“From Christmas day to New Year’s Eve, Lisbeth Salander was disconnected from the world. She did not pick up the phone and did not turn on the computer. She spent two days doing laundry, scrubbing the floor and doing some housework.” The solitary daily life in which the heroine of Stieg Larsson takes refuge at the end of the first installment of ‘Millennium, Men who did not love women’moving away from the darkness and action that usually fill his hours, is a utopia because, both in reality and in fiction, evil does not give us truce and, even on these dates saturated with Christmas carols, hugs, feasts and gifts that take place between the lottery draw and Twelfth Night, the horror stains the newspaper headlines to our bitterness, and to our joy the pages of fiction that tops the sales chartswhere the ‘thrillers’ ‘Waiting for the flood’ (Dolores Redondo), ‘Everything burns’ (Juan Gómez-Jurado) and ‘Las madres’ (Carmen Mola) take turns weekly this year at the top of the ten books Best sellers.
But what if we go one step further? And what if, far from being satisfied with blood without more, we look for the “Christmas blood”, literature of death, suspense and intrigue set in a period of the year where the constant recourse to peace, charity and love ends up becoming an insistent hammering? We will certainly 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 the latter, when visiting his friend in Baker Street on December 25, finds himself involved in the investigation of a strange discovery, that of a precious stone, the carbuncle, in the stomach of a goose
Along with Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie also contributed a few decades later, in 1938, his grain of sand to the very high mountain of the Christmas detective. In ‘Tragic Christmas’, probably his most ‘gore’ novelresorts to one of his favorite dilemmas, the locked room —a structure of the intrigue narrative to which Christmas comes in handy—, to present us with the Lee family’s Christmas Eve, the unforeseen scene of the murder of their despotic patriarch and situation in which the intervention of Hercule Poirot is called out.
But not only the famous detectives of Christie and Doyle had to give up family reunions and the tree to pursue crime. Also Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler’s most charismatic character, had to work in the throes of December. He did so in ‘Lady in the Lake’ (1943), which opens with the disappearance of two mysterious women and, like most of Chandler’s narrative, uses explicit event to veer into places of much-needed human consciousness and perversion. more diffuse.
For his part, Georges Simenon found a hole among the almost 80 novels starring Maigret to give his famous researcher a plot in Santa Claus time, and in 1951 he published ‘Maigret’s hectic Christmas’, with the same successful reception of the entire series.
De Black a Harper
This has been how the constant of the Christmas ‘noir’, to which we could almost grant the entity of a subgenre, has reached our days. Authors like Mary Higgins Clark or Anne Perry have fallen into the temptation of setting their stories at this time. However, it is John Banville, possessed by his criminal alter ego, Benjamin Black, who deserves us to linger a little longer on his proposal: ‘Sin’, which in 2017 won the RBA Award for black noveldispenses with Quirke, Black’s most popular character, and takes us to County Wexford, Ireland, during Christmas 1957. There, in the library of the Osborne family mansion, Father Tom is found dead and Inspector Strafford is determined to unravel the reasons for the crime and the identity of the murderer.
Almost at the antipodes of Ireland, in the practically uninhabitable aridity of Queensland (Australia), the novelist Jane Harper chose Christmas to contextualize ‘The Lost Man’ (2018), her best novel; a family tragedy in which there is no lack of violent death and which refers us, on the one hand, to the aforementioned ‘Tragic Christmas’, by Agatha Christie; and, on the other, and this is where both its strength and its quality reside, to the emotional currents of Greek and Shakespearean tragedy, which begin to circulate when Cameron Bright’s body appears dehydrated and sunburned next to the Tomb. of the Rancher, a sinister monument in the middle of the desert.
brief but intense
Perhaps we should delve into James Ellroy’s ‘Perfidy’, published in 2014, the first volume of the ‘Second Los Angeles Quartet’, which starts on December 6, 1941 and places us in the Christmas before the United States entered In the Second World War; or in ‘The House of Enigmas’, by Alexandra Benedict, which has colonized the novelties tables of our bookstores in recent weeks… However, it is worthwhile that, in the wake of ‘The Blue Carbuncle’, by Conan Doyle , let’s highlight two short but intense pieces in their condition of suspense miniatures. One of them, ‘The ticking of a clock at Christmas’ (1984), is the work of Patricia Highsmith, a teacher when it comes to arousing our discomfort as observers of the behaviors that she recreates on her pages, something she achieves once again with this story, in which the wife of a wealthy couple establishes a peculiar relationship with some urchins from her neighborhood, whom she invites to come up to her apartment a couple of times while she does not stop spending on trifles and gifts. The outcome of these visits, which of course will have consequences, can be read in the Anagrama compilation ‘Mermaids on the golf course’.
Accompanying Highsmith in this fleeting selection of short texts at the time of Christmas carolswe must remember Andrea Camilleri and ‘La Nochevieja de Montalbano’ (1999), the story that gives title to the stories that constitute the sixth installment of the adventures of the famous Vigata commissioner and in which everything begins —it could not be otherwise way—with Montalbano preparing to end the year angry with his eternal girlfriend, Livia, and sensing the appearance of crime around the corner.
There are many more names: PD James, Stuart MacBride, Lee Child, Louise Jenny… Even W. Somerset Maugham’s ‘Christmas Holidays’, written in 1939, can be considered to some extent noir. But to end this reconnaissance flight halfway between endearing and bloodyand respecting the maxim of these holidays, which is to return home, we must mention ‘Golpe de Reyes’, the third novel starring Commissioner Bernal, a creation by David Serafín that right now is easier to locate on the second-rate circuit hand.
Written in 2012, ‘Golpe de Reyes’ takes us back to Christmas 1981, when strange messages began to appear in a conservative newspaper in which a mysterious key was repeated: WIZARDS. Scared at what looks like a unpredictable threat, the Royal House convinces Bernal to initiate a series of investigations, parallel to the revelry typical of Madrid on the eve of Christmas Eve, and thus blood and mystery are served to the reader’s delight, to which we are not even capable of give up in a time when what is endearing becomes obligatory and love is named left and right. Maybe we need them… precisely because of that.