Notes to Notes! On Agatha Christie and Nero Wolfe!

The premise of both The ABC Murders and "The Slaughtered Santas" is that the best way to hide one murder is in a batch of seemingly random murders: in the Christie, it's an alphabetic scheme, with a person whose last name starts with A murdered first in a town whose name starts with A, followed by B and B, C and C; in the Nero Wolfe story, it's street-corner Santas.