The scene could not have been described as being conducive to a merry holiday. Detective Chief Inspector Brett Nightingale and Detective Sergeant Jonathan Beddoes had been called to the scene of a murder in a rather shabby flat off the High Street in Islington. The victim was an elderly woman, apparently living there with her grown grandson in poverty. But there was more to the story, for the dead woman was a Russian Princess, the Princess Olga Karukhin, who had escaped from Russia after the Bolsheviks came to power. As might be expected from an Imperial Princess, Olga had a well-deserved reputation for being a bad-tempered and controlling old harridan. Still, she apparently lived for the old trunk which she kept stored underneath her bed - a trunk said to contain fanstastic treasures and priceless works of art. Only, as the police quickly discovered, the trunk was empty...
It’s going to be a challenging problem for Nightingale and Beddoes to solve. The story of their investigation is found in a mystery by Mary Kelly called The Christmas Egg, first published in 1958. It's the subject of my audio review today on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the complete review by clicking here. The Christmas Egg has been republished recently. as one of the British Library Crime Classics series of mysteries, which are published in the U.S. by Poisoned Pen Press, and the publisher has sent me a copy for this review.
Could the princess have been murdered by professional thieves who went on to steal whatever "treasure" might have existed in an old woman's trunk? Could her rather loutish grandson have tired, at last, of being treated as a virtual slave of his grandmother and lashed out? What about the dealer in fine art objects, who would certainly have desired those art objects? Or was there a political motive, a murder carried out by the Bolsheviks who might finally have traced their old aristocratic enemy to her hiding place in that ugly little apartment? The deeper Nightingale and Beddoes pry into the case, the more complicated and wide-spread it becomes.
All this is told in the course of a plot that tends to move from being a police procedural investigation to a thriller. The last third of the book, roughly, is a high-end and remarkably action-filled cross-country chase. Readers will have to be on their toes to keep up with the shifting alliances in the book, and the author does an excellent job of building suspense to keep us guessing. The interplay between Nightingale and Beddoes is particularly enjoyable. In fact, all of the major characters stand out and are quite well developed. As with most of the excellent mysteries being given new life as British Library Crime Classics, Mary Kelly's The Christmas Egg has an excellent and informative introduction by mystery historian Martin Edwards, who calls the book "an unconventional Christmas crime novel by an unconventional writer." I think you would enjoy it.
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