The Red House Mystery

The Red House Mystery is a mystery novel by the English writer A. A. Milne, published in 1922. It was his only mystery novel apart from Four Days Wonder.

The setting is an English country house, where Mark Ablett has been entertaining a house party made up of a widow and her marriageable daughter, a retired major, a wilful actress and a young man about town called Bill Beverley.

Mark's long-lost brother Robert, who is the black sheep of the family, arrives from Australia, and shortly afterwards he is found dead with a bullet through his head. Mark has vanished, and Tony Gillingham, a stranger who has just arrived to call on his friend Bill, decides that he will investigate the business himself.

Gillingham plays Sherlock Holmes to his younger friend's Doctor Watson, and the two of them work their way almost playfully through the case while the clues accumulate and the theories multiply around them. The book was immediately popular on publication and has been reprinted many times since.