At the Villa Rose (1910)
Blurb:
My review:
Mason’s At
the Villa Rose appeared in the same year as Chesterton’s
monumental Innocence of Father Brown and had as
great an effect on the future of the detective story.
Indeed, it is – if we except Doyle’s four full-length
accounts of the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, of which, indeed, only The Valley of Fear (still to come when
this was published) is an orthodox detective story of the modern
variety – the first
proper detective novel. We are presented
with the murder of a rich, elderly and rather foolish old woman, with
suspicion
falling on her companion, who vanished in a motor-car.
Insp. Hanaud of the Surêté, assisted by the middle
aged dilettante Mr. Ricardo (no doubt a relation of Christie’s Mr.
Satterthwaite),
sorts through a number of clues, both physical (footprints, tears in
the sofa
cushions and ominous stains) and psychological (the relations between
the
principals in the case) and arrests the culprits, the identity of one
of whom
at least I never considered for an instant.
The novel does not end there, however, for the capture of the
villains comes
only halfway through. In the manner of
the times, we are treated to several chapters describing the case, but
far more
successful than Doyle, for they are not lengthy flashbacks into the
past of another
country, but the events of the night in question as told by the
companion and one
of the criminals, with a genuine frisson of evil in the pages leading
up to the
murder of Mme. Dauvray. An early classic
of the genre, which Mason would surpass with The House of
the Arrow.