Literature / Naughty: Nine Tales of Christmas Crime

Naughty: Nine Tales of Christmas Crime is a collection of short stories by Steve Hockensmith, featuring several (mostly comedic) mysteries or stories involving less mysterious criminal acts that occur on Christmases across the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.The stories are

1. "Fruitcake" follows a poisoned fruitcake that is introduced into a retirement home by a widow on the prowl for a new husband who is seeking to Murder the Hypotenuse in a Love Triangle, only for her target to give away the fruitcake, which journeys from kitchen to kitchen over the next year before someone finally takes a bite from it.
2. "I Killed Santa Claus" follows a mall elf explaining the circumstances that led to her being able to claim the titular phrase after a series of encounters with a shady mall Santa.
3. Secret Santa (2004) is about an office Secret Santa event where one white-collar criminal learns that his secret Santa knows all about his many dirty secrets.
4. "Humbug" is an Affectionate Parody Happy Ending Override of A Christmas Carol, where Scrooge hallucinated the last act of the book shortly before dying under mysterious circumstances that launch a Who Murdered the Asshole investigation.
5. "Naughty" features the protagonist of "I Killed Santa Claus" engaging in wacky hijinks as part of an ill-conceived and quickly-regretted plan to give a Jerkass acquaintance the bad Christmas he deserves.
6. "Hidden Gifts" follows two unhappy children who spend Christmas Eve debating about the existence of Santa Claus and learning that their mom's new boyfriend is a drug dealer.
7. "Red Christmas" follows Mrs. Claus investigating the murder of an elf at the North Pole.
8. "Naiveté" follows two characters from "Naughty" plotting to rob a church's poor box on Christmas Eve, leading to a Heel Realization for one of them and an unusual comeuppance for the other.
9. "Special Delivery" follows a trucker delivering a load of then-novel Cabbage Patch Kids to a department store for holiday shoppers while being menaced by two hijackers who debuted in the chronologically earlier "I Killed Santa Claus."

All of the stories were previously published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and, with the exception of Humbug and possibly "Hidden Gifts" and Secret Santa (2004) all of the stories seem to be set in a Shared Universe (although they are told in Anachronic Order).

Tropes in all of the stories besides Secret Santa (2004) (which has its own page)

