“From Christmas Day to New Year’s Eve, Lisbeth Salander was disconnected from the world. She didn’t pick up the phone or turn on the computer. She did the laundry, scrubbed the floors, and did some chores for two days.” The everyday lonely life that Stieg Larsson’s heroine takes refuge at the end of the first installment.millennium, Men who don’t like womenIt’s a utopia to get away from the darkness and action that often fills their hours, because both in reality and in fiction, evil does not give us a truce, and even on these dates filled with carols, hugs, banquets and gifts The horror that took place between the lottery draw and Twelfth Night stains newspaper headlines with our pain and joy. Fiction pages top of sales charts“Suspense” “Waiting for the Flood” (Dolores Redondo), “Everything Is Burning” (Juan Gómez-Jurado) and “Las madres” (Carmen Mola) take first place every week this year. Front your book Best sellers.
But what if we go one step further? What if, let alone be content with blood without more, We’re looking for “Christmas blood”A literature of death, suspense, and intrigue set at a time of year when the constant appeal to peace, philanthropy, and love turns into a persistent hammer blow? We will definitely be surprised.
a good classic
Our surprise will begin by checking the shelves of the classics. in 1892 Arthur Conan Doyle wrote ‘The Blue Carbuncle’A story starring Holmes and Watson in which Holmes and Watson, while visiting their friend on Baker Street, on December 25, find themselves involved in the investigation into the discovery of the carbuncle, a precious stone found in a goose’s stomach.
with Conan Doyle, Christie Agatha also contributed A few decades later, in 1938, the Christmas detective made a grain of sand on his very high mountain. Inside ‘Tragic Christmas’ is probably his most ‘bloody’ novelOne of her favorite dilemmas, the locked room – a construction of the intrigue narrative where Christmas works – appeals to us to present the Lee family’s Christmas Eve, the unpredictable scene of the murder of its despotic patriarch, and the situation they’re in. The intervention of Hercule Poirot was summoned.
But not only did Christie and Doyle’s famous detectives have to give up their family reunions and tree to pursue crime. Also, Raymond Chandler’s most charismatic character, Philip Marlowe, had to work through the throes of December. She did so in ‘Lady in the Lake’ (1943), which begins with the disappearance of two mysterious women and, like many of Chandler’s narratives, uses the open event to stray into places where much-needed human consciousness and perversion are more diffuse.
on his behalf Georges Simenon found a hole It was among the nearly 80 novels Maigret played to give his famous investigator a plot in Santa Claus time, and in 1951 he published ‘Maigret’s Hectic Christmas’ with the same successful reception of the entire series.
From Black to Harper
This is how the Christmas ‘noir’ constant, which we can almost accept the existence of a subspecies, has survived. Writers like Mary Higgins Clark or Anne Perry were tempted to fictionalize their stories during this period. However, it is John Banville, who is captured by his criminal alter ego Benjamin Black, who deserves our attention a little longer on his proposal: ‘Sin’ won the RBA Award in 2017 noir novelHe abandons Black’s most popular character, Quirke, and takes us to Wexford, Ireland, on Christmas 1957. There, Father Tom is found dead in the library of the Osborne family estate, and Inspector Strafford is determined to unravel the motives of the crime. and the identity of the killer.
At the nearly opposite poles of Ireland, in the almost uninhabitable wasteland of Queensland (Australia), novelist Jane Harper chose Christmas to contextualize her best novel, The Lost Man (2018); a family tragedy in which violent death is not lacking and which leads us, on the one hand, to the aforementioned Agatha Christie’s ‘Tragic Christmas’; and on the other hand, this is where both the strength and quality of the emotional currents of Greek and Shakespearean tragedy lie when Cameron Bright’s body appears dehydrated and sunburned next to the Farmer’s Grave. an ominous monument in the middle of the desert.
short but intense
Perhaps we should look to ‘Perfidy’, published in 2014, the first volume of James Ellroy’s ‘Second Los Angeles Quartet’, which began on December 6, 1941 and takes us to Christmas before the United States entered WWII. ; or Alexandra Benedict’s ‘The House of Enigmas’, which has colonized the novelty desks of our bookstores in recent weeks… However, after Conan Doyle’s ‘The Blue Carbuncle’, it is worth mentioning: two short but intense pieces in the case of voltage miniatures. One of them, ‘The ticking of a clock at Christmas’ (1984), is a work by a teacher, Patricia Highsmith, which once again succeeds when it comes to evoking our discomfort as observers of the behaviors she recreates in its pages. With this story, a wealthy couple’s wife has a strange relationship with some chestnuts from the neighborhood whom she invites to her home several times without stopping to spend on trinkets and gifts. The results of these visits, which will of course have consequences, can be read in the ‘Mermaids on the golf course’ Anagrama compilation.
Accompanying Highsmith on this A short selection of short texts during Christmas carolswe must remember Andrea Camilleri and ‘La Nochevieja de Montalbano’ (1999), which forms the sixth part of the adventures of the famous Vigata commissioner and titles the stories where it all began – it couldn’t be otherwise – as Montalbano prepares to end the year angrily at his eternal girlfriend Livia and crime is around the corner. sensing his view.
There are many more: PD James, Stuart MacBride, Lee Child, Louise Jenny… Even W. Somerset Maugham’s ‘Christmas Vacations’ in 1939 can be considered black to some extent. But to finish this reconnaissance flight middle ground between loving and bloodyand paying homage to the motto of these holidays, homecoming, we should mention the third novel, ‘Golpe de Reyes’, starring Commissioner Bernal, created by David Serafín, and which is now easier to find in second-rate circles. .
Written in 2012, ‘Golpe de Reyes’ takes us back to Christmas 1981, when strange messages began appearing in a conservative newspaper, repeating a mysterious key: WIZARDS. afraid of what you look like unforeseen threatIn , the Royal House persuades Bernal to launch a series of investigations parallel to the Madrid festivity on Christmas Eve, so that the blood and mystery is presented to the reader’s delight and we can’t give up. A period in which the lovable becomes obligatory and love is called right and left. Maybe we need them… for that very reason.