Mumming: putting on a mask and going merry-making from house to house, especially at Christmas

Earlier this year, you met Madoc and Janet Rhys in Pint of Murder. Madoc is a member of the RCMP, and captured the murderer in Janet’s small New Brunswick town, with her quiet and down-to-earth approach. They fell in love in that first book.

When this book starts, Janet is back at work in a Frederickton secretarial pool and the two have been dating for months. Madoc is working his way up to a proposal – of marriage, of course – when his mother arrives and beats him to the punch, handing over a family heirloom ring and giving the union her blessing. Before the two can get much further on their own, his mother manages to finagle an invitation for them at the ancestral country home of a wealthy benefactor.

Madoc and Janet are quickly whisked off by helicopter to a remote manor along Bay Chaleur along the north-eastern coast of New Brunswick. There their host introduces them to the family: the grandmother, her sister, her widowed son-in-law (aka, The Squire), her grandsons, grand-daughters, grandsons-in-law, granddaughters-in-law, 20-something great-granddaughter and her new boyfriend – an ex-boyfriend of Janet’s – and two teenaged great-grandsons, and a bevy of servants.

Well, not quite: the grandmother dies before Madoc and Janet can meet her.

And then, on Christmas Eve, following the annual mumming around the house in which everyone dresses up in mask and costume, and dance up and down stairs, into the kitchen, and all over the palatial manor house, drinking all the while, the great-aunt is pushed out of the house into a blizzard, perhaps by the heir apparent (The Squire’s eldest son), who appears to be stoned on speed. That’s not his style, he’s a drinker.

Who drugged the heir, killed the great aunt, and killed the grandmother? Luckily RCMP Inspector Madoc Rhys is on duty, ably seconded by his loving Janet.

Charlotte MacLeod wrote three holiday murder mysteries: one for Madoc and Janet, one for Peter Shandy, and one for Sarah Kelling. (Interestingly, she did not write one for her Grub-and-Stakers series, but she cut that series off pretty quickly. Perhaps she could only take so much silliness in her writing.)

And she made them each different: This one is almost an English Country mystery, set during a blizzard, in a big house, remotely set, filled with servants and a huge family, and the quaint custom of mumming. The Peter Shandy mystery is set in Massachusetts, set amongst a snow-covered university campus, where the houses are decorated to the hilt, holiday music carries throughout the streets and buildings, and students dash about dressed like elves. The Sarah Kelling mystery is set in Boston and the surround environs, and the central custom is the annual holiday celebration of the Convivial Codfish, which is punctuated by resounding “Bah Humbugs!”

It’s not enough to set your mystery during the holiday season, you need to introduce a distinct custom that will set it apart from other holiday mysteries. Compare this to The White Priory Murders by John Dickson Carr which is set at Christmas but the holiday is hardly mentioned and I don’t even think the family had a Christmas tree.

We all celebrate Christmas differently. Some families open their presents at midnight on Christmas Eve (a great trick for preventing children from awakening you at pre-dawn hours the next day). My sister has two traditions: every year she makes cookies and cocoa and the family decorates the tree together, unwrapping each ornament, and talking about what it is a souvenir of; and then, on Christmas Day, they have a big breakfast and sit around in their pajamas snacking on canned ham and watching all The Lord of the Rings movies. (A hold-over from when my brother-in-law was a chef and had to work Christmas Day brunch, and then was too tired to do anything more.) Retail managers often go to bed early on Christmas because they have to go in early the next day to set up the after-holiday sale.

There is no right way to celebrate Christmas. And the only wrong way is to sit alone and feel sorry for yourself. So go on: do something! Volunteer at a soup kitchen or get together with other holiday-orphans or whatever. It could only be better than sitting home alone, feeling like a victim.