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The Red House Mystery is a detective novel by A. A. Milne, better known for his children’s writing, who wrote this book for his father in 1922. It is his only mystery novel and was very popular at the time.
Mark Ablett is the amiable host of a country-house party to which his estranged brother, Robert, arrives from Australia. Robert is the black sheep of the family who is said to have borrowed money in the past and had written to warn of his visit. One afternoon a gunshot is heard, and Robert is found shot in the head while locked in the library, while his brother Mark has vanished. Tony Gillingham, who has arrived to visit Bill Beverley, one of the guests at the house-party, takes it upon himself to investigate the death. Together Tony and Bill form a Holmes and Watson partnership and seek to solve the mystery in an unorthodox manner, taking over from a bumbling police force.
The Red House Mystery has divided opinion on its literary merit but it remains an entertaining and intriguing read nonetheless.
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The Red House Mystery (Vintage Classics)
August 31, 2009, Random House UK
Paperback
009952127X 9780099521273
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This is probably one of the top classics of "golden age" detective fiction. Anyone who's read any mystery novels at all will be familiar with the tropes -- an English country house in the first half of the twentieth century, a locked room, a dead body, an amateur sleuth, a helpful sidekick, and all the rest.
It's a clever story, ingenious enough in its way, and an iconic example of Agatha Christie / Dorothy Sayers -type murder mysteries. If you've read more than a few of those kinds of books, you might find this one a little predictable, but it's fun despite that.
It's particularly of note, however, because Raymond Chandler wrote about it extensively in his essay "The Simple Art of Murder." After praising it as "an agreeable book, light, amusing in the Punch style, written with a deceptive smoothness that is not as easy as it looks," he proceeds to take it sharply to task for its essential lack of realism. This book -- which Chandler admired to an extent -- was what he saw as the iconic example of what was wrong with the detective fiction of his day, and to which novels like "The Big Sleep" or "The Long Goodbye", with their hard-boiled, hard-hitting gumshoes and gritty realism, were a direct response.
So this book's worth reading not just because it's "an agreeable book, light, [and] amusing in the Punch style", but also because reading it will give a deepened appreciation for the later, more realistic detective fiction of writers like Hammett and Chandler.
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October 8, 2023 | Edited by OnFrATa | Merge works (MRID: 86501) |
April 8, 2022 | Edited by dcapillae | merge authors |
February 9, 2022 | Created by ImportBot | Imported from standard_ebooks:a-a-milne record |