Happy Christmas to All!

A Surprise for Christmas and Other Seasonal Mysteries, edited by Martin Edwards (Poisoned Pen Press, 2021). The cover art copyright belongs to the Illustrated London News Ltd./Mary Evans Picture Library. A classic, indeed.

Whether or not you celebrate Christmas, those of us working at The Rap Sheet extend our warmest wishes to you on this morning. Absent our readers, the blog would be nothing. So your participation and support are priceless. We wish you only the best as 2023 ends and 2024 remains a promising but uncertain presence on the horizon.

READ MORE: “Merry Christmas To …,” by Bob Sassone; “St. Pancras Has Unveiled Its Spectacular 2023 Christmas Tree—and It’s Made Out of Books,” by India Lawrence (TimeOut).

A Very Waldo’s Christmas

Television has long scheduled special Christmas episodes of popular series, whether it be The Twilight Zone, Friends, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, or Downton Abbey. Crime dramas aren’t necessarily ideal vehicles for holiday sentimentality, but some have offered up a bit of comfort and joy at this time of year.

Just the other day, for instance, I stumbled upon the December 24, 1959, episode of Johnny Staccato. You remember that half-hour NBC show, right? It ran for only a single season, from September 1959 to March 1960, and starred John Cassavetes as Staccato, a jazz pianist in New York City who earns some cash on the side doing hard-boiled private-eye work. It’s a stylish gem that, sadly, too many modern boob-tubers have never taken the time to watch.



Well, here’s your opportunity. Embedded above is that Yuletide-themed installment, “The Unwise Men.” It finds Staccato helping out a hardworking friend, Tom Raffe (played by Jack Weston), who has a gig portraying Santa Claus at the musician-gumshoe’s favorite Greenwich Village nightclub, Waldo’s, but who’s also being pressed by his ex-con elder brother (Marc Lawrence) to help pull off a heist at Macy’s Department Store. Naturally, Staccato stands up for his buddy, but that only brings Tom more trouble. This 15th episode of Johnny Staccato may be remembered best for its concluding scene, which finds Cassavettes breaking television’s so-called Fourth Wall by turning to the home audience and saying, “Merry Christmas, everybody.”

If you’d like to see more of this series (which Cassavettes apparently “didn’t care for”), there are plenty of episodes available on YouTube. Or spring for the full DVD collection, re-released in 2020.

READ MORE: “Deck the Halls with Boughs of Holly: Christmas Eyes,” by Kevin Burton Smith (The Thrilling Detective Web Site).

Merry Christmas from The Rap Sheet!

Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, by Agatha Christie (Fontana, 1959). Originally published in Britain in 1939, this novel has since appeared under the titles Murder for Christmas and A Holiday for Murder. Sadly, the cover art is uncredited.

Merry Christmas from The Rap Sheet

From A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965), music by Vince Guaraldi.

Ho Ho Holmes

As Janet Rudolph observes in her blog Mystery Fanfare, there have been myriad mystery novels and short stories written with Christmas themes and settings, or at least with strong references to that holiday (see here, here, here, here, and here). Radio and television crime dramas have found no less inspiration in these annual December festivities. Today we bring you two such broadcasts.

The first is an installment of the 1954-1955 syndicated U.S. TV series Sherlock Holmes, which cast Ronald Howard (son of the more famous English actor Leslie Howard) in the title role and Howard Marion-Crawford as Doctor John H. Watson. This particular episode, “The Case of the Christmas Pudding,” was originally shown on April 4, 1955 (not exactly the appropriate season). As described in the International Movie Database (IMDb), this is the story’s plot:

Just before the Christmas holiday, John Norton is convicted of murder and is sentenced to death. In the courtroom, Norton threatens Sherlock Holmes, and swears to kill the detective before the execution takes place. Although Norton has murdered five wives, his sixth wife still believes in his innocence. Shortly after she delivers Norton a Christmas pudding at his request, the convict escapes, despite the many precautions that prison authorities had taken. In the middle of the night, Holmes is informed of the escape, and he knows that he must take action at once.

The version of “The Case of the Christmas Pudding” embedded below comes from the video sales site Captain Bijou.



For our second presentation, we have the December 24, 1945, episode of The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, a radio serial that, for most of its long run (1939-1950), featured Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as his phlegmatic associate, Watson, both of whom were familiar from Holmes movies of the time. The broadcast featured below is titled “The Night Before Christmas.” As explained on YouTube, it finds Holmes’ landlady at 221B  Baker Street, Mrs. Hudson, asking Watson “to play Santa at a party for her two nieces. After Watson leaves, Sherlock Holmes … is visited by a wealthy friend who has decided to share some of his wealth by way of jewels and bank notes with his less-fortunate relatives. But Holmes’ old nemesis, Professor Moriarty, has found out about this act of generosity and is attempting [to] blackmail the yuletide benefactor.”



