Crime at Christmas (36 page)

A
FTER
all that felony and foul play,
murder, mayhem and malfeasance, let us end with—food. And why not? It's
Christmas, after all.

Prowl
through the pages of a hundred years' worth of detective novels and short
stories and there ought to be something seasonal to tempt the palate. Nero
Wolfe, now—he was a gourmet; anything from him? And Robert Parker's Spenser has
a habit of whipping together tasty little snacks when the pace slackens. But
nothing springs immediately to mind. The trouble is, at Christmas (as we've
seen) dire things sometimes happen even in the best-regulated circles, and food
tends to be given a low priority at times of crisis.

In Cyril
Hare's
An English
Murder
Christmas
Dinner at Warbeck Hall was a bad-tempered affair which ended with cyanide in
the champagne. And festive fare isn't mentioned at all by the house-party
guests in
Hercule
Poirot's Christmas.
Hardly surprising, I suppose; the host had had his throat cut on
Christmas Eve. Mind you, for year after year Sexton Blake (the detective who
out-Holmesed Holmes in almost every particular) cleverly managed it so that he
sat down to Christmas dinner only after whatever knotty problem he was
presented with had been well and truly disentangled, although—after a strenuous
bout with Zenith the Albino, say, or the Red Vulture, or the Crime Minister—he
was singularly unadventurous in the food line: either goose or turkey with all
the trimmings, a flaming plum pudding, and trifle to follow.

The gorge
rises. No, something simple is required. Better, something simple yet oddball.
And better still, something from an offbeat source.

Luckily, I
stumbled across a recipe not too long ago—by someone who certainly wrote
mystery stories but who's far better known in quite another field.

Captain W.
E. Johns (1893-1968) wasn't really a captain but a Flying-Officer, a touch
lower in the ranking system. But one can forgive a great storyteller such mild
deceit. And Johns was a
great
storyteller, make no mistake about it, despite nowadays being
dumped on from a great height by trendy sociologists and librarians who should
know better as a racist, sexist, warmongering jingoist. Actually, he was a
humanist and anti-imperialist whose view was that most of the world's woes may
be placed squarely at the door of the land- grabbing white man. He vigorously
campaigned for sexual equality, was an anti-appeaser, and his message to his
readers, in book after book, was: Put not your trust in politicians, generals,
those in authority; inevitably, they will betray you. All in all, not a bad
philosophy.

Johns was a
machine-gunner at Gallipoli and there saw enough carnage to last him nine
lifetimes; he transferred to the Royal Flying Corps, was shot down in 1918, and
then made a nuisance of himself escaping from various POW camps. His first book
Mossyface,
an adult thriller published under a
pseudonym, was issued in the exceedingly scarce
Weekly Telegraph Novels
series in the early 1920s (later
reprinted by Mellifont, a cheap paperback firm, in 1932). After that Johns
wrote more adult thrillers then concentrated on turning out two or three books
a year featuring his flying-ace hero James Bigglesworth. He wrote over a
hundred Biggles novels and short-story collections; over 160 books in all,
including thrillers, detective novels, buccaneering yarns, and technical flying
manuals.

Johns was
an excellent journalist and a very fine, and courageous, editor; during the
1930s he was at the helm of two of the most popular flying magazines of the
day, until the government had him kicked out of the editor's chair because of
his vitriolic attacks on them over the betrayal of Czechoslovakia at Munich and
his muscular anti-appeasement line.

He was also
a keen gardener who for ten years (from 1934 to 1944) wrote a delightful column
for Theo. A. Stephens' splendid little magazine
My Garden.
This took the form of a monthly
diary describing the trials and tribulations of the amateur gardener.

Christmas
of 1939 was a particularly vexing period. A neighbour was getting uppity about
one of Johns's noble Scotch firs, and he was also having problems with the
Customs, who had impounded a parcel of bulbs from California. There were
shortages everywhere, his handyman had joined the army, petty rules and
regulations were doing bad things to his blood pressure. Still, the gloom was
not entirely unrelieved:

There is something extremely satisfying
about harvesting one's own produce. This year, for the simple reason that there
was no one else to do it, I have had to dry and store the root crops and the
fruit, so I dole them out to the household with a sparing hand. I suppose it is
a deep-rooted instinct that makes people always pick the big ones, whether it be
peaches or potatoes.

