Northpole Whodunnit

 The Fat Man A Tale of North Pole Noir by Ken Harmon

This is niche literature at its finest. 

    A Christmas-based murder mystery, The Fat Man A Tale of North Pole Noir by Ken Harmon takes place at the North Pole with an elf named Gumdrop Coal framed for murder. Gumdrop must find the real culprit. A holiday themed mystery with a twist—the tale is told as a hard-boiled, Dashiell Hammett style that would make Humphrey Bogart fans salivate.

First published in 2010, it comes in at under 300 pages, but each page packs a punch. We follow Gumdrop Coal, a bitter elf, tells the reader all about his job—dropping coal into the stockings of the naught kids. 

His job satisfaction is short lived. Soon he’s revealing his own shame when “Santa game me my walking papers and told me that there was a new elf in Kringle Town.”

Author Ken Harmon writes this in full Noir language. Every page is—start-to-finish—a nod to those Hammett novels and 1940s detective movies. By the time we find out how Gumdrop got his job at the North Pole, we’ve learned all about his impossible-to-guess lineage, his fractured-fairytale beginnings, and what other lines of work there are for elves. 

Never does the Noir slip. It’s firmly in place and if you can read it without smiling—or even laughing out loud—you’ve forgotten how to laugh. 

Gumdrop Coal follows his clues on a round about route towards clearing his name, but the murder, clever as it is, is only part of the fun. The road to the solution is the real joy here. Chapter titles from classic Christmas songs, Carols, books, etc, set the festive tone, but when Gumdrop refers to Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer as “The Christmas Moose with the red beak…” should give you an idea of what’s going on here.

Finding the culprit gets even more serious when Gumdrop has to save Santa from being next on the assassin’s kill sheet. Saving Santa from certain death might be enough to put Gumdrop back on Santa’s good side, but if he fails, what happens to Christmas?

Though this one’s a bit old, it is available as an ebook, and of course, you’ll probably find it used somewhere. It’s worth a hunt and a read, and might make you want to watch some old black-and-white films this Christmas.