Naughty-Nine Tales of Christmas

INTRODUCTION

Reading this collection, you might get the impression that I don't like Christmas. Murder, robbery, drugs, desperation-it's not very holly jolly, is it? But the truth is I love Christmas! It's my favorite time of year. That's why I keep dragging it through the mud of human degradation. There's no season I'd rather write about.

Well, that's not the only reason I've written about Christmas so often. To be honest, if Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine had annual Arbor Day issues, you might be reading The Roots of All Evil: Nine Tales of Woodland Crime. Once upon a time, you see, I wrote quite a bit for EQMM and AHMM, and I learned something useful: Come May or June, when they're starting to put together their holiday issues, it's not a bad idea to shoot a Christmas story their way. Not a bad idea at all.

Every tale in this collection originally appeared in either Ellery Queen or Alfred Hitchcock, in fact. The first to be published was "I Killed Santa Claus," which popped up in EQMM 10 years ago. (I'm going out of my way to mention that to establish that the story predates both the current ubiquity of cell phones and the film Bad Santa. So there. No sniping on those fronts, if you please.) The latest (and best, in my opinion) is "Hidden Gifts," which appeared in EQMM in late 2007. I haven't written a Christmas story since then. I simply haven't had time.

The desire, though-that I've had. I still dearly love the sound of jingle bells and Christmas carols and snow crunching underfoot. Yet whenever I hear them now, I want to mix in distant sirens and screams and gunfire.

And laughter. Yours, I hope. The characters you're about to encounter might not be having happy holidays themselves, but I certainly hope yours are a little merrier for having met them.

Steve Hockensmith

Alameda, Calif.

November 2010