The Box of Delights as a whodunnit and as social history

John Masefield's The Box of Delights is many things, and one of them is a crime novel.

Shedunnit, an excellent podcast on women crime writers, has made a previously subscriber-only episode available to everyone. It looks at The Box of Delights as crime fiction.

Kay Harker, after all, is trying to report a nasty case of scrobbling, but like many amateur detectives in fiction, he finds that the police don't take him seriously.

The podcast emphasises that The Box of Delights is a long book - there's a lot in it that didn't make it into the television adaptation. 

And it suggests that the themes of snow and Christmas were an influence on C.S. Lewis and The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.

The word 'Scrobbling' was coined by Masefield. A post on Tyger Tale reminds us that:

One of the many pleasures of reading classic Christmas books is the way they open a window into the past in an especially vivid way. More than just present another idealised vision of Victorian festivities, the best of them can highlight the small details and forgotten language of Christmas’s past. As Piers Torday’s delightful stage adaptation reminded me, few books do this more effectively than John Masefield’s The Box of Delights.