Christmas traditions are about gatherings of family and friends. The Christmas murder mystery seems out of step with a festive season. Yet every year, books come out featuring detective stories against the backdrop of a holiday. “A Christie for Christmas” was a marketing slogan created to encourage people to buy the latest Agatha Christie novel each year which helped her become the best-selling fiction writer of all time. This class will focus on her books set around the Christmas season. Part lecture and part book group discussion, we will enjoy these three books together. Explore why detective stories are associated with Christmas and other holidays, learn about her life, her writing career, and her detectives. The books to be discussed are: Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, a mystery set at the holidays where a tyrannical father is murdered in a locked room while his family enjoys Christmas Eve dinner downstairs, 4:50 from Paddington, a book that begins on as a woman, on her way home from Christmas shopping, witnesses a murder from a train, The Sittaford Mystery that begins at a séance on a snowy night when a spirit appears proclaiming a man is dead. While the class will focus on the books, we will also discuss the adaptations in movies, tv, and theater. All the books are readily available from libraries and stores. Since they are older books, you should be able to find them in sources for used books.