Murder for Christmas

A classic mystery for the holiday season! Mulled wine, mistletoe…and murder.

Mordecai Tremaine, former tobacconist turned amateur sleuth, has been invited to spend Christmas in the sleepy village of Sherbroome. Arriving on Christmas Eve, he finds that the revelries are in full swing—but so too are tensions among the assortment of guests.

Midnight strikes and the partygoers discover that it’s not just presents nestled under the tree—there’s a dead body too. A dead body that bears a striking resemblance to Father Christmas. With the snow falling and suspicions flying, it’s up to Mordecai to sniff out the culprit—and prevent someone else from getting murder for Christmas.

The question “Who is Francis Duncan?” was as much a mystery as the author’s whodunits.


When an old edition of Murder for Christmas, originally published in 1949, was discovered in the archive library at Vintage Books a few years ago, the British publisher could find no information about the author.


They launched a campaign to discover the author’s identity, which was quickly solved when his son and daughter came forward to confirm that their father, William Underhill, was Francis Duncan.


Underhill wrote more than twenty crime novels published between 1937 and 1959. After serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps in WWII, he spent the rest of his life in education, first as a primary school teacher and then as a college lecturer. He wrote detective fiction from “sheer inner necessity” and also to support his income. He died of a heart attack shortly after his fiftieth wedding anniversary in 1988.