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''Saint or Sinner? Father Christmas - The Chicago Years'' is a biographical novel covering Santa Claus's close involvement in gangland Chicago during the Prohibition era.

Premise

''On 25th December 1921, shortly after midnight, Santa Claus made the most drastic error of his career. A mistake in his chimney orientation meant that while intending to visit a tenement building in Chicago's poorest area, he instead found himself face to face with the most notorious gangster in Chicago at that time. It was a mistake that was to change the very course of Christmas - and would nearly destroy the Christmas icon's very existence.''

According to its author, ''Saint or Sinner? Father Christmas – The Chicago Years'' is the culmination of years of painstaking, often dangerous research. Through articles, interviews, official documents and a variety of other sources, the work explores Santa Claus's rise through Gangland in the ten years that followed his fateful meeting.

From humble beginnings, Claus's rise through Prohibition Chicago is meticulously documented by the author. Prostitution, smuggling, theft, violence and even murder are seen not only to have been embraced by Christmas's most celebrated personification – but perfected by him, in the creation of Gangland's most brutal empire.

Using personal accounts and academic analysis, Saint or Sinner? explores not only the involvement of Father Christmas in Chicago's darkest period – but asks why such an icon of charity and festive joy would have been drawn in to this culture of iniquity. It documents meticulously, his moral degradation and his increasingly tenuous grip on sanity.

Throughout the work, the author also explores how the involvement of Father Christmas in criminal activity was to impact on the Christmas festival itself. We are shown how the institution of Christmas was sabotaged and degraded; and how the Lapland elves were themselves drawn in to the sordid world of crime and iniquity. Throughout the work, the author examines in detail how Claus’s nefarious activities sent ripples across the metaphysical infrastucture – leading finally to a threat on Santa Claus’s continued existence.

''Saint or Sinner? Father Christmas – The Chicago Years'' is a book that claims to explode the myth of the festive season's ruddy cheeked icon as a figure of absolute charity. In doing so, it raises questions about everyman’s moral fallibility.