Forgotten Book - The Red Redmaynes

The Red Redmaynes was published by Eden Philpotts in 1922, the year in which he celebrated his 60th birthday. He had come to detective fiction relatively late, and to this day he remains best known for his books set in and around his beloved Dartmoor (which also features in this story.) He is also remembered as someone who knew the young Agatha Christie, gave her advice, and was the dedicatee of one of her novels.

The Red Redmaynes isn't a tightly plotted whodunit with a large pool of suspects of the kind for which Christie, Anthony Berkeley and others would become celebrated later in the same decade, but it does boast one notable plot twist, a pleasing device that on its own suffices to lift the story out of the ordinary. Another notable feature is that the "great detective", an American called Peter Ganns, only makes an appearance in the second half of the story. There's a particular reason why Philpotts deployed this unusual structural device, but to explain why would be a spoiler.

Throughout the book we follow a likeable thirtysomething Scotland Yard man, who comes across Robert Redmayne while holidaying in the south west, and then encounters a pretty young woman who, he discovers to his dismay, is happily married. But then her husband disappears, presumably murdered by Robert Redmayne, who also goes missing.

The plot thickens nicely from that point, although by today's standards the story moves at a fairly slow pace. Its unorthodoxy kept me interested, and I'm rather surprised that Philpotts wasn't invited to join the Detection Club when it was formed a few years later. Perhaps Anthony Berkeley or Dorothy L. Sayers didn't approve of his work, but I'm not sure why that would be, given that the Club's founder members included some relatively minor talents. A little mystery about a rather interesting writer.

Quiz Question

I’ve acquired a new bibliography of a writer whose life has long been shrouded in quite a bit of mystery, and who used at least three pseudonyms. The material in the book prompts me to set a quiz question.

The real identity of this author was the subject of much speculation when he or she published a pseudonymous novel in 1931. Can you guess the real person - who was variously identified by critics and others as being:

Aldous Huxley
Rose Macauley
E. M. Delafield
Edgar Wallace
Francis Brett Young
H.G. Wells
Richard Hughes
W. Somerset Maugham
Marie Belloc Lowndes
R. Austin Freeman
Eden Philpotts
Francis Brett Young
Roland Pertwee
Bernadette Croce
Warwick Deeping
Robert Hichens
Marjorie Bowen
Osbert Sitwell
Charles Williams
Patrick Hamilton
Anthony Rolls
Stella Benson
E.M. Forster

An extraordinarily diverse list, I think you’ll agree. Some eighteen months passed after publication before the truth about the author’s identity was revealed. Who can guess what it was? (Clue: none of the above!)

The answer will appear here shortly.