• The '80s: "Red Christmas," "Hidden Gifts," and "Special Delivery" are all set in the 1980s and feature earmarks of the decade like references to the drug trade, the Cabbage Patch Kids coming out, and The Cold War.
• A Degree in Useless: In "Naughty," Hannah's liberal arts degree has failed to get her a job outside the retail sector in the months following her college graduation, and she and her mother acknowledge that earning it was a poor use of her college fund.
• Accidental Murder: "Humbug" features Scrooge being drugged, hallucinating the presence of the three ghosts, and wandering deliriously through the busy streets until he is killed. The police initially look at the case as a premeditated murder, but it turns out Scrooge was only drugged to make him too drowsy to conduct a proper audit of the books and learn that Bob Cratchitt was Stealing from the Till.
  Mrs. Bucket [I]f he had been murdered, I should think you would have a city full of suspects. But William—Scrooge wasn't murdered, was he? He ran into the street and was trampled by a passing wagon. His death was an accident.
  Inspector William Bucket: How can you say that? The opium-!
  Mrs. Bucket Would have made a poor weapon. If Scrooge's death had been the objective, surely arsenic would have made a better choice. Or any of a hundred other poisons.
• Adaptational Villainy: Various blameless characters from A Christmas Carol are suspected of murdering Ebeneezer Scrooge in this retelling of the story, and the culprit is Bob Cratchitt, who is an embezzler and opium addict who lied about the existence of Tiny Tim and the rest of his family in failed bids for sympathy from his boss and creditor.
• Bad Santa: Big Buck, the mall Santa in "I Killed Santa Claus," is a middle-aged burglar who is planning to rob the families who visit his workshop. He also smells of sweat, cigarettes, and alcohol, hates kids, sexually harasses any college girl who works as one of his elves, and killed the kindly previous mall Santa to get his job.
• Behind Every Great Man:
  • In "Red Christmas," Santa Claus has magical abilities and is the sweetest man in the world, but the brain behind operations at the North Pole is Mrs. Claus (who also heads the investigation into the murder of an elf and saves her husband from being kidnapped in the story's climax).
  • High-ranking cop Inspector Bucket may be a determined and insightful cop who (in this universe) has been involved in the arrest of almost every villain Charles Dickens ever created, but his wife can lift him out of depressed feelings of failure with a Rousing Speech and point out something obvious about an investigation that her husband misses.
• Brandishment Bluff: In "Naughty," Hannah is terrified Diesel will shoot her with an object in his jacket pocket that he keeps pointing in her direction. It turns out to be an ice scraper.
• Brick Joke: "Fruitcake," the first story in the collection, features a poisoned fruitcake being used in a murder plot. In "Red Christmas," the Soviet agents carry poisoned pieces of fruitcake as their Christmas Cyanide Pill. This may double as a Call-Forward, since "Red Christmas" is set decades before the former story.
• Closet Geek: The Clauses and/or their elves named two of their backup reindeer Yoda and Vader, indicating that the Star Wars movies made a big impression on the paragons of holiday cheer and gift-giving. Another of the reindeer is named Pac-Man.
• Covert Pervert: Santa's Elves may be cheerful embodiments of Christmas joy, but that doesn't mean they can't have wild Christmas parties with drinking and sex, although they are embarrassed to outright admit this in Mrs. Claus's presence and come up with a lot of awkward euphemisms.
  Carol: Yeah, Gumdrop was there for a while. But he and my sister Noël had a little too much eggnog and went off to...ummmm...make some mulled cider.
  Mrs. Claus: Noël?
  Noël: Over here, Mrs. C. When we got to the bedro...I mean the kitchen, Gumdrop realized he didn't have a...well..a..bag of mulling spices. There was one in his wallet, but he'd left in in his jacket at work, I might have had a bit too much 'eggnog', but I'm not stupid-I told him no spice, no cider.
• Defector from Commie Land: "Red Christmas" features a group of KGB agents trying to kidnap Santa Claus so they can take the magic he uses to make his naughty and nice lists and spy on their enemies. After the plan is foiled, one of the agents, who has a weary Seen It All visage, requests political asylum at the North Pole and gets a job in the reindeer stables.
• Do Not Call Me "Paul": Ribbons and Bows, the most high-ranking North Pole elves featured in "Red Christmas," prefer Hank and Frank and refuse to let anyone but the Clauses call them Ribbons and Bows.
• Dreadful Musician: In "Naughty," the Reptile sounds like he has emphysema when he tries to sing and Arlo and Hannah end up singing off-key while trying to improvise a number for their Christmas carpooler disguises.
• Early Personality Signs: In "Red Christmas," Missy Widgitz is obsessed enough with Christmas to ask Santa for her own elf as a present. As an adult in "I Killed Santa Claus", she is a promotions director obsessed with her mall having the best holiday workshop.
• Even Evil Has Standards: In "I Killed Santa Claus," Kevin is just as much of a pervert and thief as Buck, but when he hears that the previous mall Santa died of injuries sustained when Buck ran him off the road, he is briefly upset, while Buck is merely amused to recall how he got away with it.
• Framing the Guilty Party: In "Naughty," Hannah forges a love letter to a man to get him in trouble with his wife, but since the guy hit on her in an exceptionally creepy way earlier, he is clearly not a devoted husband.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: Discussed in "Red Christmas," when Mrs. Claus points out that Margaret Thatcher was once just another kid who got coal from Santa but is now a powerful world leader who could have the resources and motivation to be behind a plot to kill or kidnap Santa (although it isn't her).
• Funetik Aksent: In "Red Christmas," the Russian spies replace their "s"'s with "z"'s and "w"'s with "v"'s while speaking English.
• Hard Truckin': The protagonist of "Special Delivery" is a tough trucker who works longer hours than he'd like and has to fight a pair of hijackers.
