Oh, Bother: The Red House Mystery

 I’ve been wanting to read The Red House Mystery (1922) since I learned of its existence:  that the Winnie the Pooh guy wrote a Golden Age of Detection mystery novel is curious enough to serve as an advertisement. Add in that some people think it’s pretty good and it’s a must read. 

I could have just picked up a pdf since the book is in the public domain, but instead I went on a rather arduous journey looking for an acceptable audiobook. Ultimately I went with a recording by the Online Stage, and while it met the standard of acceptable quality, I don’t really care for the full cast recording/audioplay style, which assigns different actors the dialog along while having one narrator do the rest of the text. With rare exceptions, I prefer a single narrator. I have trouble accessing the level of concentration I can usually apply to audio when the voices are switching with every line of dialog. Nonetheless, the Online Stage recording quality was good, the performances professional, and the voices were at least clear (another version I sampled was plagued with a terrible mumble), so I went with it. My lukewarm feelings about the audiobook style may have affected my feelings about the book. 

The Red House Mystery has the setup of a classic country house and locked room mystery:  a body is found dead in the office of the titular Red House, its owner has absconded, and an amateur detective descends to sort it all out. It very quickly turns into something a little different, and I’m not sure if that’s because it’s subverting anything, or if the country house locked room murder sub-genres were simply not as clearly set at the time as they seem now, in retrospect. No spoilers, but for me, this was hardly a whodunnit:  there simply aren’t enough characters to have a lively round of suspicion. Characters who are introduced in the first chapters are swiftly dispensed of, and the acting cast of the book is really just three people:  the detective, Antony Gillingham; his Watson, Bill; and the very suspicious cousin/secretary left behind to run the house and assist in the official investigation by his missing relative, the presumptive murderer. Gillingham is a dilettante with a photographic memory, a man who glories in dabbling in different professions to better observe humanity, which is a fun setup for an amateur detective. Unfortunately, there's not much humanity around for him to observe.

Much like Gillingham, while I didn’t understand the particulars until the murderer spelled it out to us all at the end, I had a pretty good idea before long what had happened. But I don’t have the sense that this was intended as an inverted novel. Today, this could be the setup for a thriller or suspense:  a cat-and-mouse between the loyal cousin and two unwanted guests. It is this in plot beats, but the tone is entirely cheerful and adventurous. I swear, as a child I read Boxcar Children and Bobsy Twins books that were more sinister than The Red House Mystery–and The Red House has textual set pieces that seem fully intended to make the reader feel, at the very least, nervous for the two heroes. But it’s only the emptiness of the house and meagerness of the cast that makes the tone feel jarring. Antony and Bill are enjoyable enough to spend time with, but not so charming that the weakness in plot was overcome. 

The book made me think about the importance of characterization in my reactions to a mystery novel:  not just the detective, but also very much the victim, murderer, and cast should be both illuminated and believable. Of course this is the arena where Agatha Christie reigned supreme–her finest books are so good because of how deftly and swiftly and often devastatingly she cut to the quick of humanity. I didn’t expect a staggering level of insight and incision from the guy who wrote Winnie the Pooh, but the introduction to The Red House, with a pair of servants chatting about the people they work for, raised my hopes for some interesting character studies and insights. Alas, the first few pages were the high point for characterization. Poirot always says that the solution to a mystery lies in the life of a victim, and I can easily imagine how Christie would handle this book. With very few changes, I think she would make the victim a much more believable figure, and thus increase the mystery and clue out its solution in a much more satisfying way. 

This seems like a lot of complaining. Ultimately, the book was okay! The best–and worst–thing I can say about it is that it feels like the first in a series. If Milne’s career hadn’t become devoted to his son’s toys, if he’d gone on to write a dozen more Antony Gillingham mysteries, I think The Red House Mystery would be considered one of the stronger first outings of a detective! The book is a solid base to build on, but there’s plenty of room to grow and develop. Because the series was never written, instead it feels rather like a house haunted by the ghost of what never was:  a little too empty, its characters somewhat shambling, the plotting and pacing uneven.  Oh, to visit the library of unwritten books and see where Milne may have taken Gillingham. The most interesting mystery to me in The Red House, and one that wasn’t entirely solved, was whether or not Antony Gillingham would move on to a new profession or whether his appetite for observation would be satiated by detecting.  Would Bill have stuck around, or would he have shuffled off page to the fields of happy matrimony in the way of Hastings or Nigel Bathgate? Perhaps Gillingham could have been called in by or paired with a new Watson each book, some person he’d met in a previous career? Or would they have remained a pair, a Sherlock and his Watson, throughout a series of lighthearted romps through the tropes of the British mystery? Ultimately, pondering these mysteries was more interesting to me than the one posed by the book.