My recent travels overseas have hampered my reading calendar a bit, and jet-lag brain hasn’t allowed for much reading either. Still, I finished five books over the past 2 weeks, one of which was this jolly murder-mystery by Winnie the Pooh‘s author, A.A. Milne. The Red House Mystery is the 4th book in this year’s Siblings’ Book Club, and it was a sheer delight to read.

I’m not much of a mystery buff, though I’ve enjoyed several Agatha Christie and Robert van Gulik books in the past. I rarely seek mystery novels out, which is odd, because whenever I happen to read one, I enjoy it immensely. Thanks to the Siblings’ Book Club I guess for generally having one on the list and for keeping my in the loop!

The spoiler-free plot for this one goes like this: A wealthy patron hosts a number of guests at his expansive estate known as The Red House, but the holiday gets disrupted when a wastrel brother from the past pays the property a visit. Following a mysterious murder, a visiting friend-of-a-friend also arrives on the scene and spends the rest of the book playing the amateur sleuth.

It’s this amateurishness in part that makes the book so much fun to read. Anthony Gillingham admits his handicap towards the end of the book as he and his pal, Bill Beverly, try to decipher the clues they’d thus far uncovered: 

“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.” (82)

The book’s flow also made it a joy for me to read—a flow that starts and stutters and backtracks through conversations and questions. I felt like a third party to this impromptu Holmes-and-Watson duo throughout the book. Milne’s writing drew me in and kept me reading, searching for clues along with these buddies as if I might have a chance at helping them solve the crime. This clearly was the author’s intent, as Gillingham voices Milne’s own annoyance with other mystery novels when he says this to Beverly’s question about a certain clue:

“Properly speaking, I oughtn’t to explain till the last chapter, but I always think that that’s so unfair.” (35)

I honestly didn’t guess the solution to this murder until I read it in black-and-white, which is a good thing I suppose, to keep the tension high. I’m a little proud of myself that one important clue from the beginning of the book came back to me while the characters were talking about something entirely different later on—a clue that played a decisive role in the mystery. I’ll credit the jet lag, not my own ingenuity for that fluke.

All in all, I really enjoyed this short mystery novel and feel ready to take on more just like it. Our next few months will be a total whirlwind, though, so there’s no telling when I’ll get back to reading for fun — except for what the Book Club gives me. I say, righto, by Jove!

©2024 E.T.