The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories

As the acknowledged 'Queen of Crime', P. D. James was frequently commissioned by newspapers and magazines to write a special short story for Christmas. Four of the best of these have been drawn from the archives and published here.

P. D. James' prose illuminates each of these perfectly formed stories, making them ideal reading for the darkest days of the year. While she delights in the secrets that lurk beneath the surface at family gatherings, her Christmas stories also provide tantalizing puzzles to keep the reader guessing. P. D. James embraces the challenge of the short-story form, and ingeniously weaves the strands of plot, setting, characterisation and surprise to create a satisfying whole within only a few thousand words.

From the title story about a strained country-house party on Christmas Eve, to another about an illicit affair that ends in murder, and two cases for James' poet-detective Adam Dalgliesh, each treats the reader to James' masterfully atmospheric storytelling, always with the lure of a mystery to be solved.

A literary polymath, P.D. James is undoubtedly known primarily as a writer of crime fiction, having begun her career with her ever-popular seasoned detective Adam Dalgliesh in Cover her Face (a series she continued for a further 13 novels, finally finishing with The Private Patient). Her novels were always much more than the sum of their parts with James frequently using fiction to challenge national institutions including the criminal justice system and the systemic failures of government. She developed a new audience when her dystopian novel The Children of Men was adapted for film and even turned her hand at a Regency classic, blending Jane Austen’s characters into the novel Death Comes to Pemberley.