Xmas Thrillers gathers holiday mysteries in which festivity becomes an occasion for secrecy, menace, detection, and the uncanny. Spanning sensation fiction, detective puzzles, Gothic terror, comic misdirection, supernatural tale, and psychological suspense, the volume situates Christmas within the rich nineteenth- and early twentieth-century traditions of popular narrative. Domestic celebrations, winter travel, inherited houses, and seasonal charity repeatedly acquire darker implications, while notable locked rooms, apparitions, disappearances, and revelations demonstrate the remarkable adaptability of the mystery form. Its contributors include major architects of detective and crime writing alongside innovators of the Gothic, the ghost story, children's literature, social realism, and comic fiction. Figures such as Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, G. K. Chesterton, M. R. James, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Algernon Blackwood participate in a broad literary culture shaped by Victorian sensation, fin-de-siècle anxieties, Edwardian detective fiction, and the expanding periodical marketplace. Their varied approaches reveal how Christmas could mediate questions of class, family, faith, modernity, and concealed violence. Recommended for readers of classic mysteries and scholars of popular literature, this capacious anthology offers an unusually vivid encounter with the holiday tale's darker history. Its many voices invite comparison across genres and decades, making the collection both an engaging seasonal read and a valuable study in literary dialogue.