By the way, this was one of at least two episodes of The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes to have been rooted in this merry time of year. The second, “The Christmas Bride,” was initially broadcast on December 21, 1947. Rather than Rathbone and Bruce, it found John Stanley playing “the world’s most famous detective,” with Alfred Shirley as his chronicler. You can listen to that show here.

Happy Holidays, Everyone!

I admit, this front from the 1959 Signet edition of The Dame, by Carter Brown (with artwork by Robert McGinnis), doesn’t look particularly festive. However, it’s promoting a celebratory series that begins today in my other blog, Killer Covers. As I explain there,

… I got to thinking about how often the word “dame” appears in the titles of those classic paperbacks I’ve come to treasure over the years. Could I find enough such books to fill a tribute to the dozen days of Twelvetide? As it turns out, there are many more than 12 available, especially if you include covers with “dame” in their teaser lines. So beginning today and running through January 5, Killer Covers is celebrating “The Twelve Dames of Christmas.”

Click here to enjoy the first entry. The Rap Sheet will be on hiatus for a few days (a little end-of-the-year breather), but you can delight in many more “dames” by visiting Killer Covers!

Malfeasance and Mistletoe

I’ve had some trouble feeling the Christmas spirit this year. Maybe it’s because I am still getting over the loss of my dear cat, Monkey. Or because my mother-in-law passed away a few months ago, and my wife continues to work through her grief around that. Or because I’m having trouble coping with the potentially disastrous fact that Americans elected a bullying bigot, misogynist, and sex predator (not exactly a role model for youngsters) as their next president. Whatever the reason, it has been hard for me to find the joy and smiles I usually share at this time of year. I’ve tried loading my CD player up with Christmas music and whittling down my list of presents to be purchased, but so far without satisfactory result.

Maybe the answer is to bury myself in Yuletide-associated crime fiction and try to block out the world for a while. If so, Mystery Fanfare’s compilation of Christmas mystery titles will come in very handy. Blogger Janet Rudolph has broken her list down into five parts: Authors A-D,  Authors E-H,  Authors I-N, Authors O-R, and Authors S-Z. Clearly, crime writers see great potential in linking homicide and the holidays. Any family that has had to arrange Christmas parties around complicated guest schedules or endure the conflicting demands of divorced parents during this season might understand that quite well.

Merry Christmas from The Rap Sheet!

Could that be a very young and innocent Honey West (Anne Francis) I spy playing Santa Claus? Yes, I do believe it is!

Merry Christmas, Everyone!

Actually, whether you’re celebrating Christmas, Hanukkah, or Kwanzaa, those of us at The Rap Sheet wish you the very merriest holiday season! The memorably dark-themed magazine cover embedded above, from the December 22-29, 1997, edition of The New Yorker, was illustrated by Northern California artist Owen Smith, whose work we’ve showcased at least one time before on this page.

(Hat tip to Pulp International.)

An Unexpected Gift

Merry Christmas, everyone, from The Rap Sheet!



Homicide at Yuletide, by Henry Kane (Signet, 1966). Unfortunately, the girly cover art here is not attributed. This Peter Chambers novel was originally released in 1951 as A Corpse for Christmas.

READ MORE: “Forgotten Books: A Corpse for Christmas--Henry Kane,” by James Reasoner (Rough Edges).

Bullet Points: The Day After Edition

• Even as I finish work on the crime-fiction section of January Magazine’s “Best Books of 2012” feature package, other publications are posting their own favorite reads from the last twelvemonth. The Miami Herald touts its preferences here, while you can look for Book Chase’s choices here, blogger Nick Jones’ here, author Heath Lowrance’s here, and CrimeFictionLover’s here. Oh, and a variety of well-known UK wordsmiths list their favorites in Pulp Pusher.

• Meanwhile, British critic Robin Jarossi has posted his rundown of “2012’s ten best crime shows” right here.

• Wow, publisher Thomas & Mercer has certainly done well by Max Allan Collins, releasing many of his older novels in handsome new paperback editions. It’s especially nice to see Collins’ six “disaster mysteries” back in print.

• It seems that the largest government-sanctioned execution in U.S. history took place 150 years ago today, on December 26, 1862. Thirty-eight Dakota Indians were hanged in the small town of Mankato, Minnesota, for “killing 490 white settlers, including women and children, in the Santee Sioux uprising the previous August.” Those executions marked the end of the so-called Dakota War of 1862. The story of that largely forgotten conflict is told in Scott W. Berg’s new book, 38 Nooses: Lincoln, Little Crow, and the Beginning of the Frontier’s End, which I just received for Christmas from my friend Byron, and look forward to reading.

