Dictionary of Literary Biography on A(lan) A(lexander) Milne
In his autobiography, It's Too Late Now (1939), A. A. Milne complains that his children's books have eclipsed his other kinds of writing. Best known before Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) as a playwright, Milne was an important mystery writer, and the popularity of his detective novel, The Red House Mystery (1922), helped establish the conventions of British detective fiction between World War I and World War II.
Born in London, 18 January 1882, Alan Alexander Milne was the son of Sarah Maria Heginbotham Milne and John Vire Milne, a headmaster. Milne and his two elder brothers grew up at their father's preparatory school, Henley House, where they learned to love the schoolboy life of games, cordial intimacy, routine, and study. At Westminster School Milne settled into mathematics as his favorite subject (in which he later earned his B.A. with honors from Trinity College, Cambridge). While at Westminster and during his early years at Cambridge, Milne and his brother Ken invented a species of comic verse which they called "Milnicks." After having edited the school magazine, Granta, at Cambridge, Milne decided upon a career as a writer.
Milne's first piece to appear in the commercial press was a Sherlock Holmes burlesque printed in Vanity Fair in 1903. In 1906 Milne became assistant editor of Punch, for which he wrote a weekly article and edited correspondence from people who thought that they had invented something humorous. In 1913 he married Dorothy Daphne De Selincourt. Their only child, Christopher Robin Milne, was born in 1920. During World War I Milne found time out from his job as a signal officer to write his first play, Wurzel-Flummery (1917).
In The Red House Mystery Antony Gillingham arrives at the country estate Red House on an August afternoon to visit his friend Bill Beverley, a houseguest, seconds after Robert Ablett has been murdered. Antony and Matthew Cayley, friend and companion of the murdered man's brother, Mark Ablett, discover the body. Mark Ablett, the head of the household, is missing and a suspect in the murder of his brother, whom he had not seen for fifteen years because of Robert Ablett's dissolute habits. Antony Gillingham literally plays Sherlock Holmes to Bill Beverley's Dr. Watson, drawing a number of false conclusions before he solves the crime.
The Red House Mystery is important both because in it Milne attempted something new to meet the needs of sophisticated mystery fans who wanted witty books and wanted to take part in the detection, and because his popularity as a writer insured the book a wide audience. In an introduction he wrote for the 1926 New York reprinting Milne says he set four goals for himself: the dialogue must be natural, love interest must be minimized, the detective must be an amateur, and there must be a Watson. He argues that stilted language and romantic interludes add nothing to the story. Professional detectives distance the reader, and the absence of a Dr. Watson means that the reader cannot "know from chapter to chapter what the detective is thinking." Writing about detective novels in general and this story in particular in It's Too Late Now, Milne says, "I had read most of those which had been written, admired their ingenuity, but didn't like their English.... I wondered if I could write a detective story about real people in real English. I thought it would be 'fun to try,' my only reason for writing anything." The London Times Literary Supplement (20 April 1922) praised the book greatly, as did the Boston Transcript (8 April 1922) and the New York Times (16 April 1922). Writing in 1936 (16 February), Isaac Anderson said in the New York Times that the book had not been forgotten like so many others of its era.
Milne wrote another mystery novel, Four Days' Wonder (1933), and a detective play, The Fourth Wall (1929; produced, 1928). Although Four Days' Wonder was not popular with the reading public (critics found it overrefined), it was made into a 1936 film by Universal. The Fourth Wall had a run of 225 performances in New York. Milne suffered a stroke in 1952 which left him partially paralyzed. He died at his home in Sussex on 31 January 1956.
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