From Dashiell Hammett to Agatha Christie and PD James, the festive season has inspired some of fiction’s finest criminal minds
There is a yearly argument – online if nowhere else – as to whether Die Hard, the Bruce-Willis-versus-European-baddies action flick from 1988, is a Christmas movie. It’s set during a holiday party, after all. But every year, people argue that it can’t be a Christmas film, for no other reason I think than the fact that it spills more blood than eggnog.
And yet I’d say that Christmas and crime are not such strange bedfellows. For one thing, Christmas is that time of year during which families are thrown together in close proximity, often in overly warm houses with bad weather threatening outside. The liquor flows, and dusk arrives early. Sounds like an occasion for murder to me.