“An Exciting Christmas Eve” (1883)

This story by Arthur Conan Doyle was written when he was about 24 and does not alas have very much to do with Christmas or the Christmas spirit. I’m not sure why it is set in the season, except that might have made it more marketable in publishing circles of the time. The plot is ludicrous and, contra the title, not so exciting. But Doyle is good enough, even at young age, to make it suspenseful and it is often enjoyable in spite of its various weaknesses. The first-person narrator, Herr Doktor Otto von Spee of Berlin, is a chemist who specializes in explosives. The Franco-Prussian War of 1871-1872 is raging along. Foreign spies or undercover agents (presumably French) want information from him about bombs, so they kidnap him to get it. In a way it makes sense in 1883 for an explosives expert to be heroic like von Spee is here. That might have changed after about World War I and it does seem strange here. Nobody ever thought much of the Unabomber, for example. In the end a lot of the problems in this story may be more about the inexperience of Doyle. The kidnapping of von Spee is not handled well and in general the story assumes we are more keenly interested in bombs than we might be and that we already know what things like “guncotton” are. I suspect the explosions here would be likely to kill people. Von Spee notably survives a big one. Basically, the story describes von Spee’s expertise and bona fides, then he is kidnapped and told he must train bomb-makers with his knowledge, and then he figures out a way to escape. You really have to lean into your suspension of disbelief if this story is going to work for you, especially with this premise. But even as a young writer still coming up, Doyle has a knack for making his stories entertaining and engaging. Just don’t expect this one to work well if you’re including it in some kind of Christmas ritual. Yes, I do think Christmas is a good time for ghost stories. But this story is not really that.

Chillers for Christmas, ed. Richard Dalby (out of print)
Read story online.