All my friends and followers seemed to like it so much that I decided to expand on it and wrote a short story, bringing in all the tropes from Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and others to make a world-weary Santa dread the investigation of the murder of one of his reindeer in a sort of seedy version of Christmas Town, going all out for the humor. Santa laments in the story, in a parody of the words of Sam Spade, “When someone murders one of your flying reindeer, you’re supposed to do something about it.” And it’s up to him to bring down the culprit.
You just don’t know what’s stuck in your head until you get on the parody kick and then it just flows out to make a humorous tale; a drunken penguin desperate to snitch on his pals for just one more hit; one of the reindeer addicted to candy canes (“he’s on the cane”) and willing to talk to Santa, but only alone under a frozen bridge; and a mob boss walrus that sounds suspiciously like Sidney Greenstreet from Casablanca who owns the Blue Penguin café and wants to make a deal.
It’s definitely an admiring hat tip to all the books and stories I have loved over the years. Even Frosty the Snowman makes an appearance. And when other writers and readers know these stories just as intimately, then, well…it’s just a community sharing in the joke.
The title “Last Pole on the Left” is reminiscent of Where the Sidewalk Ends or One Way Street, wonderful noir films from the 1950s, where people get caught up in their own corruption with really no way out. That’s the fun of noir anyway, to see how tangled the characters can get as they try to worm their way out of trouble and only get themselves deeper in by foolish choices. When I wrote my fifteen-book series the Crispin Guest Medieval Noir novels, they were definitely along the same lines, with a hero who just couldn’t get out of his own way, but managed to do the right thing, though still losing it all and getting knocked around a bit too.
I wanted to lighten it up with this short story.
It’s all in good fun to bolster your holiday spirit, but keep it away from the kiddies. This isn’t the Santa they’re looking for. But it just might be the Santa we need.
Find it on Draft2Digital or Amazon: https://a.co/d/cJfhkIG
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Jeri Westerson is currently writing a Sherlockian pastiche, An Irregular Detective Mystery series, with a former Baker Street Irregular as a new sleuth under the guidance of Sherlock Holmes. Westerson writes medieval mysteries, Tudor mysteries, several historical standalones, and a few paranormal series. See JeriWesterson.com for the entire oeuvre.
