I am currently enjoying Murder by the Book, a recent publication by the wonderful British Library Crime classics, and contained therein is a short story A Savage Game by one A A Milne.
We all know who A A Milne is (incidentally I have always wondered what A A stood for - it seems it is Alan Alexander. Thought you might like to know). All of us are familiar with Winnie the Pooh et al and if you did not read them as a child (I didn't) your children will have done. Mine certainly did and also my grandchildren. It seems poor AA got a tad fed up with being famous purely for all the inhabitants of the Hundred Acre Wood especially as he wrote poetry, plays, essays, non fiction and other fiction.
He has also written a mystery, The Red House which was published in 1922 which I read a few years ago. According to the blurb the Red House was 'where secret passages, uninvited guests, a sinister valet and a puzzling murder' lay and this formed the foundation for a classic crime.
This is what I said about it at the time of reading:
We have a murder in a study - Anthony Gillingham, a sub-Wimsey man about town, clean cut and with grey eyes 'absorbing every detail of our person' calls on a guest at a weekend party at the Red House and is just in time to hear a gun shot and a member of the household hammering on the locked door.
Within half an hour the police have arrived, led by an Inspector who is immediately portrayed as a dim and worthy person but obviously is never going to solve the mystery and Anthony takes over without so much as a by your leave. Apart from one or two chapters, the police spend most of their time well off centre stage and Anthony just does as he likes - it is all very unbelievable. Most of the house guests are packed off back to town within an hour of the murder, in case they find it all too upsetting, surprisingly the police allow this to happen, and we are therefore left with such a narrow field of suspects, ie - one, that any tension that might have been hovering vanishes entirely.
By the end of the book, I was very glad to have finished this tedious rigmarole and so disappointed as I had high hopes at the start of the first chapter and it was not until the end that I also realised that the 'sinister valet' mentioned in the blurb had never appeared.
And this story The Savage Game is all that the Red House was not. Witty and perceptive and a cracking good mystery which the narrator solves in double quick time. It had definite shades of Miss Marple about it and I am rather sorry that this appears to be one of the few short stories he penned. The light touch shown here is such a surprise after the full length novel. In the foreword to the Red House A A Milne admits, somewhat ruefully, that perhaps a life of crime was not for him. He was right in that case but his inclusion in this volume shows he could do it. Perhaps he should have persevered.
A few years ago I reviewed a full length novel by the author, Two People which was published by Capuchin Press and enjoyed it very much indeed. The link to this review is here (apologies for the length of the link, it won't work unless all this is in) and illustrates his versatility:
Incidentally Murder by the Book also contains story by Ngaio Marsh which I had never read before and I was thrilled to bits to find it written in her inimical style and fooled me completely. I wonder if she has any more lurking that have yet to see the light of day?
