The Red House Mystery

 A classic that has been sitting on my bookshelf for years.  I finally read it.  

It is a short fun closed room mystery.  The murder happens in a room that is allegedly locked and a young man happens along just as the door is being opened to find a murdered man lying on the floor.  It all happens at a English country house, where there is a limited pool of suspects and the young man decides to play the part of Sherlock Holmes and entreats his friend to play his Watson.  Together you follow them as they interview different people and walk the grounds of the estate to discover who the perpetrator is. 

The most interesting part of this book is that it is written by A.A. Milne, who later writes the Winnie the Pooh stories.  This was his first career, though not long lived. It turns out that Milne wanted to be a mystery writer and thought he would be good at it.  This book shows that he was clever and though I was really sure I knew who did it and how the crime was done, it was still satisfying to read all the way to the end to see how it would be explained at the end.  So maybe with a few more mysteries under his pen Milne could have been a great mystery author.  But as luck would have it, he started writing about Christopher Robin his young son and his stuffed bear, Winnie the Pooh and the friends in the Hundred Acre Wood and the rest is history, as they say.  So The Red House Mystery is the only book of this genre he ever wrote.