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.

The Wine of Certitude

The Wine of Certitude would rank high in my list of unenticing book titles, yet – contrary to a fault - I’ve invested in a copy. Why? Because it is a brand new ‘literary biography’, written by David Rooney, of a rather interesting character, Father Ronald Knox.

Knox was a member of a family of high achievers (his brother Edmund, who edited 'Punch', also wrote a very funny skit on detective stories which is not mentioned here.) Ronald converted to Catholicism and became a major figure in the English Catholic literary revival of the first half of last century. He was a prolific writer, but the main attraction of the book to me is the insight it offers into Knox’s role in the Golden Age of English detective fiction.

It seems that the Knox family members were very keen on puzzles and word games (one brother was a master cryptographer ‘in the service of the British government’), and Ronald often compiled acrostics, publishing a book of them in 1924. The detective puzzle offered him a more elaborate kind of intellectual game to play – and the chance of supplementing a meagre priestly salary. In 1926, he produced his debut mystery, The Viaduct Murder, ‘complete with a map of the fictional environs around the murder scene, and a cast of characters who could hardly raise enough three-dimensionality among them to obscure the physical evidence placed before the reader.’

Knox introduced his regular sleuth, the insurance investigator Miles Bredon, in The Three Taps, a more sophisticated whodunit. Rooney regards The Body in the Silo as his best mystery. Knox abandoned writing crime stories after 1937, and it’s interesting to note that some of the most interesting Golden Age writers (Knox, Sayers, Berkeley/Iles and Rupert Penny) had given up the genre by the time the Second World War ended.

Rooney concludes that ‘for stylistic beauty and for ability to evoke the English and Scottish countrysides and manors of the interwar years, Knox had few equals, and his detective fiction would remain enjoyable for that reason alone…The golden age of the English detective story is the richer for his contribution.’

I’ve read Knox’s celebrated short story ‘Solved by Inspection’, but none of the novels – an omission I mean to repair. I'd be interested to hear from anyone who's read the novels, and who has any recommendations. There’s also quite a bit more to be said about Knox’s contribution to the Golden Age – this will be the subject of a future post.