
The Best Holiday Mysteries for Christmas Time
Victorian and Edwardian Christmas Ghost Tales, Locked-Room Crimes, and Fireside SuspenseBy Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, George MacDonald, Arthur Cheney Train, Arthur Conan Doyle, Algernon Blackwood, Thomas Hardy, John Kendrick Bangs, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Grant Allen, Wilkie Collins, Saki, Fergus Hume, Edgar Wallace, William Douglas O'Connor, Florence Marryat, Catherine Crowe, James Bowker, R. Austin Freeman, J. M. Barrie, E. F. Benson, G. K. Chesterton, Jerome K. Jerome, M. R. James, Fred M. White, Sabine Baring-Gould, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Frank R. Stockton, Louisa M. Alcott, Leonard Kip, Emmuska Orczy, Lucie E. Jackson, Katherine Rickford, Bithia Mary Croker, Catherine L. PirkisLength55h 44m
About this audiobook
The Best Holiday Mysteries for Christmas Time gathers Victorian, Edwardian, and early modern tales in which seasonal warmth shades into suspense, detection, supernatural unease, and comic misrule. Its range extends from locked-room puzzles and domestic intrigues to spectral visitations, crimes of conscience, and ironical holiday reversals. Christmas functions not merely as décor but as a literary pressure point: a season of reunion, charity, secrecy, and heightened expectation. Standout modes include the antiquarian ghost story, the rational detective narrative, and the Gothic tale of threatened households. The contributors form an unusually rich cross-section of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British and American popular literature. Canonical novelists, pioneering crime writers, humorists, Gothic practitioners, and frequently overlooked women authors bring distinct cultural assumptions to the festive mystery. Together, their work illuminates the intertwined traditions of the Christmas ghost story, sensation fiction, detective fiction, and the periodical tale. The anthology's varied voices reveal how genre fiction negotiated anxieties about class, family, modernity, and belief beneath the apparent security of holiday ritual. Ideal for readers, students, and scholars of mystery and Gothic literature, this volume offers a compact survey of evolving popular forms. It invites comparison across styles and eras while preserving the pleasures of surprise, atmosphere, and seasonal storytelling. Readers will find both an entertaining Christmas companion and an instructive dialogue among diverse literary imaginations.
Audiobook details
GenreMystery and Thriller
Length55 hrs 44 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateDec 20, 2023
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Classic Mysteries - The Émile Gaboriau Edition (Detective Novels & Murder Cases) (Annotated)
2The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle (Arthur Conan Doyle)
3The Flying Stars (G. K. Chesterton)
4Percival Bland's Proxy (R. Austin Freeman)
5A Christmas Capture (Fred M. White)
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6McAllister's Christmas
7I
8II
9III
10IV
11V
12VI
13The Mystery of Room Five (Fred M White)
14A Policeman’s Business (Edgar Wallace)
15Stuffing (Edgar Wallace)
16Mr Wray’s Cash Box or, the Mask and the Mystery
17I
18II
19III
20IV
21V
22VI
23VII
24VIII
25IX
26X
27The Adventure of the Second Swag (Robert Barr)
28An Exciting Christmas Eve or, My Lecture on Dynamite (Arthur Conan Doyle)
29A Chaparral Christmas Gift (O. Henry)
30A Christmas Tragedy (Emmuska Orczy)
31The Thieves Who Couldn’t Stop Sneezing (Thomas Hardy)
32The Silver Hatchet (Arthur Conan Doyle)
33What the Shepherd Saw: A Tale of Four Moonlight Nights
34First Night
35Second Night
36Third Night
37Fourth Night
38Markheim (Robert Louis Stevenson)
39The Wolves of Cernogratz (Saki)
40Mustapha
41I
42II
43III
44IV
45The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance
46Letter I
47Letter II
48Letter III
49Letter IV
50The Christmas Banquet (Nathaniel Hawthorne)