Have yourself a crooked little Christmas with The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries. Edgar Award-winning editor Otto Penzler collects sixty of his all-time favorite holiday crime stories — many of which are difficult or nearly impossible to find anywhere else. From classic Victorian tales by Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Thomas Hardy, to contemporary stories by Sara Paretsky and Ed McBain, this collection touches on all aspects of the holiday season, and all types of mysteries. They are suspenseful, funny, frightening, and poignant. Included are puzzles by Mary Higgins Clark, Isaac Asimov, and Ngaio Marsh; uncanny tales in the tradition of A Christmas Carol by Peter Lovesey...

“Found drowned, my foot,” said the pathologist two minutes after looking at the body. The unidentified young man pulled from the salt water near the little fishing village of Edsway hadn’t drowned after all. And he hadn’t been a bather either, observed Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan. One simply didn’t go swimming in a shirt and trousers. Not voluntarily, that is. And then there was the matter of the mysterious copper weight stuffed in the dead man’s pocket… and the sunken ship discovered offshore. It all added up to murder as Inspector Sloan set out in a dinghy to net the killer before he got the chance to send another victim to a watery grave.

A tourist discovers a body in a suit of armor on display at an English country estate. Suspicion centers on the owning family whose archetypical members are superbly portrayed by Robin Bailey. His takeoff on the two aged aunts is just delicious. Distinction is made, as it is in British society, between the aristocrats and ordinary folk like Detective Sloan, a continuing Aird sleuth. One senses that both writer and reader are having fun with this one. Bailey has read other of Aird's "cosy" mysteries, but has died, so this is the end. 

Murder at Boundary Cottage. The townspeople would have said Larking, with the stone rectory and thatched farmhouses, was typical of a thousand other English villages. As it happened, this was true. And everyone in Larking thought they knew everything about everyone else. In that they found they were mistaken...especially the morning the postman found Grace Jenkins murdered. She had lived quietly at Boundary Cottage for twenty-one years. But there was a great deal about Grace the townspeople didn't know. And Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan soon discovered they knew even less about her daughter Henrietta...in fact, nobody could explain who Henrietta really was.

"Sister Anne," said the Mother Superior unperturbed, "died on Wednesday evening sometime after supper, probably in the corridor leading from the Great Hall to the kitchens. Her body was put into the broom cupboard and later thrown down the cellar steps. "Who would want to kill a cloistered num? But, astonishingly, someone had. It was as much of a surprise to the sisters of the Convent of St. Anselm as it was to Inspector C. D. Sloan, Criminal Investigation Department. But now it was up to the Inspector to find the motive and the murderer. ______________ Inspector C.D. Sloan of the Callehsire C.I.D. makes his first appearance here as he looks into the murder of a nun at the Convent...