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My favourites in this were the Sherlock Holmes (which I've read many times), The Chopham Affair, and Haunted House, but my absolute favourite was The Mystery of Felwyn Tunnel, which is very like The Signalman by Charles Dickens, a story that I love. The Chopham Affair by Edgar Wallace - in which a blackmailer of ladies meets his end on a snowy night by a roadside with a fantastic twist in the end. Some of the other stories are less good and I didn't really like the Father Brown story that's included at all. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. These are mainly set in the last century but I love the old fashioned settings, the way people spoke, the simplicity of life and the hardship of it before the health service, before the welfare state.
Sayers' Sleuths on the Scent has a classic scenario of weary travellers trapped by bad weather, this time in the bar of the Pig and Pewter. It begins with the description of the cushy and immoral life of an international gigolo and ends with justice being dealt out on a cold, snowy Christmas Eve in freezing London.The Adventure of Abbey Grange' by Conan Doyle - Sherlock Holmes chooses to play judge and jury, after his detective work is done . Ten short stories from the golden age of British crime fiction, not all of which involve murder and precious few of which play out against a backdrop of snow, either falling or settled. Cecily Gayford studied English at the University of Oxford, where she wrote her thesis on the 'golden age' detective stories of the 1930s and 1940s. Some of the stories are also in other collections - I really like The Mystery of Felwyn Tunnel by L.
Whilst there are now much fewer instances of stories set at Christmas, all the stories are set in the cold or snowy winter months. Austin Freeman - not a name I knew - whose 'Mr Ponting's Alibi' was long enough, like the Doyle and the Chesteton, to develop a neatly attentuated investigation by lawyer Thorndyke whose relations with the local detective, Superintendent Miller are similar to Holmes and Lestrade. This is one of the shortest of these short stories (some are actually far too long-winded) and it's one where a thick blanket of snow is crucial to the solution of a murder mystery. Innes was reliably clever, Sayers terse and entertaining with a well crafted red herring character, but I did rather enjoy R.
Several of these stories have been published in various other anthologies and I had certainly read some of them before. Some of the stories are a little obscure, but I really enjoyed The Chopham Affair, The Adventure of the Abbey Grange and The Mystery of Felwyn Tunnel. Austin Freeman - in which a woman is murdered and finding her killer may hinge on finding a cat, a dog and a monkey. Though the stories are certainly classics, some of them haven't quite maintained their appeal and intrigue into our modern times.
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