Looking Back: The Red House Mystery

The book reviewed this week on our podcast, "The Widening Stain," is unusual in that its author, Morris Bishop (writing as W. Bolingbroke Johnson) was a "one-off" - the author of only one mystery novel. There were actually a great many authors who wrote only a single mystery, although some wrote other kinds of fiction as well; the Golden Age of Detection Wiki has a lengthy list of them, which begins at the link.

But I can only find one other "one-off" mystery reviewed on the podcast, and that is "The Red House Mystery," by A. A. Milne. His primary contribution to literature, of course, was the Winnie the Pooh books, but "The Red House" is a fine, early mystery classic as well. It is still in print at Amazon (and elsewhere) in a number of different editions, and it's certainly worth reading. There's even a Kindle edition - and that download appears to be free. It's a locked-room murder story, and, as I said in my original review (which you can listen to here), it is an ingenious puzzle and a pleasant way to pass a few hours.