Of course it's very hampering being a detective, when you don't know anything about detecting,
    and when nobody knows that you're doing detection, and you can't have people up to
    cross-examine them, and you have neither the energy nor the means to make proper inquiries; and,
    in short, when you're doing the whole thing in a thoroughly amateur, haphazard way.
            -A.A. Milne (The Red House Mystery)

A.A. Milne is, of course, best remembered for his series of Winnie the Pooh tales.  In addition, he wrote for the famous British humor magazine Punch, was a fine playwright and, though he served in WWI, became an outspoken pacifist.  In the midst of all this, he wrote one of the classic English drawing room mysteries--The Red House Mystery.  The book ends on a note which seems to imply that further adventures will follow, but sadly none did.

The Red House is a British manor, home to Mark Ablett, and gathering place for his fun loving friends.  But the bucolic setting is disrupted when Ablett's long lost brother, black sheep of the family, is murdered and Mark goes missing.  Two guests, Antony Gillingham, a sort of Holmsian jack of all trades, and Bill Beverley, a mildly dense Watson-like sidekick, take it upon themselves to solve the crime.  What follows is a reasonably dated but still amusing "intuitive" mystery.  Raymond Chandler apparently went out of his way to attack the story as one of the worst examples of the genre, wholly lacking in genuine criminological methodology and requiring enormous intuitive leaps on the part of the "detectives".  Still, take it for what it is and it offers a pleasant enough reading experience.

(Reviewed:23-Jan-00)

Grade: (C+) Orrin C. Judd

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