The Christmas Murders

A seasonal gift for connoisseurs of true crime Here are ten murder cases of the old-fashioned sortevoking a nostalgia more obviously associated with fictionthat all took place during the festive period from mid-December to Twelfth Night between 1811 and 1933. The settings of these grisly tales range from the Knickerbocker Athletic Club in New York (where a gentleman named Molineux provided a drastic cure for hangovers by putting cyanide in a gift-wrapped bottle of Bromo Seltzer) to an apartment in Glasgow (home of a wealthy Scotswoman whose demise seemed to have been satisfactorily explained by local constables, until Arthur Conan Doyle assumed the role of Sherlock Holmes) and from a builders workshop in North London (site of a murder committed by a man called Furnace, who suited his criminal action to his name) to the elegant dwelling of a mnage trois near the Thames (scene of a puzzling poisoning that, years later, Raymond Chandler tried, unofficially, to solve). In The Christmas Murders, Jonathan Goodman has collected stories as fascinating and compulsively readable as one would expect from a writer described by Jacques Barzun as the greatest living master of true-crime literature and by Julian Symons as the premier investigator of crimes past.