The Red House Mystery, by A. A. Milne

I've been reading The Red House Mystery . It was published in 1922 by A.A. Milne, one of the very first full-length mystery novels. (Agatha Christie's The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was published in 1920.)

Although I'm enjoyed the mystery, truth to tell I'm not sure what age audience it's aimed at. A. A. Milne is most famous as the author of the Winnie-the-Pooh stories, and occasionally in the book the omniscient narrator addresses the reader in a professorial manner (as JRR Tolkien does in The Hobbit, a book for teens, but not in The Lord of the Rings), aimed at adults.

For example:

At about the time when the Major (for whatever reasons) was fluffing his tee-shot at the sixteenth, and Mark and his cousin were at their business at The Red House, an attractive gentleman of the name of Antony Gillingham was handing up his ticket at Woodham Station and asking the way to the village. Having received directions, he left his bag with the station master and walked off leisurely. He is an important person to this story, so that it is as well we should know something about him before letting him loose in it. Let us stop him at the top of the hill on some excuse, and have a good look at him.

The first thing we realize is that he is doing more of the looking than we are. Above a clean-cut, clean shaven face, of the type usually associated with the Navy, he carries a pair of grey eyes which seem to be absorbing every detail of our person.

Mark Ablett is a wealty man who maintains a household in the country, which he allows his cousin to run. He invites people, much less well-off than himself, down to frequent house parties - he is a sponsor of all the arts. On the day when this novel starts, he receives a letter from his ne'er do well younger brother, Robert, who has been living in Australia for decades. He's coming to call.

In due course, Robert does arrive. He goes into the study with Mark, and all is silent for some time. Then there is a shot. Mark's cousin Cayley bangs on the door to the study, while Antony Gillingham, who has come to the house to pay a call on his friend, Mr. Beverly, whom he knows is staying there, sees him from the front door and offers his assistance. When they enter the room, they find the body of Robert on the floor...and Mark nowhere to be found.

Gillingham enlists his friend Beverly as his Watson, and sets out to solve the mystery, with the accommodating help of the policeman on the case.

The Red House Mystery is very much a "tea cosy" mystery, a puzzle (and one that anyone who has read twenty years of Agatha Christie may solve quickly - but remember this book was written very early on in the career of the mystesry novel.)

It's an easy read, it evokes a time long past (as do Christie's early novels), and its fun.

I'm reading it in the Kindle edition (only 99 cents). The formatting is a little off. Sometimes lines in a paragraph are shifted down, an occasional indentation is missing, but these are very, very minor problems.

Nerve, by Dick Francis

The key element of a Dick Francis book is that it will have something to do with horses and horse-racing. His early books featured mostly jockeys and racing, later books dealt with lead characters in other professions, who were only tangentially connected to the horse racing world.

Another element of a Dick Francis novel is that the hero always - always - will be either beaten up or in some way tortured in the last few chapters of the book, to show how tough they are, presumably.

Truth to tell, Nerve isn't one of my favorites, but it is an interesting psychological story. (My favorite Franis is Reflex, the very first one I read, in which the hero is a jockey and also an amateur photographer, the reflex of the title speaking both of a person's reflexes, and also a reflex lens), followed by In the Frameand then Forfeit.

Interestingly, having just checked Wikipedia, it looks like Nerve was Francis' second novel, written in 1964. I was surprised by that - it is very accomplished, for someone's second novel.

Robb Finn is a beginning jockey, just starting out in his career. Things are starting to look up - he's just been offered steady rides by a trainer, James Axminster. He's ecstatic...he's on his way. Then...things start to go wrong. His horses start to give up on him...is he losing his nerve?

This is a novel of psychological suspense...as several jockeys whom Rob knows are also finding their lives in turmoil...losing their jobs, losing their nerve, nad so on... what is going on?

Here are the first few paragraphs of the book:

Art Mathews shot himself, loudly and messily, in the center of the parade ring at Dunstable races.

I was standing only six feet away from him, but he did it so quickly that had it been only six inches I would not have had time to stop him.

He had walked out of the changing room ahead of me, his narrow shoulders hunched inside the khaki jerkin he had put on over his racing colors, and his head down on his chest as if he were deep in thought. I noticed him stumble slightly down the two stepos from the weighing room to the path; and when someone spoke to him on the short walk to the parade ring, he gave absolutely no sign of having heard. But it was just another walk from the weighing room to the parade ring, just another race like a hundred others. There was nothing to suggest that when he had stood talking for two or three minutes with the owner and the trainer of the horse he was due to ride, he would take off his kerkin, produce from under it as he dropped it to the ground a large automatic pistol, place the barrel against his temple and squeeze the trigger.

If you haven't read Dick Francis before - and he's so popular that you probably have, I'd suggest starting chronologically, from Dead Cert (his first novel, 1962), to Straight. He wrote more after that but they are disappointments (either written by a ghost writer or by his son), without the same flair.

