The Red House Mystery is a "locked room" whodunnit by A. A. Milne, published in 1922. It was Milne's only mystery novel; he is better known for his humorous writing, children's stories, and poems. 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. 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 1944 essay The Simple Art of Murder criticized Woollcott for that claim, referring to him as, "rather a fast man with a superlative".
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| Author: | A. A. Milne |
| Genre: | Fiction, Mystery, Suspense |
| Year published: | 1922 |
| Number of editions: | 19 |