Authors find success by keeping holiday stories short
Several years ago, a couple of popular authors discovered they could write short, holiday-themed novels, thereby relieving themselves of the need to open Christmas Club accounts like the rest of us.
Every year since, a few more have climbed on that bandwagon. They can hardly be blamed for wanting to make an easy buck, but the results are decidedly mixed.
Among the first to take this course was Mary Higgins Clark, who now collaborates with her daughter Carol on an annual holiday project.
“The Christmas Thief” (Simon & Schuster, 204 pages, $20) is the third they’ve written as a team, and its mother-daughter heroines – mystery writer Nora Reilly and her investigator daughter Regan – are back, along with lottery winners Alvirah and Willy Meehan, whom they befriended a couple of holiday novels ago.
The three couples – the Reillys, the Meehans, and Regan and her boyfriend Jack – head to Vermont for some pre-Christmas skiing, along with the Meehans’ friend Opal, another lottery winner who was swindled out of all her winnings by a crook posing as an investment adviser. Unbeknown to them, said swindler Packy Noonan has just been released from prison and is headed for the Vermont woods himself to retrieve a flask of diamonds he tied to a tree before he was locked up.
The real star of this story is an 80-foot spruce about to be cut down and transported to New York to become the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree.
A collaboration with even more creators is the reissued “The Delaney Christmas Carol” (Bantam, 429 pages, $20), written by Iris Johansen, Kay Hooper and Fayrene Preston in 1992. Subdivided into three distinct stories, each written by a different author, you’d imagine they couldn’t possibly hold together as credible components of a larger whole, but they do.
The common thread running through “Christmas Past,” “Christmas Present” and “Christmas Future” is an heirloom mirror that harbors a bit of magic which affects the lives of several generations of Delaneys.
The most engaging of this year’s arrivals may be “A Redbird Christmas” (Random House, 229 pages, $17.95), written by Fanny Flagg (“Fried Green Tomatoes”).
Shortly before Christmas, Oswald T. Campbell’s doctor tells him his emphysema is so advanced he’s unlikely to live out another year. But he just might live a little longer if he gets out of Chicago to a warm climate. He even gives him an old brochure advertising an affordable hotel in Lost River, Ala.
Unable to find a listing, he phones the Lost River Community Center, where he learns the hotel burned down years earlier. But not to worry, says the widow at the other end of the line, she knows of a nice home where he can board.
So he packs up and leaves – and arrives to discover Lost River is a tiny, remote hamlet where everyone knows everyone, and privacy is a foreign concept. But it is here that the hardened Campbell discovers the rewards of love, compassion and caring neighbors.
Also among the best of this season’s crop is Luanne Rice’s “Silver Bells” (Bantam, 224 pages, $15). Widower Christy Byrne, a Nova Scotia Christmas tree farmer, comes to Manhattan with his two children every December to sell his trees on the streets of Chelsea. This year, he also is searching for his son Danny, who hasn’t been heard from since he ran off the previous year.
Christy finds himself drawn to a neighborhood woman, Catherine, who is still mourning the loss of her husband, who died of cancer three years earlier. Coincidentally, Catherine is the only person in Manhattan who knows Danny’s whereabouts, but her loyalty to the boy stops her from enlightening his distraught father – and threatens to abort their budding romance.
Nora Roberts’ “The Gift” (Silhouette, 217 pages, $16.95) could have been titled “Two Gifts,” as it encompasses a pair of short stories, both of them nicely sentimental tales with happy endings.
In “Home for Christmas,” newspaper reporter Jason Law returns to his New Hampshire hometown after a 10-year absence to search out the girl he left behind. Now divorced, Faith still resides there with her daughter, and the former lovers are drawn to one another, despite his lingering anger that she didn’t wait for him and her disappointment that he waited so long to return.
It will take a revelation of enormous proportions for them to envision a future together – and, naturally, Roberts provides one.
The second story, “All I Want for Christmas,” is about a pair of motherless twin boys who have only one thing on their Christmas list: a new mom. (Well, actually, bikes and a new mom.) They’ve even picked out the mom – the school’s new music teacher. Getting their dad to see the logic of their plan takes some doing, but Roberts is more than up to the task.
One of the odder holiday books is “Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story” (Henry Holt, 34 pages, $15). Paul Auster’s tale emanates from a newspaper’s request that he submit a Christmas story, which puts him in a quandary until he asks his friend Auggie, proprietor of a Brooklyn cigar store, for an idea.
Auggie promises Auster “the best Christmas story you ever heard” in exchange for lunch. Auster agrees, and thus we are entertained by a short saga involving Auggie, a youthful shoplifter and an elderly blind woman.
It’s misleading to call it a book, as it’s actually a very short story. Still, this memorable little morality tale is charmingly told and illustrated.
The point of these books, of course, is not to strive for literary excellence, but to get readers into the holiday spirit — which, like Christmas carols, they decidedly do.