Tea at Trianon: Mystery Novel Written by A.A. Milne

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, November 24, 2021

Mystery Novel Written by A.A. Milne

From Crime Reads:

Before he created Winnie-the-Pooh at the age of forty-four, English author A. A. Milne had a varied writing career. Born in 1882 in London as Alan Alexander Milne, he grew into his love of writing as a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, writing articles for Granta and occasionally collaborating on projects with his brother. His work drew attention from the well-known humor magazine Punch, and after graduating in 1903, he contributed articles, eventually becoming an editor in 1906. For the next few years, Milne wrote various pieces for Punch and elsewhere, including the novel-length works The Day’s Play and Lovers in London, until he enlisted to fight in World War I. After an injury at the Battle of the Somme in 1916, he joined Military Intelligence, writing propaganda until 1918.

In 1920, he and his wife Daphne (whom he had married in 1913, before enlisting in the war) gave birth to their only child, Christopher Robin. During this time, his literary output varied in genre even more; he wrote poems, plays, and novels. Just before he published Winnie-the-Pooh in 1925, he had authored eighteen plays and three novels. And one of these novels was a murder mystery.

Published in 1922, Milne’s mystery novel, The Red House Mystery would be his only foray into the genre. A locked-room whodunit, it tells the story of a group of diverse people who have gathered for a party at the country estate of a young man named Mark Ablett, whose wayward brother Robert shows up in the middle of the festivities and is soon after found dead; shot in the face. Mark has disappeared, and so partygoer Bill Beverly and his friend Tony Gillingham (who has arrived after the hullabaloo) begin to try to solve the mystery of both he murder and the disappearance, together.

The Red House Mystery was a tremendous success, right off the bat. And in 1944, Raymond Chandler used it as a case study in his essay The Simple Art of Murder, exploring various techniques which developed the mystery genre. He introduces it by noting,

“Let us glance at one of the glories of literature, and acknowledged masterpiece of the art of fooling the reader without cheating him. It is called the red house mystery, was written by A. A. Milne, and has been named by Alexander Walcott (Rather a fast man with a superlative) “one of the three best mystery stories of all time.” Words of that size are not spoken lately. The book was published in 1922 but it’s timeless, and might as easily Have been published in July, 1939, or, with a few slight changes, last week. It ran 13 additions and seems to have been in print, and the original format, for about 16 years. That happens to few books of any kind. It is an agreeable book, light, amusing in the Punch style, written with a deceptive smoothness that is not as easy as it looks.”

As he examines the various developments of the novel, though, Chandler finds a few problems with its ultimate trick on the grounds that it is not actually possible to pull off. We won’t spoil it for you here (because it is quite a good twist) but we’ll just say that Chandler took issue with it, claiming that it doesn’t matter that the story is merely supposed to be entertaining and the twist is written to surprise the reader. He maintains that he doesn’t find the story wholly believable, and this sinks the whole novel, however good it might otherwise be. (Read more.)