It’s a few years since I read a classic detective story; one in this case written in the 1920s with all the tropes of the best inter-war detective fiction.
The Introduction is disarming; it might almost have been written by PG Wodehouse.
”When I told my agent a few years ago that I was going to write a detective story, he recovered as quickly as coulld be expected, but made it clear to me (as a succession of editors and publishers made it clear, later, to him) that what the country wanted from a ‘well-known’ Punch ‘humorist’ was a ‘humorous story’. However, I was resolved upon a life of crime; and the result was such that when, two years afterwards, I announced that I was writing a book of nursery rhymes, my agent and my publisher were equally convinced that what the English-speaking nations most desired was a new detective story. Another two years have gone by; the public appetite has changed once more; and it is obvious now that a new detective story, written in the face of this steady terrestrial demand for children’s books, would be in the worst of taste. So I content myself, for the moment, with an introduction to this new edition of ‘The Red House Mystery’. ”
That’s how AA Milne’s introduction to the 1926 edition begins. The Red House Mystery was first published in 1922 when he was a successful author of plays and novels but by 1926 he had become better known in a different field. When We Were Very Young in 1924 and Winnie-the-Pooh in 1926 launched his career on another trajectory.
The Red House Mystery earns him a place in the pantheon of authors in The Golden Age of Detective Fiction in my opinion, although maybe because it is Milne’s only contribution to the genre, not on Wikipedia. It has been re-published often most recently by the Folio Society in 2016 and as part of the Hatchards Library, Vintage Classics series in 2022.
The setting is an English country house, where Mark Ablett has been entertaining a house party consisting of a widow and her marriageable daughter, a retired major, a wilful actress, and Bill Beverley, a young man about town. Mark’s long-lost brother Robert, the black sheep of the family, arrives from Australia and shortly thereafter is found dead, shot through the head. Mark Ablett has disappeared, so Tony Gillingham, a stranger who has just arrived to call on his friend Bill, decides to investigate. Gillingham plays Sherlock Holmes to his younger counterpart’s Doctor Watson; they progress almost playfully through the novel while the clues mount up and the theories abound. (Wikipedia)
I rather wish AA Milne had stuck to a life of crime as he’s a dab hand at writing detective stories. Whodunnit? Maybe I know?
On a complete tangent …but your title triggers a little known fact that the 1st. Duke of Wellington’s mother died following a fall down the staircase at the Red House , Ardee, Co. Louth. Not something you might hear on a guided tour of Apsley House.. or a mystery ..however