The Red House Mystery

Product Information

Los personajes principales, Anthony Gillingham y Bill Beverley, son muy interesantes y forman una buena pareja. Meg is in love with Nath but he has a girlfriend, Tibby Renton. Although the two plan to marry, Tibby is attracted to Teller, an older man with a questionable past. He gives Tibby some money and asks her to buy him a savings bond. He doesn't want to be seen in town. They arrange to meet at a later date so she can give him the bond. Between games of billiards and bowls, the taking of tea, and other genteel pursuits, Gillingham and Beverley explore the possibilities in a light-hearted series of capers involving secret passageways, underwater evidence, and other atmospheric devices.

Later, Pete and Ellen argue. She was once engaged to Dr. Byrne and accuses Pete of ruining her plan to marry. Pete didn't try to stop her but wouldn't let her take Meg with her. In a fury, he throws a lamp at Ellen and injures her arm. Meg hears the commotion and calls out to Ellen. Hiding her injury, Ellen assures Meg that nothing is wrong.Meg is forced to stay in bed until the cast is removed. Since he is not allowed to visit her, Nath climbs the tree and sneaks into her room. She tells him about finding the Red House. Pete overhears their conversation and comes to Meg's room. They hear him coming and Nath leaves, but Pete knows he has been there. He scares Meg by calling her Jeannie.

Given the focus on a select few characters, there’s not much surprise when it comes to who is involved in the murder. The twist is more in the why and how. I was pleasantly surprised by the reveal, though I suppose if you have read a ton of golden age mysteries, you might be able to guess what has happened. Milne was a Cambridge grad and math major who wrote plays, novels, and a virulently anti-war book titled Peace With Honour as well as his Winnie-the-Poo fluff. The Red House Mystery was immediately popular; Alexander Woollcott called it "one of the three best mystery stories of all time", though Raymond Chandler, in his essay The Simple Art of Murder (1944), criticised Woollcott for that claim, referring to him as, "rather a fast man with a superlative". Chandler wrote of Milne's novel, "It is an agreeable book, light, amusing in the Punch style, written with a deceptive smoothness that is not as easy as it looks [...] Yet, however light in texture the story may be, it is offered as a problem of logic and deduction. If it is not that, it is nothing at all. There is nothing else for it to be. If the situation is false, you cannot even accept it as a light novel, for there is no story for the light novel to be about."

Contents

In it, Milne takes readers to the Red House, a comfortable residence in the placid English countryside that is the bachelor home of Mr. Mark Ablett. While visiting this cozy retreat, amateur detective Anthony Gillingham and his chum, Bill Beverley, investigate their genial host’s disappearance and its connection with a mysterious shooting. Was the victim, whose body was found after a heated exchange with the host, shot in an act of self-defense? If so, why did the host flee, and if not, what drove him to murder? The so-called "Golden Age of Detective Fiction" was a largely British phenomenon that took place in the 1920s and 1930s and its masters are among the most well-known names in the mystery genre (Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, etc.). The stories of this time had a number of conventions (which they did not invent, but certainly popularized), and they were so prevalent that several essays were written codifying them. These will be familiar to anyone with a passing familiarity with older mysteries: the amateur detective, the country house, a murder, a cast of suspects staying at the house, all clues revealed to the reader and sleuth at the same time, hints of romance, etc. Apparently, the man who later gave the world "Winnie the Pooh" was interested enough in the detective genre that he decided to have a stab at it himself. The resulting book, which, while anemically titled, has to be considered a very entertaining example of the "Golden Age" novel. Nath has already asked his mother about what happened to Pete's leg. Mrs. Storm says that Pete fell into a quarry many years earlier and the local physician, Dr. Byrne, amputated the leg on the Morgan's kitchen table.