A department store Father Christmas, stabbed in his grotto (sounds painful!). A priceless historic book hidden under a Christmas Tree. A shadowy spectral monk killing a butler at a Christmas gathering. A master criminal who disappears without trace in a Christmas shopping spree – as does his assistant. Two different escapades on a train taking people home to Christmas.

Martin Edwards has gathered together these stories together with nine other tales of Christmas cheer and villainy, in the annual British Library Christmas short story collection, the best way to start my season of pre-Christmas Christmas reviews after the false start last time with The Marlow Murders. But surely he can’t have found another fifteen great Christmas mysteries, can he?

No, he’s found fourteen. One of them – and only one of them – is bloody awful. An “hilarious” Sherlock Holmes parody by Peter Todd featuring Herlock Sholmes – how did he ever think up such a crazy name? Basically Watson is stupid, Holmes is psychic, etc. Ho, as they say, ho. Luckily it’s a) short and b) almost right at the end.

But the other fourteen? You may recall that I’m not a massive fan of short story collections, especially reading them in one go from beginning to end, but this one kept my attention throughout, and there are some really nice stories here. Not much in the way of fairly-clued mysteries, but there are some fun twists and reveals here – I could have done without the ghost in one of them, but all in all, this is a really strong collection.

I’m not going to go over these one by one, but there are many highlights here – I even enjoyed the one by Ellis Peters (not featuring Cadfael, so that probably helped). Two stories, The Bird Of Dawning by Michael Gilbert and The Grey Monk by Gerald Verner both have killer last lines (almost on a par with The House In Goblin Wood) and two other contenders for best story would be the titular tale by Patricia Moyes and Vincent Cornier’s Among Those Present Was Santa Claus.

So all in all, one of the strongest collections of short stories that I’ve read recently and Christmassy to boot. Stayed tuned for more Christmas reviews for things to put in your mystery loving chum’s stocking soon – probably every other review or so…