Which reminds me, here is a recipe for a
wartime winter sweet which, apart from being cheap, has the advantage of
requiring neither sugar nor cream; it is a good way of using up windfall
apples. I've often made it, so can recommend it.

Weigh 1 ½ lbs of quick cooking apples—the
sort that soon go to a white pulp. Peel, core and quarter (small quarters).
Place in saucepan with
just
enough water to prevent burning, and the strained juice of half a
lemon. Cook to a pulp. Turn into a large basin and beat to make sure that there
are no lumps. Well stir in one small tin of
sweetened
condensed milk with one
whisked egg. Return to saucepan, and cook over low heat, stirring, for a few
minutes—until it begins to thicken. Turn into glass goblets, and serve cold.
Serves six.

To be
honest, Johns didn't call his recipe “Biggles' Apple Snowballs”, I did. He
called it 'Apple Snow', but what's in a name? As W. C. Fields once nearly said,
'It'll taste just as well.'

Indeed.
Certainly tastier than cold Christmas pud for the umpteenth time. And I can
vouch for that.

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Every
effort has been made to contact the owners of all the copyrighted stories, and
grateful thanks are extended to the copyright holders for allowing them to be
reprinted. If any necessary acknowledgements have been omitted, the editor and
publisher hope that the copyright holders concerned will accept their apologies
in advance.

'A Problem
in White' by Nicholas Blake/C. Day Lewis. Copyright © 1949. Reprinted by
permission of A.D. Peters & Co. Ltd.

'Detective's
Day Off' by John Dickson Carr. Copyright © 1957. Reprinted by permission of
David Higham Associates Ltd. and Harold Ober Associates Inc.

'The Three
Travellers' by Edward D. Hoch. Copyright © 1976. Reprinted by permission of the
author.

'Murder in
Store' by Peter Lovesey. Copyright © 1985. Reprinted by permission of John
Farquharson Ltd.

'Waxworks'
by Ethel Lina White. Copyright © 1930. Reprinted by permission of Laurence
Pollinger Ltd on behalf of the Estate of Ethel Lina White.

'Serenade
to a Killer' by Joseph Coramings. Copyright © 1957. Reprinted by permission of
the author.

'No Room at
the Inn' by Bill Pronzini. Copyright © 1988.

'Santa-San
Solves It' by James Melville. Copyright © 1988.

'Sister
Bessie' by Cyril Hare. Copyright © 1949, 1959. Reprinted by permission of A. P.
Watt Ltd on behalf of the Revd C. P. Gordon Clark.

'Murder
Under the Mistletoe' by Margery Allingham. Copyright © P. & M. Youngman
Carter Ltd 1963. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown Ltd, London.

'The Santa
Claus Club' by Julian Symons. Copyright © 1960, 1965. Reprinted by permission
of Curtis Brown Ltd, London.

'The Plot
Against Santa Claus' by James Powell. Copyright © 1971. Reprinted by permission
of the author and the author's agents, Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc, 845
Third Avenue, New York, NY 10022, USA.

Special
thanks and acknowledgements to the following: Bob Adey (not least for letting
me prowl through his loft); Ed Hoch (for his usual friendly help); Bob Sampson
and Walker Martin (for their sleuthing amongst the browned and brittle pages of
old pulp magazines); Bill Pronzini and Barry Pike (for both suggesting superb
stories, which I subsequently couldn't use—well, you tried); A. J. Flavell, Assistant
Librarian of that most civilized of repositories, the Bodleian; the old Firm of
Bill Lofts and Derek Adley; the Revd Charles Gordon Clark; Sarah Cartledge of
Woman's Own;
G. R. Samways, Eric Fayne, John
Cooper, Maurice Hall, Fr Francis Hertzberg and Mary Cadogan; and, not least,
Robyn Sisman (for one very good reason best known to herself).