The Red House Mystery by A. A. Milne
I was surprised to learn that as well as writing Winnie The Pooh, A. A. Milne had also written an adult novel, The Red House Mystery, apparently his third I learned later.
Curious I decided to track down a copy, by mere chance I found a copy in a charity shop in Huntingdon. This particular edition was a paperback “A Rediscovered Classic” issued by The Times. The Red House Mystery was written before the Winnie The Pooh books, A. A. Milne’s more well known works.
It is an interesting book, undoubtedly, of its time, a time when the lives of ordinary people were, of no consequence. In this book like it seems so many others, murders took place in large country houses, inhabited mainly by the great, the respectable and the good. The fact that the great, the respectable and the good numbered among them the murderers doesn’t seem to be the contradiction it ought to be, perhaps just a better class of villain. The Red House Mystery is not badly written but for me lacks pace. The plot is dependent on the unlikely as much as the probable. I had difficulty in finding the enthusiasm to continue reading and was able to put it down for long periods of time sometimes for days. It was a shame it wasn’t a better book, it could have been, should have been.
On a side note in a book that is nearly a hundred years old and reissued it should have been possible for someone competent to proof read it and remove the typos.
Fenlandphil's Blog 
Posted by Gibson Square on March 4, 2020 at 5:23 pm
In a previous life I was a compositor. In my day (1960s) we had a large department of readers, so there was no excuse for typos. I suspect the original was recently scanned and then run through a spell checker. New technology. Tut, tut.
Posted by fenlandphil on March 5, 2020 at 7:08 am
Spell checkers are useful but this isn’t a new book, it is nearly 100 years old, surely I can’t be the only reader to have noticed these things?
Posted by Gibson Square on March 5, 2020 at 9:22 am
If it’s that old, could it have been written in the Middle English of Chaucer?
Posted by fenlandphil on March 5, 2020 at 9:26 am
Not that old about 1920 from memory.
Posted by Gibson Square on March 5, 2020 at 9:27 am
Just looked again at the cover which states : ‘A rediscovered classic’ makes me think that OCR was employed in its production.
Posted by fenlandphil on March 5, 2020 at 9:36 am
Excuse my ignorance but what is OCR?
Posted by Gibson Square on March 5, 2020 at 12:04 pm
Optical Character Recognition, developed at least since the 1980s. Scan a printed page and Viola! a digital copy of the words and letters. Only problem often it looks like thiiis amd tgat!
Posted by fenlandphil on March 5, 2020 at 2:34 pm
Thanks for the clarification.
Posted by Cathy Cade on March 4, 2020 at 7:27 pm
That was my thinking too. Bearing in mind there wouldn’t have been an electronic version before the re-issue, I imagine the typos were all introduced by the transposer or the scanning process where text recognition was low quality. Or maybe the original was grubby – coffee stains have a lot to answer for.
Had the story been more gripping I’m sure we’d all have heard more about it in our schooldays.
Posted by fenlandphil on March 5, 2020 at 7:11 am
I don’t know what the answer is regarding the typos Cathy. As for the book itself it was definitely a dissapointment, perhaps this genre wasn’t Milne’s forte, I certainly don’t regard it in any way as a classic.
Posted by Cathy Cade on March 5, 2020 at 10:28 am
perhaps he found his voice in Winnie the Pooh. it’s certainly a different style.
Posted by Dr B on March 27, 2020 at 9:09 am
I find that a lot of books written in this era lack pace, as you say, even thinks written up to the 1950s. I’ve been recently rereading books by Priestly, Snow and others and it’s quite an effort! But thanks for this one, I’ll look it up but doubt it’s in digital format for my kindle 😂
Posted by Dr B on March 27, 2020 at 9:13 am
Blimey, it’s available on kindle, just bought it , 84p!
Posted by Damyanti Biswas on April 12, 2020 at 12:59 pm
This book has been on my TBR for a while. Will get to it sooner now.
Posted by fenlandphil on April 12, 2020 at 1:05 pm
I will be interested to see what you think of it when you hve had the chance to read it.