This is your audiobook for December 2022: two festive mysteries by masters of the early 20th century detective story. Both centre around a theft that is perpetrated during Christmas festivities. The first, The Flying Stars by GK Chesterton, features his regular sleuth Father Brown, but is told from the perspective of his greate nemesis, the jewel thief Flambeau. It was first published in The Saturday Evening Post on 20 May 1911 and collected in the anthology The Innocence of Father Brown later the same year.

The second story, Stuffing by Edgar Wallace, was also first published in The Saturday Evening Post, appearing on 11 December, 1926. It is an entirely standalone tale, likely written by Wallace as a festive commission for the newspaper, and draws on the pre-existing tradition established by Conan Doyle and others of using the Dickensian trappings of Christmas for nefarious purposes in a crime story.