This post contains Amazon affiliate links. I make a tiny amount of money off of what you buy through the link for doing Amazon’s dirty work as an advertiser. I don’t collect your information, that’s Amazon’s business.
Seduction on a Snowy Night is a three-author short story romance anthology published in 2019 by some of the most well known historical romance novelists in the current industry.
The theme for each revolved around the days leading up to and following Christmas. The main female characters each fall in love with a devastatingly handsome fellow of high society in relatively short time, professor their love, do the hanky panky and turn themselves around, that’s what this is all about. No wait…
No, that’s pretty much right, save for the turning around bit. Anyways
I think I much prefer character development and found these stories to be gratifying in their own right. I wasn’t quite in the mood for on page spicy scenes, so I skipped over those with a skim and didn’t miss anything for it. Some authors do put in essential character development during spicy scenes, some don’t, that’s a preference thing. Usually I enjoy spicy scenes, so this was just me having a one off day of wanting to read not quite slow burn, but something like it in a short story format. Made it work for me.
I enjoyed the settings. Each had a care for description that was not overbearing due to the nature of the format, but enough to set the mood.
The second story by Jeffries did disappoint me a little only for the fact that there were quite a few dialogue lines that used lines from popular Christmas songs and that pulled me out of the story because the setting was historical and some of those are 20th century songs. I can appreciate what the author was going for with inserting those Easter eggs and there are probably quite a number of readers who either didn’t notice, or got some glee from it. So, that one I will fully claim as a person preference and should not detract from the overall impression of the story.
What I found mildly frustrating, as I read, was the few editorial mistakes that should have been caught if the team was doing their job between the developmental and the typesetter. Often books do end up with editing mistakes, there was one that just felt like it should have been caught. In Jeffries’ story, near the end of it, there was something to the effect of mentioning people who had helped the main character and the word mom should have been replaced with aunt. It was jarring because the main character’s parents were only really mentioned to establish her finances, otherwise they were dead and she never expressed any sentamental attachment. Another section had clearly had dialogue removed and the follow up script didn’t match.
I don’t think it impacted the story much, I was just frustrated to see a short story – what could be considered an easy editing gig from a well regarded author having not only those two mistakes, but also a few other grammatical ones.
They were not blaring enough to tell the average reader to leave off reading the book. Honestly, I’ve been craving autumn and winter stories, and this one worked out splendidly as a Christmas themed one. If you’re into spicy romance and want a couple short reads, this one is pretty nice. Also, if you’re into spicy romance, you’re probably familiar enough with a lot of romance tropes to be able to overlook someone falling madly in love with someone else at almost first sight and kissing them within the first couple days of having met them, so you should be good with suspended disbelief. Otherwise, if you prefer your characters taking months to develop interpersonal relations and themselves as individuals for what would better be classified as healthy relationships, this book isn’t going to do that job.
I would deeply suggest a lovely cup of tea (Harney and Sons Victorian London Fog with milk and sugar or their Tower of London have become my absolute favorite in the last month). Put on Winter Cafe music from over on Youtube and enjoy a snowy night in (even if it is 100+F outside…which it is for me at the moment of writing this). Sometimes, you just need to be whisked off into a cold makebelieve land for a time.
First published back in 1939, Agatha Christie’s book And Then There Were None – originally under the name Ten Little N*(I am not putting that in print, this book has issues), then changed to Ten Little Indians to be just ever so slightly less controversial – is a murder mystery in the strangest sense of the word.
It was giving me Murder By Death without the humour vibes for a hot minute.
But let’s get back to the blaring issue of that first sentence I just wrote. That’s…that’s a thing. That’s a problematic thing.
So, how did I go about reading this thing? I read a released copy that came out in the last couple of years, where all the racist crap has been scrubbed out. The rhyme and the little statues at least. Now, there were a couple of elements left in without the problematic words that hints at the dismissive tone of all the individuals on this barren rock of a locked door murder mystery for their fellow man. That was sort of the point of the murder part of this mystery, but more to the fact, all the characters are white, or at least presented in such a white British tone that the only one I had to wonder after – the wait staff, if the term brown used was to reference the wait staff as people of color, or people who had been in the sun a bit more. But the wife of the wait staff was described as a ghostly white, scared almost witless, so that doesn’t quite work out. Then again, the setting is Devon in the UK and white British folk could give the color of flour in rain a run for their money.
The rest of the ‘guests’ were not outright rude or demeaning to them, but there were some throw away lines about one man’s service in Africa that’ll make you flinch if you have the understanding that a publishing industry has deemed this book so important to keep in print that they had an editing team scrub it into political correctness rather than wash their hands of the problematic thing.
My assumption, in looking at the prior titles to this book, is that the use of the derogatory term for Africans reflected the murderer’s cruel interpretation of the guests being inhuman…I’m not sure how to write that better, but for the time the book was written, quite a great many white people looked at African populations within their communities as unsavoury criminals. When the title changed to using the word Indian, it would appear that the tone shifted from criminal to ‘savage’ – despicable word to be used, but I do believe that was the tone they were after in their metaphor. Changing it yet again, this time to Soldier took away that derogatory tone, which made the nursery rhyme and the metaphor the killer was going for a bit lost. There were military folk on the guest list, but not enough to make it a fully rounded metaphor for criminals, crooks, violent individuals. Neither of the preexisting titles should be excused, I just wanted to point out what the metaphor was probably reaching for with them in the first place.
