Books with title The Mystery of the Hidden House

The Red House, stately mansion home of Mark Ablett, is filled with very proper guests when Mark's most improper brother returns from Australia. When the maid hears an argument in the study it isn't long before the brother dies... of a bullet between the eyes! Strangely, the study has been locked from the inside, and Mark Ablett is missing. Only an investigator with remarkable powers of observation could hope to resolve this mystery, and Antony Gillingham (with cheerful Bill Beverly at his side) is just the man.

There were many speculative attempts to explain the internal architecture of the Great Pyramid of Giza in the 19th century. Most of them were composed with an eye to Christian dispensational prophecies. Adams, on the other hand, thought that the blueprint for the Great Pyramid was the recently translated Egyptian Book of the Dead, a journey of the soul through the afterlife. He viewed this as an allegory of initiation, a precursor of Masonic rituals. When this book was initially published, it was taken seriously by many scholars and esoteric researchers. However, the lack of scholarly apparatus was a stumbling block for many. In addition, the Great Pyramid was constructed about 2500 BCE, and first versions of the Book of the Dead date to about 1500 BCE: a gap of nearly a thousand years. Although Adams drops hints about high-level Masonic themes in the Pyramid and Book of the Dead, he was not a member of any Masonic group. On the balance, some of Adams' ideas were ahead of his time, particularly his theory that the Egyptians were African in origin, not Asian, as most believed at the time.

The Red House Mystery is a "locked room" whodunnit by A. A. Milne, published in 1922. It was Milne's only mystery novel; he is better known for his humorous writing, children's stories, and poems. The setting is an English country house, where Mark Ablett has been entertaining a house party consisting of a widow and her marriageable daughter, a retired major, a wilful actress, and Bill Beverley, a young man about town. Mark's long-lost brother Robert, the black sheep of the family, arrives from Australia and shortly thereafter is found dead, shot through the head. Mark Ablett has disappeared, so Tony Gillingham, a stranger who has just arrived to call on his friend Bill, decides to investigate. Gillingham plays Sherlock Holmes to his younger counterpart's Doctor Watson; they progress almost playfully through the novel while the clues mount up and the theories abound.

Alan Alexander (A. A.) Milne (1882-1956) is most prominently remembered as the author of the well-known Winnie-the-Pooh tales, written for his son, Christopher Robin. Milne was born in London and raised in his father's private school, Henley House, after which he attended Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge to study mathematics. By 1925 he had published 18 plays and 3 novels, including "The Red House Mystery" (1922). This was Milne's first and final venture into the detective and mystery genre, despite its immediate success and an offer of two thousand pounds for his next mystery novel. The story is set in the quaint, English countryside at the house party of Mark Ablett, where a murder quickly takes place. Milne lets his readers inside the head of his amateur detective, disregarding the clichéd romance or violence of other detective novels, as the mystery becomes a puzzling sort of parlor game for the novel's characters and readers alike.