'Back for Christmas'

 

Frequent New Yorker contributor John Collier wrote a nasty little story, "Back for Christmas" (1939) that has become an atypical holiday favorite. 

Last year, it was featured in American Christmas Stories, a Library of America volume edited by Connie Willis. Despite the story's title, it has little to do with Christmas. The protagonist's wife promises the couple will return from America in time to celebrate the holiday in England, but the setting is actually several months earlier. 

I first learned of "Back for Christmas" from one of its radio adaptations. It has been featured three times on Suspense and once on Escape. In the script, writer Robert Tallman changed the main character from a medical doctor to a professor of botany and added some business about a devil's garden in the basement. Both revisions are effective. 

The Suspense episode starring Peter Lorre is justly praised as a classic. However, I prefer the Escape episode with Paul Frees in the title role. Lorre sounds too creepy from the start, so his descent into homicidal madness isn't as shocking as Frees's. The listener is still able to muster some sympathy for Frees's doctor, despite his crime. Not so with Lorre's portrayal. (Sirius XM's Radio Classics is playing the Lorre version several times this week; it's also available on demand to subscribers.) 

All of the radio adaptations do justice to Collier's work, but searching out the original story is still worthwhile.