I wanted to know if the prose were any decent. Agatha Christie was known for her writing during World War II and quite a good many stories kept the boys in trenches and the wives at home entertained and provided an escape for a moment. She was of a time and a place. Is that any excuse? No, I don’t think so. People raised within a certain section of society were being introduced more and more text that was treating marginalized people *vaguely* better. I say that and the two authors that come to mind are Mark Twain – many say his stories are racist. His prose were of a time, but his presentation and themes were that of expressing and exposing to his white audiences the humanity of African Americans in 1884 as seen through the eyes of a white protagonist. Alright, that’s…a few decades from Agatha Christie, and his books had made it over to the UK. The other one that came to mind was Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, but looking that up, it was published back in the 60s, so that isn’t a good reference.
Okay, I keep trying to come back to speaking on the prose, setting, character development. One last time: The story historically had problems. If your morals say you don’t want to read problematic things, then do not read this. The prose were not revolutionary in any capacity by which to warrant the use of as a paltry excuse.
Now, I tried reading a used copy of this book a couple years back. That copy I used was paperback and still used ‘Indian’ for the rhyme and statues. If you think back to Disney’s Peter Pan, there was this time during the Edwardian Era, Great War, and World War II era where British and American white audiences were still fascinated with the exploration and bringing God to the native people’s trope or just putting them in side shows because they didn’t acknowledge their humanity. Right, tangent again.
Anyways, the prose in the ebook version I read was much easier to follow along. The formatting from the used paperback was just odd. I’m so used to internal dialogue being italics at this point that the indented dashes were uncomfortable.
Fantastic is utilized in a different sense of the word in the same way aweful is different in it’s usage now too. Take that one with a grain of salt if you do take this on.
Christie was managing ten characters in a short time frame, so there isn’t a remarkable amount of character development. I think my main issue with them is the way they all spoke and thought were not distinctly different enough for my taste. This is a short read, though. A dime store novel so to speak. There can’t be depth or reflection, growth, or much else. My sticking point came about by death number five where I found myself staring at a paragraph a bit lost because I thought the guy speaking had already died. The women had a bit of difference, but there were two pairs of men that both were similar in their mannerisms and disposition that it felt contrived to have gone with ten characters for the sake of a racist nursery rhyme and would have probably been better served with just five characters and inventing a significantly less problematic poem.
The setting took some time to pin down. I never could formulate a full map of the house and grounds in my head. There were introductions of outbuildings later in the story that would have benefited the reader early on to understand. The interior design elements also would have been nice to know quite a bit earlier. I had built up in my head a 1930s mansion in the theme of Katherine Hepburn’s private estate – a revamping of the Victorian into Art Deco. Instead, the way it was discussed later as “modern”, and well lit with few shadows, with ‘no atmosphere’, my brain went straight over to mid-century mod (which I know is almost two decades after the book was written). I would like a better description of what she meant by modern for that time frame. And if it was meant to be 1930s time frame.
One character was in possession of a car that could reach speeds of 80 miles an hour at the time, and there were accusations with dates listed between the ’15-20’s. The house had been on the island for some time, so my best bet was a setting of 1930s. Maybe something akin the brutalist architecture – but that was the 1950s-1980s. Alright, back to the drawing board – I went over to brutalism with the thought of maybe she meant modern in the same way the main character in The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand wanted to design architecture. That book was published in 1943, though.
The mystery side of the murders had a pattern, until it didn’t in one very specific point, and then it returned back to the regular pattern. That would be the only hint. Do read the epilogue if you do read the book – it sums everything up pretty cleanly and you’ll probably be mad at yourself for spotting the pattern shift and wondering why it happened.
Also, I didn’t know canned beef tongue was a meal option. I think I’m good not revisiting some recipes from the past.
Conclusion time: is it worth while? In a strange way, it might be a quick read for historical presentation of the early murder mystery dime store novel. Is it necessary as a ‘teacher’s pick’ book?…Mmmmmm…no, I don’t think so. If you want people to deal with moral dilema and feeling unsettled, point them at Fitzgerald and Steinbeck. Those’ll both make the reader hate jazz and depression era literature, but with more depth. It’s the difference between disliking an off-brand soda and hating a forty year old vintage wine. One is cheap, quick to drink, and will give you indigestion. The other one will stick around, make you a bit emotional, but you recognize the work involved.
Am I going to read the rest of Christie? Maybe. I’m working through another problematic book – Dracula, at the moment. I have found from the Jewish author’s community I’ve listened to, that the book is or at least themes within it are anti-Semitic in nature. I would like to have a better grasp of context, and I’m in a Gothic stories mood. Will I gripe about that one too? Most assuredly yes.
In a way, I want to read the problematic books, so I have a better understanding about the content, to do the historical research for the time frame they were written in and the nature of the author for my own person understanding behind the current socio-political movements that are layering on top of the material.
This probably has something to do with how I went about getting a degree in Art History and History with a minor in sociology because of my life motto: Art does not happen in a vacuum. There is history, culture, religion, current events, social oppression and a wide variety of other factors that can make up both an art piece and a story. I want to understand the depth behind it.
My last thought:
Agatha Christie’s prose come across as a British middle class lady’s armchair observations of murder and intrigue. I.E. give a Kardashian a month to watch true crimes documentaries and cold case files and ask her to write a book. (I realize Kardashians aren’t middle class – but the allegory still holds in my mind.)
If you would like to support the reviewer, check out their book list and see if you spot one you would like to have reviewed next.