Forgotten Books - Detection Medley

My latest contribution to Patti Abbott's series of Forgotten Books is another volume produced under the aegis of the Detection Club. Detection Medley was published in the UK in 1939; it appeared the following year in the US under the title Line Up.

John Rhode edited the book and supplied a foreword (although it is debateable whether his account of the historical date of origin of the Club is correct), while A.A. Milne, himself a member of the Club, contributed a short introduction.

Milne, of course, wrote a celebrated Golden Age whodunit, The Red House Mystery, as well as some other work that touched the genre. He remains, however, best known as the creator of Winnie the Pooh! His introduction is characteristically light and urbane.

This book is something of a mixed bag. Although most of the contributions – a number of which had been published previously - were short stories, there were also articles by G.K. Chesterton, J.J. Connington, R.Austin Freeman and Milward Kennedy.

The full list of contents is:

Margery Allingham – The Lieabout

Margery Allingham – The Same to Us

H.C. Bailey – Mr Bowley’s Sunday Evening

E.C. Bentley – The Sweet Shot

E.C. Bentley – The Genuine Tabard

Nicholas Blake – A Slice of Bad Luck

J. Dickson Carr – Persons or Things Unknown

G.K. Chesterton – The Best Detective Story

Agatha Christie – Wireless

Agatha Christie – Death By Drowning

G.D.H. and M. Cole – Too Clever By Half

J.J.Connington – A Criminologist’s Bookshelf

Freeman Wills Crofts – The Match

Carter Dickson – The Hiding-Place

Carter Dickson – The Crime in Nobody’s Room

Edgar Jepson and Robert Eustace – All Square

R. Austin Freeman – The Art of the Detective Story

Anthony Gilbert – Horseshoes for Luck

Anthony Gilbert – The Cockroach and the Tortoise

Lord Gorell – The Shadow

Lord Gorell – A Fly in the Ointment

Ianthe Jarrold – Blue Lias

Milward Kennedy – Are Murders Meant?

Milward Kennedy – Murderers in Fiction

E.C.R. Lorac – The Live Wire

Arthur Morrison – A Professional Episode

The Baroness Orczy – A Shot in the Night

The Baroness Orczy – The Tytherton Case

E.R. Punshon – Who Was It?

E.R. Punshon – The Secret of the Chessboard

Dorothy L. Sayers – Striding Folly

Dorothy L. Sayers – The Haunted Policeman

Henry Wade – The Sub-Branch

Henry Wade – Four to One – Bar One

Hugh Walpole – The Perfect Close

The Red House Mystery

A.A. Milne is remembered today as the creator of that amiable character Winnie-the Pooh, but he was also fascinated by the detective story. More than that, he ventured into the genre on several occasions, with short stories (including one I think is quite splendid), one or two plays and a novel that many regard as a light-hearted classic of the Golden Age – The Red House Mystery.

The book was first published in 1922, just after Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers first came on to the scene. Thirty year old Antony Gillingham is the amateur sleuth in this enjoyable tale, which I was commissioned to review by Tangled Web UK (one of my favourite online crime fiction resources, by the way) to mark the appearance of a reprint by Vintage Books.

The Vintage edition is pleasingly packaged and includes a short and cheerful introduction by Milne, who takes the opportunity to chat about some of his ideas about the genre – including his preference for an amateur sleuth, definitely not quite so fashionable these days. Milne, incidentally, was an early member of the Detection Club.

I’m delighted by this reprint. Vintage are to be congratulated. I do hope they can be tempted to reissue more hidden gems of the detective genre.