The Red House Mystery by AA Milne

The Red House Mystery by AA Milne

published 1921

 

 

examining a plan of the Red House! 

The Red House Mystery can be seen as one of the early pillars of Golden Age detection – I’d put it in a category with EC Bentley’s Trent’s Last Case (1913), Agatha Christie’s Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), AEW Mason’s At the Villa Rose (1910).

 

Caroline Crampton has recently done an episode of her Shedunnit podcast on the book (you can find it here), and revealed that she rereads it around once a year. That impressed me, and she did a great job on the book in the podcast, so it was clearly time for a reread: I checked my records and I had't looked at it since 1986.

I enjoyed it very much in a very specific way. I remembered almost nothing about it, and guessed a fair amount of the plot. I noted that although there were some promising women characters in the opening pages, they were all sent away from the Red House as soon as the murder occurs: ‘no doubt you would prefer to leave as soon as possible’.

From then on it becomes a very male book, more so than others of the era. I welcomed the presence of Elsie the housemaid, with this splendid bit of a witness statement:

Elsie knew perfectly well that she had no business to come down the front stairs, and it was no excuse to say that she happened to come out of Miss Norris’s room just at the head of the stairs, and didn’t think it would matter, as there was nobody in the hall, and what was she doing anyhow in Miss Norris’s at that time? Returning a magazine? Lent by Miss Norris, might she ask? Well, not exactly lent. Really, Elsie! – and this in a respectable house. In vain for poor Elsie to plead that a story by her favourite author was advertised on the cover, with a picture of the villain falling over the cliff. ‘That’s where you’ll go to my girl, if you aren’t careful,’ said Mrs Stevens firmly.

This is the cook-housekeeper doing the cross-examining, and honestly I wish there’d been more of this. Milne does excellent characters when he puts his mind to it – the parlourmaid Audrey was good fun too, in her brief scenes. (there are also, disappointingly, no clothes to speak of at all.)

The owner of the Red House, Mark, is an awful man – ‘vain, pompous and absurd’ – and a very recognizable type, all too easily imagined.

The detection is quite fun and funny, led by Antony, the worst kind of gleeful amateur, helped by his much-less-clever friend Bill. They charge around following up leads. (One of them - concerning a letter from a lost brother, that may have arrived a day earlier than claimed – just disappears from the story). The story that finally emerges is surprisingly sad, a change in tone. There is a heart-chilling moment at the end when someone says ‘I am lonely tonight… that’s funny, isn’t it?’

Caroline’s Shedunnit podcast contains a lot more about the book, and about Milne and his life, and about why he didn’t go on to write other books. She also looks at Raymond Chandler’s takedown of the book in his The Simple Art of Murder – and having read the essay concerned, I’m with Caroline: Chandler’s criticisms are just strange, and seem to miss the point.

It's not a perfect book, but there’s a lot to enjoy. I did start to wonder if Milne was one of those people with an immense facility for successful writing, who finds it too easy to move from genre to genre – he did so much in his life apart from the Winnie the Pooh books, and everything seemed to come easily to him. I felt that with the character-creation, the very funny moments, and an ability to create depth of feeling – well he could have done something really remarkable. Not that he did badly…

I have also written about Milne's book Four Days’ Wonder on the blog – which I described as tremendously silly, and also magnificently enjoyable, a spoof of detective fiction, with a delightful but completely unreal heroine.