(courtesy Allen & Unwin)
Christmas is supposed to be all merry and bright and wondrously lovely, escapistly free from the nastiness and brutishness of the rest of the year.
Well, that’s the general, tinsel on the tree and deck the hall view of the season anyway.
But in Janice Hallett’s wholly delightful and fabulously, wickedly funny festive skewering of societal battling and group dynamics, The Christmas Appeal, the season gets its Agatha Christie on with a deliciously darkly view of the vagaries of human nature.
It’s no secret that humanity is a mass of marvellously murky contradictions.
We join a society or group, in this an amateur community dramatic society known as the Fairway Players, who stage plays and pantomimes throughout the year to raise money for things like repairing the ailing roof of the local church hall where they routinely perform.
It should, in theory, be all sweetness and delight, people coming together in a spirit of creatively theatrical bonhomie all for a good cause, but people being people, and good lord aren’t they, what ends up happening is people fighting to be the power couple of the Players, trying to sabotage the pantomime and sniping and snarking behind each other’s back in pursuit of the power to influence and control and not necessarily to make art in its purist and most community-minded form.
For any new members who might not be aware, we spend the month of December frantically rehearsing a fundraising pantomime that we perform for one night only, just before the big day. In fact, some of us consider that panto to be the big day, and Christmas merely an after-party. (Sarah-Jane MacDonald writing to the Fairway Players mailing list, 3 December 2022)
That in itself, especially in hands as assured as Hallett’s, is entertaining enough but throw in a dead body in a Santa suit, all mummified and encased in a possibly asbestos-filled giant beanstalk which splits open mid-performance to ooohs and aaahs from the audience who think it’s all part of the performance, and you have a festive mystery for the ages, one in which whodidit is as much fun as whytheydidit.
Written as a series of emails, police transcripts and round robins, The Christmas Appeal is a case that is handed to lawyers Femi and Charlotte Roderick Tanner, KC, who asks them to assiduously read their way through everything and see if they can solve the mystery at the heart of the novella.
Who is in the Santa suit looking mortally worse for wear and who put them there, and why were they put there in the first place?
The Christmas Appeal isn’t short of suspects with Sarah-Jane fending off Celia for the position of Chair – the passive-aggressive posturing and back room politicking alone is worth the price of luminously good admission – and a host of smaller bit players, some of whom think they need bigger parts and others who delight in playing both side of the power divide.
It’s a potpourri of the best and worst of human nature and it all comes to a crescendo at what it supposed to be the most wonderful time of the year which if you think about is always more than a little tainted when flawed and very broken people (that’s all of us) are involved.
(courtesy official Janice Hallett Instagram page)
Like any good mystery novella worth its detective salt, there are red herrings aplenty and glorious, near-farcical redirects such as when Sarah-Jane’s husband makes a mistake ordering lollies for the kids and gets considerably more than he bargained for.
By being handed the clues via all the digital documents as Femi and Charlotte, we are given a chance to work our way through the evidence to see if we can spot whodunnit before anyone else.
If, like this reviewer, you are fiendishly bad at piecing together patterns of behaviour and trails of clues then you will have it reconfirmed once again that a career in law enforcement is likely not your first and best choice for a career change.
But if you are someone of sharply observant intellect who can spot a pattern of guilt behaviour from a mile away then you will probably work out who has very old blood on their hands – the body’s been there a while so it’s a cold case par excellence – and emerge triumphant with the killer’s identity right about, if not before, when Femi and Charlotte do.
However well you fare with your sleuthing, you will have a huge amount of fun not just piecing together all the clues in a coherent pattern of behaviour but glorying in how truly awful people can be to each other in the pursuit of something that should, by rights, be all loveliness and rich community spirit.
Sgt Crowe: Mrs Walford, you’ve come in to speak to us today of your own accord. What would you like to say?
Mrs Walford: That I know who the body in the beanstalk is. Recognised him the minute he flew out with the Fairy Godmother. There wasn’t much left to go on, but I knew who it was.
Sgt Crowe: Go on …
Mrs Walford: Well …
(Extract from police interview with Joyce Walford, 24 December 2022, County Police interview report.)
As a peek into the underbelly of English society and the machinations of groups, The Christmas Appeal is an utter, brilliantly well-written joy, a novella that uses a divergent from normal narrative form that absolutely works quickly and fulsomely in giving us a rich and informative sense of who all the characters are but also in diving into the cesspool of human interaction that characterises just about everything we do.
What’s remarkable is that for all the sabotaging and playing out with things is that the show somehow does go on, after a fashion anyway, and we also see how earnestly sincere some people can be too; people might have a propensity to self-serving awfulness, and The Christmas Appeal thrives on dissecting and bringing that to life, but they can also be tenacious and committed and excited about the chance to do something out of the ordinary, like perform on stage, and that lovely aspect also gets a chance to fully shine too.
Hallett is a master of human observational writing and she seamlessly weaves this into The Christmas Appeal which is a murder mystery of the highest, most witty and sublimely clever order that like all good members of the genre doesn’t just investigate what happened and why, but takes a hugely entertaining into the gloriously inconsistencies of human nature and emerge with a suspect, and some moral conundrums which come with huge satisfying resolutions.