There are a lot of books in my house that hail from the era when I worked at Barnes and Noble. The one that prompted me yesterday to start blogging is called Crimes for Christmas, edited by Richard Dalby.
I have a set of several of these Christmas-themed mystery anthologies on my mystery shelf, and I really don't care much about them. Still, I can't let a book go without reading through it, so that is why I plucked it off the shelf a few weeks before Christmas. I thought at the time that it could be a fun seasonal read, but of course the actual holidays got in the way of my finding much reading time, so I only managed to start it a few days ago.
I like mysteries but I don't read them very often, which is a bit odd. Mystery books were what hooked me on reading; my Mom had a box of old-school Nancy Drew books in our attic (the kind where cars are called "roadsters"), and I read through them like a demon when I was in third and fourth grade. I also spend a lot of time pretending I was Nancy Drew, but that is neither here nor there.
Agatha Christie's work got a lot of my attention in fifth and sixth grade, although I vastly preferred Miss Marple to Hercules Poirot (probably because I couldn't adequately pronounce Poirot's name at the time and I was flummoxed by the title "M." I was desperately in need of French lessons).
Crimes for Christmas includes sixteen short crime stories, all with a Christmas link in them. It includes stories by familiar names like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Ellis Peters, and (of course) Agatha Christie. There are also authors I've never heard of in my life; Fergus Hume, Pamela Sewell, and Lennox Robinson.
Overall it is mildly entertaining, but not something I will need on my shelf forever. The most interesting thing about it may have been the ancient insurance card in it, complete with my Social Security number and my original (before I married and hyphenated) name. But we'll see.
The scary thing is that I have at least six more of these Christmas mystery anthologies on that shelf. I need to get to work on them.
Mysteries are what I generally come back to when I need something for pure entertainment. Sci-fi gets some of that, but mysteries are, in a lot of ways, my first love. Well, other than you, of course. :)
ReplyDeleteYou are sweet, and also kind of silly. I should give more mysteries a try.
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