Janice Hallett’s The Christmas Appeal
©Atria Books
Janice Hallett’s novels are innovative, intensive, and compelling. The Christmas Appeal, a novella and a sequel to the runaway hit, The Appeal: A Novel, will keep you reading nonstop. The Fairway Players, first introduced to us in The Appeal, are putting on a Christmas Pantomime, a festive production of Jack and the Beanstalk. A note to US readers: Christmas in the UK always offers a range of Pantomimes (Pantos, as they are affectionately known there) throughout the United Kingdom. These Pantos tend to involve classic stories turned into comedies that feature cross-dressing players where hijinks ensue.
The Fairway Players were introduced in The Appeal as a tight-knit amateur theatre group that put on plays to raise money for various charities, located in the fictional town of Lockwood. If you want to truly appreciate The Christmas Appeal, then do yourself a favor and read The Appeal first. It is a quick read and you will appreciate the characters and humor much more if you have the back story.
While The Christmas Appeal does not have any female detectives, it is certainly a female-centric mystery. The majority of characters are female and the rivalry between the co-chairs of the Fairway Players, Sarah-Jane MacDonald and Cecila Halliday alone is worth the read. The intricate and sometimes caustic relationships are at once biting and hilarious. The novella itself essentially mimics a Christmas Panto with all the mishaps and misunderstandings that unfold over three weeks.
While the mystery of the dead Santa is a catalyst for the narrative, the story starts more as a legal case review. Just like in The Appeal, we learn about the entire case/story through the eyes of two fledgling criminal lawyers, the same two we met when they were law students in The Appeal, Femi Hassan and Charlotte Holroyd. Their mentor, Roderick Tanner, KC (retired), once again enlists them to put their young legal minds to work and see if they can solve the mystery he doesn’t initially reveal. Tanner functions a bit like Charlie in Charlie’s Angels, the voice in command of the narrative.
Thus begins Hallett’s clever narrative form, also known as the expository novel–a flurry of texts and emails between the Fairway Players, including fliers, newspaper articles, reports, and handwritten notes. All conversations between Femi, Charlotte and sometimes Roderick are through texts, emails, and WhatsApp. There is no formal prose throughout the entire novella. Please don’t let this put you off. It is quite an ingenious way of pulling the reader directly into each character's mind and forcing them to identify with those characters. While Hallett isn’t the first writer to exploit this form, she expertly uses a frame story to control the narrative of the core tale to manipulate the way it will unfold through Roderick Tanner, KC’s omniscient knowledge of events and the direction of his two mentees.
If you have had enough heart-warming holiday films to make you feel that you have turned into an emotional marshmallow*, then, by all means, treat yourself to The Christmas Appeal, and begin to feel like a thinking person again.
*Please note: While I enjoy Christmas movies, two months of them has become a bit overwhelming. Even Nutmeg has voiced her preferences for episodes of Vera, The Coroner, and Death in Paradise before she has to watch another Christmas film. Whatever happened to a simple week or two of Christmas specials and then the world moved on?