Xmas Thrillers: The Greatest Holiday Mysteries in One Volume

Victorian and Edwardian Holiday Mysteries, Ghost Stories, and Gothic Suspense

Edgar Wallace, Arthur Conan Doyle, R. Austin Freeman, Fred M. White, G. K. Chesterton, Arthur Cheney Train, Wilkie Collins, Emmuska Orczy, Louisa M. Alcott, M. R. James, Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sabine Baring-Gould, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens, Fergus Hume, John Kendrick Bangs, Jerome K. Jerome

• Publisher: e-artnow
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9788027301324
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Littérature policière et sur le mystère

Xmas Thrillers gathers holiday mysteries in which festivity becomes an occasion for secrecy, menace, detection, and the uncanny. Spanning sensation fiction, detective puzzles, Gothic terror, comic misdirection, supernatural tale, and psychological suspense, the volume situates Christmas within the rich nineteenth- and early twentieth-century traditions of popular narrative. Domestic celebrations, winter travel, inherited houses, and seasonal charity repeatedly acquire darker implications, while notable locked rooms, apparitions, disappearances, and revelations demonstrate the remarkable adaptability of the mystery form. Its contributors include major architects of detective and crime writing alongside innovators of the Gothic, the ghost story, children's literature, social realism, and comic fiction. Figures such as Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, G. K. Chesterton, M. R. James, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Algernon Blackwood participate in a broad literary culture shaped by Victorian sensation, fin-de-siècle anxieties, Edwardian detective fiction, and the expanding periodical marketplace. Their varied approaches reveal how Christmas could mediate questions of class, family, faith, modernity, and concealed violence. Recommended for readers of classic mysteries and scholars of popular literature, this capacious anthology offers an unusually vivid encounter with the holiday tale's darker history. Its many voices invite comparison across genres and decades, making the collection both an engaging seasonal read and a valuable study in literary dialogue.

Table of contents

• Xmas Thrillers: The Greatest Holiday Mysteries in One Volume
• Table of Contents
• The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle (Arthur Conan Doyle)
• The Flying Stars (G. K. Chesterton)
• Percival Bland's Proxy (R. Austin Freeman)
• A Christmas Capture (Fred M. White)
• McAllister's Christmas (Arthur Cheney Train)
• The Mystery of Room Five (Fred M White)
• A Policeman’s Business (Edgar Wallace)
• Stuffing (Edgar Wallace)
• Mr Wray’s Cash Box or, the Mask and the Mystery (Wilkie Collins)
• The Adventure of the Second Swag (Robert Barr)
• An Exciting Christmas Eve or, My Lecture on Dynamite (Arthur Conan Doyle)
• A Chaparral Christmas Gift (O. Henry)
• A Christmas Tragedy (Emmuska Orczy)
• The Thieves Who Couldn’t Stop Sneezing (Thomas Hardy)
• The Silver Hatchet (Arthur Conan Doyle)
• What the Shepherd Saw: A Tale of Four Moonlight Nights (Thomas Hardy)
• Markheim (Robert Louis Stevenson)
• The Wolves of Cernogratz (Saki)
• Mustapha (Sabine Baring-Gould)
• The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance (M.R. James)
• The Christmas Banquet (Nathaniel Hawthorne)
• The Haunted Man (Charles Dickens)
• Doctor Marigold’s Prescriptions (Charles Dickens)
• The Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens)
• The Ghost’s Touch (Fergus Hume)
• Glámr (Sabine Baring-Gould)
• The Ghosts at Grantley (Leonard Kip)
• A Terrible Christmas Eve (Lucie E. Jackson)
• Ghosts and Family Legends (Catherine Crowe)
• The Ghost: A Christmas Story (William Douglas O’Connor)
• Thurlow’s Christmas Story (John Kendrick Bangs)
• The Mystery of My Grandmother’s Hair Sofa (John Kendrick Bangs)
• The Abbot’s Ghost; or Maurice Treherne’s Temptation (Louisa M. Alcott)
• Old Applejoy's Ghost (Frank R. Stockton)
• Wolverden Tower (Grant Allen)
• The Christmas-Eve Vigil (James Bowker)
• Told After Supper (Jerome K. Jerome)
• The Box with the Iron Clamps (Florence Marryat)
• Joseph: A Story (Katherine Rickford)
• The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton (Charles Dickens)
• The Ghost of Christmas Eve (J. M. Barrie)
• The Dead Sexton (Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu)
• Uncle Cornelius His Story (George MacDonald)
• The Grave by the Handpost (Thomas Hardy)
• Number Ninety (Bithia Mary Croker)
• At Chrighton Abbey (Mary Elizabeth Braddon)
• The Black Bag Left on a Door-Step (Catherine L. Pirkis)
• Between the Lights (E. F. Benson)
• Transition (Algernon Blackwood)
• The Kit-Bag (Algernon Blackwood)