Below is the complete list of Val McDermid’s Vintage Murders books in order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Vintage Murders Books
About Vintage Murders
Vintage Murders is not a conventional Val McDermid series but a long-running collection of themed crime-story anthologies published by Profile Books. The volumes bring together short fiction by numerous classic and contemporary mystery writers, usually around a seasonal setting such as Christmas, winter, summer holidays, the seaside, or extreme heat. McDermid appears as one of the contributing authors in selected volumes, placing her alongside writers from different generations of British crime fiction rather than making her the creator of a connected sequence.
The collection began with Murder under the Christmas Tree, a festive anthology built around ten crime stories. Cecily Gayford, an editor with a particular interest in Golden Age detective fiction, became closely associated with the series and has edited many of its volumes. The success of the first collection led to further Christmas installments including Murder on Christmas Eve and A Very Murderous Christmas.
McDermid contributes to A Very Murderous Christmas, published in 2018. The anthology mixes established names from traditional crime fiction with more contemporary writers, using Christmas as the common thread rather than a shared cast or chronology. Her presence is particularly fitting given the breadth of her own crime-writing career, which ranges from psychological suspense and police procedurals to private-eye fiction and historical crime.
As Vintage Murders expanded, the concept moved beyond Christmas. Books such as Murder in Midsummer, Murder in Midwinter, Murder Takes a Holiday, Murder on a Winter’s Night, Murder by the Seaside, Murder in a Heatwave, and Murder in the Falling Snow collect stories according to atmosphere and setting rather than recurring investigators. Later volumes have continued that pattern with themes involving beaches, candlelight, summer heat, winter weather, and holiday travel.
The series is therefore best approached as a curated library of short crime fiction. Stories by Golden Age figures may appear beside work from modern writers, allowing readers to see how similar situations—locked rooms, suspicious gatherings, country houses, holidays gone wrong, or seasonal celebrations—have been handled across different periods of the genre. Some stories feature recurring detectives belonging to their original authors, while others are entirely self-contained.
McDermid returns to the collection in Murder at First Frost, scheduled for publication in November 2026. The volume again gathers ten crime stories for the festive season and includes her alongside writers such as Ian Rankin, Ellis Peters, and Julian Symons. It should not be read as another McDermid novel or as part of the Tony Hill and Carol Jordan, Karen Pirie, Lindsay Gordon, or Kate Brannigan continuities.
That distinction is important when organizing McDermid’s bibliography. Vintage Murders may appear under her name because she contributes individual stories to particular anthologies, but authorship of the series is collective. Cecily Gayford and Profile Books provide much of the editorial continuity, while the contributing writers change from volume to volume.
For readers interested in McDermid specifically, the relevant entries are therefore selected anthology appearances rather than an independent sequence of her own. Within her larger body of work, Vintage Murders demonstrates another side of her crime writing: the ability to compress tension, character, and misdirection into short fiction while sharing the page with writers whose approaches to murder mysteries span almost a century.