• Hoist by Their Own Petard: In "Fruitcake," a woman gives her romantic rival a poisoned fruitcake, but she mistakes it for a gift from her Lethal Chef boyfriend and gives it away to the local superintendent, who then starts dating the original poisoner and obliviously gives her the (redecorated and no longer recognizable) fruitcake.
• How We Got Here: "I Killed Santa Claus" begins with the narrator describing the circumstances behind why she can say that phrase about an Accidental Murder act of self-defense involving a dishonest mall Santa.
• Incriminating Indifference: In "Red Christmas," after an elf is murdered at the North Pole, suspicion quickly and correctly falls on the only elf present who is calmly continuing with his work rather than gathering around Mrs. Claus to express grief and trying to figure out what happened.
• Lazy Alias: In "I Killed Santa Claus," William "Buck" Thomerson's police record shows that three of his aliases, Thomas Williams, William Williamson, and William Thompson, don't deviate far from his real given and/or surname, although his fourth alias, Vincente Benito de la Rosa III, stands out from this pattern.
• Manchild: In "Red Christmas", Bud Schmidt is still writing to Santa for books, games, and a Farrah Fawcett poster despite being forty-three, and remains an amiable bumbler as a seventyish retiree in "Fruitcake".
• Minion with an F in Evil: Diesel, the junior member of the Stupid Crooks duo, emphasizes with Linus during A Charlie Brown Christmas, happily sings along with a church choir, and is unable to go along with robbing a church.
• Mushroom Samba:
  • In the universe of "Humbug," everything in A Christmas Carol after the appearance of the ghosts was Scrooge hallucinating after he was drugged with opium.
  ''There followed a brief conversation with a heap of dirty snow Scrooge addressed as "Fred and a cart of roasted chestnuts he called "Bob," after which he christened a discarded sack of rotten potatoes "Tim" and proceeded to give it a piggy-back ride.
  • At the end of the story, the villain drugs Bucket the same way he drugged Scrooge, and, before overpowering his assailant, Bucket hallucinates bizarre sights such as "a remarkably large and malicious-looking gingerbread man," a reindeer with blood-stained antlers and a nose that blazed as red as the unholy fires of Hell", and "green-haired ogres with termites in their smiles".
• The Omniscient: Santa's elves do indeed know everything about all the children who write letters to Santa, and a few particularly good and bad ones are famous enough for the Clauses to remember offhand as well.
  Mrs. Claus Why this first [letter]]'s from little Karen Courtney. Santa and I know all about her. She's a little angel.
  Ribbons/Frank: Nice to old people.
  Bows/Hank: Kind to animals.
  Jingle: Picks up her room. Brushes her teeth. Wipes her boots before coming inside.
  Mrs. Claus: I don't think we need to worry about Karen. Now, how about this next one? Alvin Erie?
  Ribbons/Frank: Picks his nose.
  Bows/Hank: Fights with his brother.
  Jingle: Pouts. Cries.
  Mrs. Claus: My goodness. Coal?
  The Elves (in chorus) Coal.
• Pragmatic Hero: In "Special Delivery," after Bass foils Buck and Kevin’s attempt to hijack his truck, he doesn’t turn them into the cops because the following debriefing might reveal that he was driving without stopping for a longer stretch than the law allows and would also delay his efforts to get his time-sensitive load to River City.
• Pulling Themselves Together: In "Red Christmas," North Pole stableman Rumpity-Trump is an ice creature who scares away National Geographic photographers visiting the region and falls apart when he is frightened but can put himself back together afterward.
• Race Against the Clock: In "Special Delivery," Bass has to pick up a truckload of toys five hundred miles away and make it back to River City by ten a.m. Christmas morning, a task which he succeeds at despite the delay of a hijacking attempt.
• The Stoner: Arlo Hettle, from "I Killed Santa Claus," "Naughty," and "Naiveté," is an unmotivated and unimaginative user of marijuana and various borrowed over-the-counter drugs who can barely hold down a job as a mall elf with "a memory like a sponge...by which I mean it's soggy and full of holes."
  Hannah: Demerol? Geez, Arlo, can't you just say no?
  Arlo: Man, I can't even say "maybe."
• Stupid Crooks: Alvin "the Reptile" Erie and Diesel are a pair of "the pettiest of petty crooks" who have engaged in various failed or unprofitable robberies, pot deals, and counterfeit t-shirt schemes. The Reptile "aspired to be a Napoleon of crime" but "was, in sad reality, closer to a Custer", while Diesel dutifully and obliviously follows him into almost every new scheme regardless of how badly the last one went.
• Took a Level in Cheerfulness: It is implied but not confirmed that the Karens mentioned in "Red Christmas" and "Hidden Gifts" are the same person and that the sad Wise Beyond Their Years girl from the latter story has become one of the most polite and kind Cheerful Children to write to Santa after regaining her faith in him.
• Wise Beyond Their Years: Karen, the protagonist of "Hidden Gifts", is a cynical ten-year-old who no longer believes in Santa, shatters her brother's belief (albeit in a Cruel to Be Kind way), watches Starsky & Hutch and The Rockford Files, and figures out that her mom's shady new boyfriend is a drug dealer when she finds some cocaine in the house, while also lying to him about what she knows.
• Wham Line:
  • In "Humbug", it first starts becoming clear that The Bob Cratchitt in this story is very different from the saintly Family Man version of the character in A Christmas Carol when a constable recalling details about his homelife says "Small flat, no kids."
  • In "Naiveté," the Reptile learns how the cops found out about his church burglary when they take him past a nearby Nativity scene and he sees that it isn't occupied by department store dummies but a youth group in costumes who were acting out the scene and were able to call 911.
  Up close, he could see that the manger wasn't small at all. It was nearly life-size. Which was appropriate, since the figures milling about around it were alive.

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