Frankfurt Christmas Market – The Real Location Behind Deadly Christmas
The Frankfurt Christmas Market is the German-style market that takes over Birmingham city centre every winter, and it's the setting for Deadly Christmas, book 7 in my Detective Zoe Finch series. It's also the only Zoe Finch book I researched at exactly the right time of year, and that turned out to matter more than you might think.
What is Birmingham's Frankfurt Christmas Market?
The Christmas market is a Birmingham institution. It runs from early November to a few days before Christmas every year, and has been doing so since 1997.
Every winter it descends on the city centre, and the whole place transforms. Rows of little wooden cabins. The smell of gluhwein and roasting nuts. Currywurst on every corner – for a few weeks each year it genuinely seems to replace the Balti as Birmingham's traditional dish. Lebkuchen by the bagful. Crowds, lights, noise.
Why does the Christmas market divide Brummies?
As I write in the opening chapters of Deadly Christmas, it divides Brummies. There are those that love it, and those that hate it.
Those that love it see it as a fundamental element of Christmas in Birmingham, something the city wouldn't be without. They love the crowds, the lights, the cheesy music and bad wine... everything about it.
Those that hate it, on the other hand, see it as a nuisance. They hate having to push their way through crowds to get through the city centre. They hate the kitsch tackiness of it all. And they hate the mess, and the crowds, and the drunkenness.
I've sat in both camps. I've had years when my kids were small and we loved the lights and the noise and the chance to ride the carousel and whizz down the helter-skelter. And there was the year the lovely Sally and I rode the carousel with our kids and then embarrassed them by dancing to the tunes of the 'singing' reindeer at the gluhwein stall.
The year I lived right next to it
There was also one year when I lived in the city centre, very close to the market. Living next door to the Frankfurt Christmas Market for six weeks will refine your feelings about it considerably. You get the magic on your doorstep – and the noise, and the mess, and being woken in the small hours by revellers who've had one too many steins of beer.
How does Deadly Christmas begin?
That's part of why the book opens the way it does, in the cold early morning, with the council workers who clean up after the night before. The market looks very different when the lights are off and the glamour's gone and someone has to pressure-wash the pavements.
I got the idea for Wendy, the street cleaner we meet in the opening chapter, on a Sunday morning in December 2021, when I got up at 7am to do some location research and found myself the only person at the market... except for the poor souls cleaning up last night's mess.
But Wendy finds more than the usual discarded currywursts and foul pavement pizzas. Behind a little wooden cabin housing one of the market stalls, she and her colleague Manjit find a body.
King's Heath
Much of Deadly Christmas, though, takes place not in the city centre but in King's Heath, the suburb where I live.
Writing this book gave me the chance to put a part of the city I was still getting to know onto the page, and to tell a warmer, more community-rooted story alongside the festive-market drama. There's an elderly busybody of a neighbour. There's a local school. There's even a Father Christmas – because what's a Christmas book without one? It's the kind of close-knit suburban world where everyone knows everyone's business, which is a gift to a crime writer. Communities like that hold secrets and notice things in equal measure.
Writing Christmas at Christmas
Deadly Christmas exists because of a conversation with my writer friend Sacha Black. In November 2021, she interviewed me for the Rebel Author Podcast, and then she asked me a very sensible question. "Your Zoe Finch books," she said, "they're all called Deadly Something. Why don't you write a Christmas book? You should call it Deadly Christmas."
Crime fiction isn't like romance, or even cosy mystery. Christmas books aren't really a thing. But Deadly Christmas? I couldn't really resist.
And it's the only one of my festive books that I actually wrote in winter. I've written Christmas stories in the height of summer before, sweating at my desk and having to constantly remind myself that my characters are bundling indoors to escape the cold, not the heat. It's harder than it sounds to fake a season. But Deadly Christmas came together in the run-up to an actual Christmas, which meant I could wander down to the real market in December and soak it all up while it was happening around me. The cold was real. The gluhwein was real. The crowds I was grumbling about were real.
It made for a book that feels properly, bone-deeply wintry – because for once, I wasn't imagining the season. I was standing in it.
Real locations in Deadly Christmas
The Frankfurt Christmas Market, Birmingham city centre
King's Heath
Read more
Frankfurt Christmas Market – Detective Zoe Finch Series Location Guide
New to the series? Start with Deadly Wishes, or get the prequel novella Deadly Origins free.
