as the title suggests, a cozy crime mystery for the Christmas season. It’s reviewed here as historical fiction because it is set in 1953, but the historical element is minimal.
The book has a sort of vaguely 1950s feel to it but little real understanding of the day-to-day drabness of the period. There are occasional references to rationing, but nobody ever has to produce ration coupons for anything, though they were a miserable daily reminder of wartime restrictions. Sugar and sweets had just been taken off the ration, but when people are enjoying Christmas cheer nobody remarks on how, only a few months earlier, their sugar would have been limited by government order. At one point, someone needs a phone line reconnecting, and it is done overnight. Even in the 1960s, getting a phone line connected could take weeks. Life was different in those days.
Once you accept that period detail isn’t the book’s strong point, does it work as a mystery? It’s not Agatha Christie. It aims for character-driven amusement rather than offering a problem to work out. Our policeman hero, his overweight boss, his embarrassing father, and his father’s unlikely girlfriend are all trapped in a Yorkshire fishing village cut off by snow. (December 1953 was unusually mild, but let that pass.) People are murdered. There is smuggling. The mafia are involved. Lots of short sentences. Whimsical humour. That sort of thing.
If this aspect is something you enjoy, this is an ideal Christmas gift. I didn’t laugh out loud, but I chuckled a few times. If jokes involving fat men getting stuck climbing through windows don’t appeal, it’s probably not for you. If they do, then Christmas has come early.