• I’ve never really given much thought to Christmas-and-crime crossovers, but following on the heels of my recent recommendation that you watch a holiday-themed episode of Man Against Crime and The Avengers’ “Too Many Christmas Trees” ep, let me point you as well to these seasonal treats: the December 21, 1957, installment of Have Gun, Will Travel, titled “The Hanging Cross”; a clip from the December 23, 1966, episode of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., “The Jingle Bells Affair”; and “The Case of the Christmas Pudding,” the April 4, 1955, episode of Sherlock Holmes, a short-lived American series, based of course on Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous Victorian sleuth.

• Here’s another museum worth visiting in Washington, D.C.

• British producer and writer Gerry Anderson--who gave TV watchers such science-fiction classics as Stingray, Thunderbirds, Space: 1999, and (my personal favorite) UFO--has passed away at age 83.

• Although it’s been wildly uneven in the quality of its coverage over the last several years, I am still sorry to see Newsweek release its final print edition this week. Launched under the banner News-Week on February 17, 1933, the magazine was owned for most of its 79 years by The Washington Post Company, which finally sold it in 2010 after significant monetary losses. Reports are that Newsweek will be reborn in 2013 as the all-digital Newsweek Global, but for all intents and purposes, the mag as we have known and loved it is dead.

• This “chilling graph in Ezra Klein’s Washington Post blog makes abundantly clear that “in the United States, when people decide to kill people, or kill themselves, they typically reach for a gun.”

• Perfect for today: a Boxing Day mystery.

• Drat, another fine Shell Scott story I haven’t read.

• Slattery’s People is one of those TV dramas I’ve heard quite a bit about over the years, but have never seen. Broadcast on CBS from 1964 to 1965, and starring Richard Crenna, it was, as Wikipedia notes, “one of the few American television series spotlighting the travails of local politicians, a topic that other programs of the period mainly avoided.” If you’re curious to know more, check out this new article about Slattery’s People in Television Obscurities.

• Gawk with me now at the New York City that once was.

• And here’s bad news for Downton Abbey fans, like me: Dan Stevens, who plays reluctant heir Matthew Crawley on that extraordinarily popular British period series, won’t be returning for Season Four. Meanwhile, American viewers should ready themselves for the start of Season Three on PBS-TV on Sunday, January 6.

“A Particularly Nasty Type” of Santa

Here’s something to help put you in the holiday mood: an episode of The Avengers, titled “Too Many Christmas Trees,” and originally broadcast in the UK in December 1965. Watch it here.

Fright Night

There have been many interpretations over the years of Charles Dickens’ 1843 holiday tale, A Christmas Carol, but few as memorable as the musical adaptation Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol. Wikipedia says this “was the first animated holiday program ever produced specifically for television, originally airing in December 1962, and the only one until the stop-motion Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was first shown in December 1964.” I must have watched this hour-long program--which has Jim Backus voicing Ebenezer Scrooge and Jack Cassidy as the lowly Bob Cratchit--dozens of times. Yet it still brings a smile to my face and a modicum of joy to my heart.

With Christmas now less than two weeks away, it seems right to revisit the near-sighted Quincy Magoo and his ghostly guest stars. Enjoy!

UPDATE: When I first composed this post, Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol was available in its entirety on YouTube, and I embedded it above. However, that video has since been taken down “due to a copyright claim.” As a substitute, I have installed at the top of this post a scene from the film, which finds Scrooge visiting the humble home of Bob Cratchit, in company with the Ghost of Christmas Present. You can purchase a DVD of Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol from Amazon.

READ MORE: “Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol,” by Terence Towles Canote (A Shroud of Thoughts).

Even the Toy Department Isn’t Safe!

While doing some research for a Rap Sheet piece I hope to have finished next week, I stumbled across a Christmas-related episode of Man Against Crime, the 1949-1956 TV series starring Ralph Bellamy (and later Frank Lovejoy) as tough New York private eye Mike Barnett. The episode, titled “Petite Larceny” and embedded above, was originally broadcast by NBC on December 20, 1953, and as The Classic TV Archive explains, it finds Barnett “uncover[ing] a pair of criminals disguising themselves as father and daughter, trying to steal the valuable ‘Star of Bethlehem’ diamond necklace.” If, like me, you’ve never before seen Man Against Crime (syndicated as Follow That Man), take a bit of time to enjoy this half-hour show.