The Red House Mystery

The Red House Mystery by A. A. Milne - is a whodunnit by A. A. Milne, published in 1922. It was Milne's only mystery novel (except for Four Days Wonder). Plot introduction: The setting is an English country house, where Mark Ablett has been entertaining a house party consisting of a widow and her marriageable daughter, a retired major, a wilful actress, and Bill Beverley, a young man about town. Mark's long-lost brother Robert, the black sheep of the family, arrives from Australia and shortly thereafter is found dead, shot through the head. Mark Ablett has disappeared, so Tony Gillingham, a stranger who has just arrived to call on his friend Bill, decides to investigate. Gillingham plays Sherlock Holmes to his younger counterpart's Doctor Watson; they progress almost playfully through the novel while the clues mount up and the theories abound. Literary significance and criticism: 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." In his introduction to the 1926 UK edition, A. A. Milne said he had "a passion" for detective stories, having "all sorts of curious preferences" about them: though in real life the best detectives and criminals are professionals, Milne demanded that the detective be an unscientific amateur, accompanied by a likable Watson, rubbing shoulders with an amateur villain against whom dossiers and fingerprints are of no avail.

In between tea and billiards, a pair of amateur detectives investigates their host's disappearance. Droll whodunit from the creator of Winnie the Pooh sparkles with witty dialogue, deft plotting, and an amusing cast.

From Mark Haddon, the bestselling author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, comes a dazzlingly inventive novel about modern family life. Richard, a wealthy doctor, invites his estranged sister and her family to join his family for a week at a vacation home in the English countryside. Against the backdrop of a strange family gathering, Haddon skillfully weaves together the stories of eight very different people forced into close quarters. The Red House is a symphony of long-held grudges, fading dreams and rising hopes, tightly guarded secrets and illicit desires, painting a portrait of contemporary family life that is at once bittersweet, comic, and deeply felt.

Carol and Steve Taylor move into an old, mysterious house which hides many secrets. Carol hears footsteps at night, Steve finds an old love letter from the American Civil War and the people in town hear a woman crying in the night. Who is trying to give them a message and why?

As an artist, my eyes are trained to observe the minutest detail, enabling me to spot the most obscure clues. Can you do the same? By looking carefully at the notes and pictures in my casebook, can you find all the clues and deduce how the crime has been committed? The reader, as assistant detective, must gather clues from the text and illustrations to help solve a mystery involving a stately home full of possible suspects and a disappearing fish-shaped ruby.

In this atmospheric tale from the author of the Miss Silver Mysteries, a widow is reunited with her girlhood love in a house haunted by all-too-human ghosts They meet again in the dusk of a ruined garden. Amabel Grey hasn’t laid eyes on Julian Forsham in twenty years, not since she gave him up—the man she’d fallen passionately in love with—for the fiancé who needed her. Now an unexpected circumstance brings the British widow and the world-famous scientist together again. Amabel’s nineteen-year-old daughter, Daphne, has been invited to join her friends—and the boy she adores—on a trip to Egypt. But she needs two hundred pounds from her mother. George Forsham is offering that exact sum to anyone willing to stay six months at Dower House, the centuries-old estate in the English countryside where Amabel and Julian first met. The fact that the overgrown, sadly neglected house is rumored to be haunted doesn’t deter Amabel. Until strange things start happening . . . The mewing of a cat that doesn’t exist, the sound of flapping wings, someone crying in the dark. Are restless spirits walking the night? Or is there a rational explanation? Plunged into deadly danger, Amabel could lose her second chance with the man she never stopped loving.

Classic crime, at its very best. With a new introduction by Gyles Brandreth. The Red House is a country residence far removed from the world of the Hundred Acre Wood but its story has much of the same charm and wit. There is, of course, a murder, and when the local police fail to solve the crime, an amateur sleuth readily steps in. What follows is a delightful whodunnit with humour, excitement and a suitably surprising twist at the end. A. A. Milne loved detective stories and pays homage to Sherlock Holmes in his detective - the clever and charismatic Anthony Gillingham- and his assistant, Bill Beverley. This is classic crime at its very best. 'I love his writing' P.G.Wodehouse