Wed 21 Dec 2016
An Archived Christmas Mystery Review: ROBERT NORDEN – Death Beneath the Christmas Tree.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[4] Comments
ROBERT NORDAN – Death Beneath the Christmas Tree. Fawcett Gold Medal, paperback original; 1st printing, December 1991.
This is the second mystery adventure featuring widowed Mavis Lashley and her police photographer nephew Dale, both lovers of murder mysteries — the first being All Dressed Up to Die — and because Mavis turns out to be a very interesting woman, the story itself does, too, somewhat in spite of itself.
This one begins with a woman in a church choir being shot to death while part of a huge, glorious Christmas pageant in her church. Unfortunately several of the children in Mavis’s neighborhood are witnesses to the crime (as shepherds waiting for their cue to go on stage). Not only that, they may even know more.
This is not a happy story, as it turns out, and justice is left hanging out to dry at the end — more than which I cannot say, without telling you everything. But as a detective story, the solution to the second killing, at least, is no more subtle than one of those old five-minute Ellery Queen radio mysteries, in which the Maestro states the circumstances of the crime in three minutes, takes a minute for a commercial, then comes back in the final minute and tells you exactly how he knew who did it.
And Nordan’s prose while capable enough, is largely unimaginative — with confessions of various secrets coming forth like torrents, pages on end — but he does capture one idea very well: that while we may ever so much long for the past, what has past us by is gone and is not retrievable, whether it be our children, our youth, our cities, or (in some more general way) our way of life.
We can mourn it, whatever it is that we’ve lost, but we can’t bring it back. This book looks back, however, more than any other mystery I’ve ever read, not in anger, but in sorrow.
Bibliographic Note: There were two more in this series, Death on Wheels (1993) and Dead and Breakfast (2003).
December 21st, 2016 at 7:25 pm
As stated, this review has been revised substantially from its first appearance. Gone are some references to earlier reviews in the same issue of DEADLY PLEASURES, along with a couple of short side diversions I deemed not needed this time around.
I don’t remember much of the story itself, sad to say. You now know pretty much the same about the book that I do.
December 21st, 2016 at 11:00 pm
Something lost in books like this or series like MURDER SHE WROTE is that murder just doesn’t matter much. There is little sense that anyone died. Even at their most artificial writers of the past seldom forgot murder wasn’t just a game. Even when bad people died it mattered that they were murdered — even in the screwball school.
I may be wrong on this one but I get the impression the fact someone is murdered is secondary or worse.
December 22nd, 2016 at 1:08 am
While I agree with you about that murders don’t matter as much as they should in a lot of, well, let’s call them cozy mysteries, in this case I think you may be reading more into this review than what’s there. The problem is that I don’t remember the book itself. I simply can’t say one way or the other.
But note that I did say that “this is not a happy story,†which suggests less than a game of murder and detection is being played here. And the last paragraph and a half suggests that there is more at hand in this book than in your average cozy today.
December 22nd, 2016 at 11:41 am
My problem with the old traditional mysteries was everyone,
especially the victim, was a plot device (yes there are exceptions). When the hardboiled mystery surfaced the characters developed depth to the point where the clues didn’t matter as much. Today’s popular mysteries series now focus so hard on the characters the murder and victim serve little reason other than to give the characters something to do.
This is especially true with the series mystery. Readers return for the characters rather than the mystery. This is not necessarily a bad thing. For example, I was more interested in the life of Spenser and friends than I was in any mystery in the Robert B. Parker novels.