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the Complete Review
the complete review - fiction



The Red House Mystery

by
A.A.Milne


general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

To purchase The Red House Mystery


Title: The Red House Mystery
Author: A.A.Milne
Genre: Novel
Written: 1922
Length: 286 pages
Availability: The Red House Mystery - US
The Red House Mystery - UK
The Red House Mystery - Canada
Le mystère de la maison rouge - France
Das Geheimnis des roten Hauses - Deutschland
Il dramma di Corte Rossa - Italia
El misterio de la casa roja - España
from: Bookshop.org (US)
  • With an Introduction by the author (1926)

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Our Assessment:

B : a genial mystery that doesn't do quite enough with its clever premise

See our review for fuller assessment.



Review Summaries
Source Rating Date Reviewer
The Nation and Athenæum . 24/6/1922 .
The NY Times Magazine . 6/1/2024 Molly Young
The Saturday Review . 13/5/1922 .
Sunday Times . 14/5/1922 .
The Times . 11/12/2008 Kirsty Brimelow


  From the Reviews:
  • "But nobody could hit by luck upon so ingenious a plot-kernel as Mr. A. A. Milne has just put into his first detective story. (...) Apart from this kernel of mystery we have a vastly entertaining travesty of the detective method with a running vein of humor, which spices without impairing the current of sensational thrills. An excellent performance." - The Nation and Athenæum

  • "The pacing ingenuity is especially noticeable because Milne's other ingredients are so familiar: English country manor, secret passages, amateur detective, the disruption of moral order followed by its tidy restoration. He spices the book with funny comments on the clichés of the mystery novel -- which, as early as 1922, were ripe for cheerful mockery !" - Molly Young,The New York Times Magazine

  • "(T)he murderer is most cunningly concealed. (...) The criticism on psychological grounds of such a carefully constructed puzzle as The Red House Mystery would be immoral. Mr. Milne knows that we are at his mercy for we cannot discuss the treatment of motives and characters without giving the reader clues to the real solution of the mystery, and we have too much enjoyed being baffled ourselves to prevent our readers from experiencing the same genial irritation." - The Saturday Review

  • "(H)e has so deftly intermingled the serious and the gay that, though one never loses the thread of the story, there are everywhere those delightful touches that are Mr. Milne's own. Anyone who likes a really good murder mystery, in which an attractive amateur detective plays the principal part , ought to read The Red House Mystery" - Sunday Times

  • "I loved the array of characters, the sharp dialogue and the feeling of bouncing along on an adventure. Pooh Bear never seemed far away." - Kirsty Brimelow, The Times

  Quotes:
  • "It is an agreeable book, light, amusing in the Punch style, written with a deceptive smoothness that is not so easy as it looks." - Raymond Chandler, 'The Simple Art of Murder' (The Atlantic Monthly, 12/1944)

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       The Red House Mystery is an English-countryside mystery of the early 1920s, set at 'The Red House', "Mr.Mark Ablett's bachelor home", where he is entertaining a collection of guests when the story opens. Having inherited enough money to live off of comfortably, Mark dabbles in writing and is something of a patron of the arts. Also resident at The Red House is his younger cousin -- now twenty-eight -- Matthew Cayley, who is Mark's "not quite secretary, not quite land-agent, not quite business-adviser, not quite companion, but something of all four".
       At breakfast, Mark reads and shares with his guests a letter announcing that his brother Robert is expected shortly. This brother has apparently been in Australia, not having visited England for some fifteen years; he apparently left England: "owing to some financial trouble at home" and never got along with his brother; his return is clearly not welcome.
       At the same time, thirty-year-old Antony Gillingham is also making his way to The Red House. Having also inherited enough to live off of in some comfort -- £400 a year --, he has drifted around, taking on a variety of jobs and getting to know people. A friend of his, Bill Beverly, happens to be staying at The Red House, and when Antony finds himself in the neighborhood he decides to look him up.
       When Antony arrives at The Red House he finds a worried Cayley saying he has heard a shot, and trying to get into a locked room. When they finally get in, there is a body there -- identified by Cayley as Robert Ablett. Mark, however, is missing, while other than servants, no one else is in the house; all the guests have been off golfing.
       The scene suggests that brothers Mark and Robert got into an altercation -- and a few words overheard by a maid would seem to confirm that -- and that Mark shot Robert and then did a runner. An Inspector Birch comes, to lead the investigation; except for Bill, all the guests soon depart, while Antony stays on -- as a witness, he is expected to testify at the inquest.
       Antony notes that: "I notice things, you know. I was born noticing", and he's intrigued by this little mystery and decides to play at amateur detective -- "Antony Gillingham, our own private sleuth-hound" -- with friend Bill as sidekick, his own Watson.
       As Antony will eventually acknowledge:

     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
       But that's exactly the kind of very amateur detective Milne wants to present, his novel a playful take on the form and characters. In an Introduction Milne wrote to a later edition of the novel, he already makes clear: "Away with the scientific detective, the man with the microscope !" A bit of common sense, a natural curiosity -- that suffices for Milne. His Antony is a true amateur -- but sensible enough, and with some decent powers of observation to find his way to the truth.
       The Red House Mystery remains well-known -- and frequently reprinted -- in no small part because of its author's fame (as creator of Winnie the Pooh), but also as a prime example of casual 1920s British mystery-fiction and, especially, what is widely considered a particularly unusual and striking twist. Just how unusual and striking is open to debate -- to me it seemed likely from the start and obvious soon enough, and having been warned that there was a sensational twist to the story I kept waiting for one, only to see that this was all there was to it ... --, with Milne also making the odd choice of limiting the story's possibilities from the beginning. There are a houseful of characters at the start of the story, but rather than mix them into the murder-mystery, he has them all off playing golf when the crime is committed, and then sends them on their way.
       What Milne offers is basically a cat and mouse game: Antony sees that Cayley must be somehow involved in what happened, and he tries to get to the bottom of that. The basic mystery is less who the killer is -- though that long remains at least a somewhat open question -- but rather the how and why. A secret passage and the dredging of the local pond add a bit of frisson, but mostly The Red House Mystery is genial buddy-caper, with Antony carefully dosing out the information to his sidekick Bill, but also using him to help put the pieces together (and Bill gamely going along with everything).
       It's all decent, harmless fun -- decidedly not serious, despite the murder. The big twist -- obvious or not -- is a fine one, but all in all one wishes Milne had done more with his story and his characters (as, for example, we don't really get much sense of either Mark or Robert).
       More period-piece curiosity than timeless classic, The Red House Mystery is a reasonably enjoyable read and an okay mystery; it doesn't quite live up to its reputation.

- M.A.Orthofer, 13 August 2024

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Links:

The Red House Mystery: Reviews: Other books of interest under review:

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About the Author:

       English author A.A. (Alan Alexander) Milne, best known as the creator of Winnie the Pooh, lived 1882 to 1956.

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© 2024 the complete review

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