Mystery in White: A Christmas Crime Story (British Library Crime Classics)

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Jefferson Farjeon layers on the twists and builds the eccentric plot as one of the group takes the lead and the various elements one by one come together.

While the eerie tone contributes greatly, there is not much mystery surrounding the characters as Farjeon presents them. Farjeon is now best known as the author of Number Seventeen, a play that was adapted for the big screen by Alfred Hitchcock. It is an interesting listen, especially knowing it is one of a number of forgotten British mystery classics republished by the British Library. His first published work was in 1924 when Brentano's produced 'The Master Criminal', which is a tale of identity reversal involving two brothers, one a master detective, the other a master criminal. So bearing in mind that this story is set in the 20s after the 1st world war and therefore some of the language and vocabulary might seem old fashioned , the story is so clever and well written and keeps you guessing.Tras abandonar el tren una nevada los obliga a refugiarse en una casa donde también hay crímenes y misterio. Anyhow, if you are looking for social political commentary that will blow your mind and change your life look elsewhere. This is not exactly a ghost story, but there certainly is a rather creepy element to the whole story, though it’s handled lightly and left up to the reader to decide. The British Library Crime Classics have excelled themselves with this delightfully lively and tantalising novel, which was first published in 1937.

The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs.The whole set up is quite wildly improbable and the amateur detective (a psychic expert) is perhaps a little too insightful, but all the disparate people and elements of the plot make for a darn good story. I also seem to remember getting frustrated with the character who appoints himself as a leader of the group though my memory may be cheating me! The psychic, Edward Maltby, decides to leave the train and attempt to find another station and he is soon followed by others from his train carriage. From that point on, characters come in and info dump to explain murders (in the past and present), motives and a possibility that all the eerieness was simply the creation of a character's psychic powers which all conspired to create quite a bit of dissonance for this reader.

After this delightfully intriguing start, things get more and more puzzling for the trapped visitors.

It is still not that often that I have come across depictions of characters suffering from shell shock in the original 1920s/30s mysteries. A murder turns out to have taken place on the train, and later another body is discovered in the snow. No one in their right mind would get tea all ready only to leave the house in the middle of a snow storm.

A strange assortment of passengers traveling by train during a blizzard find themselves caught in an acute dilemma when the track becomes impassable. And there is a mysterious portrait that appears to be keeping an eye on all those present from its prominent position at the head of the stairs. But a deserted house where a bread knife lays on the floor, the kettle is boiling, the fires are lit and tea is laid. Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. There was one part of several pages I had to re-read several times to get it all straight in my mind and, to my mind, the ending was very messy and unsatisfying.Interesting from a social history viewpoint and it is festive, but not in the same league as Dennis Wheatley or Agatha Christie. Farjeon, in contrast, shows the promise of the former but delivers by the end a story that is less than the sum of its very intriguing individual parts. Unexplained deaths are then discovered and eventually, when other uninvited guests find their way to the house, a story begins to unfold and, providing one can keep all the threads together, an explanation, and solution, to the mystery, appropriately late on Christmas Day, is finally is reached. The Crime Classics stand out against the darker crop of contemporary crime fiction and offer something a bit different.