Books by Dick Francis. Note that he has only one "series", that of Sid Halley, and Halley is only in a couple of books.
Dead Cert 1962
Nerve 1964
For Kicks 1965
Odds Against 1965
Flying Finish 1966
Blood Sport 1967
Forfeit 1968
Enquiry 1969
Rat Race 1970
Bonecrack 1971
Smokescreen 1972
Slayride 1973
Knockdown 1974
High Stakes 1975
In the Frame 1976
Risk 1977
Trial Run 1978
Whip Hand 1979
Reflex 1980
Twice Shy 1981
Banker 1982
The Danger 1983
Proof 1984
Break In 1985
Bolt 1986
Hot Money 1987
The Edge 1988
Straight 1989
Longshot 1990
Comeback 1991
Driving Force 1992
Decider 1993
Wild Horses 1994
Come to Grief 1995
To the Hilt 1996
10 LB. Penalty 1997
Second Wind 1999
Shattered 2000
Under Orders 2006
Dead Heat 2007 with Felix Francis
Silks 2008 with Felix Francis
Even Money 2009 with Felix Francis

Smokescreen, by Dick Francis

Edward Lincoln is an actor, and a successful one. But he's the rugged kind, like Clint Eastwood (so he can handle the trials and tribulations that author Dick Francis is about to throw at him!). Before becoming an actor, he had ridden horses for a living, so when a family friend, who is dying, asks him to travel to Australia to discover why her horses aren't running well, he can hardly refuse.
But Lincoln, who likes to maintain a low profile, finds more than he bargained for in Australia, from paperazzi yearning to get some dirt on him (whether or not they have to invent it themselves doesn't matter), to the people behind the poorly-performing race horses, who don't want to see their scheme interfered with.
Francis handles the characters in this book with sureness...we get an insight into the actor's life that is fascinating (in particular the feud with the director/auteur), and of course there are the inevitable racing scenes that are also fun. And then of course there are the trials and tribulations that Francis heroes are known to be subjected to.




Recommended.

On the Slam, by Honor Hartman

On the Slam, by Honor Hartman, is "A Bridge Club Mystery." There are only two books in the series to date, On The Slam in 2007, and The Unkindest Cut, in 2008.

Meet Emma Diamond: novice bridge player, recent widow, and the kind of person who never leaves her grocery cart sitting willy nilly in the parking lot. And now, after a vile woman in her new neighborhood in Houston is poisoned during a bridge game, Emma has a new identity: amateur detective.

I didn't really care for this book, yet another in a series of amateur female detectives who have no career, yet are better detectives than the police. Emma Diamond is a widow, who plays bridge (and the bridge notes at the end of the book are interesting). The woman who was murdered hardly seems vile, and Emma is annoyingly unaffected by her death.

The novel takes place in Houston, Texas, but I didn't get a "sense of place," it could have taken place anywhere.

A few paragraphs

I glanced over at the doorway, and Nate McGreevey sttod watchintg, again looking past me at someone else in the room. I started to speak to him, but Janet came in just then and and picked up a small paper plate. She spooned a large amount of the spinach dip onto it, then added a handful of wheat crackers on the side. At this rate, there might not be spinach dip left for much longer.

Janet caught my expression, and her gaze hardened. "There's plenty of food for everyone," she said.

"Yes, of course," I murmured politely and started to turn away.

She wasn't paying any attention to me. She scooped up a large dollop of spinach dip with a cracker and popped it into her mouth. She smiled as she chewed.

I heard her murmur "yummy" as I headed bck to my table.

Then, suddenly, I heard gasping, choking sounds from behind me.

I turned back and, to my horror, Janet was clutching her throat with both hands. Her plate had dropped to the floor in front of her. She reached out a hand toward me,, but I was rooted to the spot.

A split second later, I recovered my voice. I yelled out, "Gerald! Something's wrong with Janet."

The room went completely still behind me, and for a long moment, no one moved. No one except Janet, that it. She collapsed against the island, hands still clawing at her throat. The platter of crudites went flying as she elbowed it on her way down.

The Dark Place, by Aaron Elkins

The Dark Place, by Aaron Elkins, is the second in the Gideon Oliver series. In Fellowship of Fear, the widowed Oliver meets a woman, however he is alone at the beginning of The Dark Place. However, we are reintroduced to FBI agent John Lau. Mysterious happenings occur in the Olympic National Park, in Olympia, Washington State. Six years ago, two hikers disappeared. A few days ago, a woman has disappeared. When some bones are found, John Lau asks Gideon Oliver, who is working at a dig at Dungeness, to come look at them.

Once at the park, Gideon meets park ranger Julie Tendler, and works with John Lau to solve the mystery of the disappearing hikers.

Sample paragraphs

John held open the door, and Gideon awkwardly bowed Julie through, not at all sure if she would like the gesture. She went through with a pleasant smile, and they stepped out into the town of Quinault. It was a shock. They had entered the hotel building from a spacious, sunny lawn peopled with sunbathers and laughing volleyball players, and with ten square miles of open lake at their backs. When they walked out through the rear entrance, no more than forty feet away, they stepped into a sunless shadowy world of almost solid green, hushed and perceptibly cooler and more moist than the lawn.

The "town," invisible from the air, consisted of several buildings out of the nineteenth century along either side of a narrow road. On the right was an old post office and a weathered, rustic general store - Lake Quinault Merc, the sign said - with a wooden porch complete with an old dog sprawled lazily on it. On the left was the Quinault Ranger Station, a group of small frame houses. Everything was dwarfed and hemmed in by towering walls of cedar and spruce, so tall and close together that the sky was only visible as a narrow slit high above the road. The road itself gave the illusion of being cut off at either end by more tree walls, and the overall effect was like being at the bottom of a sunken corridor, a narrow, gravelike canyon cut deep in the living mass of trees.

Elkins gives the story an excellent sense of place. Makes you long to visit there... see if it still exists as he described. (Aarons and his wife still live in Olympia, Washington.)

The only flaw in the book is that Gideon manages to learn a foreign language in 24 hours...I don't really think that's possible. But if you suspend your disbelief, it's an enjoyable book.

The Gideon Oliver series
Fellowship of Fear (1982)
The Dark Place (1983)
Murder in the Queen's Armes (1985)
Old Bones (1987)
Curses! (1989)
Icy Clutches (1990)
Make No Bones (1991)
Dead Men's Hearts (1994)
Twenty Blue Devils (1997)
Skeleton Dance (2000)
Good Blood (2004)
Where There's a Will (2005)
Unnatural Selection (2006)
Little Tiny Teeth (2007)
Uneasy Relations (2008)
Skull Duggery (2009)

A Nun in the Closet, by Dorothy Gilman

Dorothy Gilman is most famous as the author of the Mrs. Pollifax series, however she wrote some stand-alone novels as well.

In A Nun in the Closet (1975), two unworldly nuns from the Abbey of St. Tabitha are sent out into the world to decide what to do with a large mansion that has been unexpectedly left to the order. Sister John is the practical one - she can mend the Abbey's printing press when it breaks down. Sister Hyacinthe, from impoverished hill country, knows how to make meals from herbs.

When the nuns reach the house, they find it haunted... by a man who has been shot and begs them for sanctuary. The two nuns, and a few friends they gather along the way, protect the man from those who wish to finish the job they had started.

It's 1975, so this book does have some "Dated Death." Brill, Alfie and Naomi are hippies, learning to live off the land. The man they found is an establishment type...and he's the only one with a bullet in him.

Between A Wok and a Hard Place, by Tamar Myers

Between A Wok and a Hard Place, Tamar Myers, 1998

Author Tamar Myers prose begins to grate on me after a while, and I cringe at her pun-laden titles, but her books are certainly popular. I've just checked out her website and learned her biography, which is pretty interesting. Her parents were missionaries in the Belgian Congo, where she was born and grew up for the first 16 years of her life. So when she talks about culture shock (having never driven, never used a phone, never used a vending machine, she knows what she's talking about! She's been in the US since 1964. http://tamarmyers.com/bio.htm

So, to the plot of Between A Wok and A Hard Place:
Ever since her brand new husband flew the coop, Magdalena Yoder, owner of the quaint Penn-Dutch Inn, has had time to kill. And now the local Amish commmunity has a murder in its midst: an Asian tourist found strangled and run over by a horse and buggy. It isn't a crime Police Chief Melvin Stoltzfus can easily handle; after all, he was once kicked in the head by a bull he was trying to milk. But he's smart enough to deputize Magdalena.

Soon Magdalena is off visiting the neatly kept farms of the Plain People, in search of the truth. Although not an outsider, she's about as welcome as a fox in a henhouse. Something dangerous is being concealed behind their dour faces and determination to protect their own. And as for Magdalena, finding a killer may just put her between the rock of faith and a hard place called justice....

Opening paragraph

I was a virgin until I married at age 46. Use it or lose it, my sister Susannah always said. Maybe she was right.

Of course this is none of your business. I am a God-fearing womanvand I certainly do not intend to discuss my sex life with you. It is imperative, however, that you understand that I was still in a state of shock when the events I am about to relate happened. After all, I had been married only a month, and what Mama had only hinted at paled in comparison with the real thing. I was born and raised on a farm and had seen animals-cows and horses-but never a naked man. How was I to know they looked like that? Thanksgiving is forever ruined for me. I can't even look at a turkey neck now without feeling embarrased.