A strange melange of Agatha Christie (fiendishly ingenious country house murder), Sherlock Holmes (amateur sleuths, bromance) and Winnie the Pooh (a delight in verbal repetition, low-stakes madcap adventure), this book was ridiculous yet delightful.

A. A. Milne published it, his only murder mystery, in 1922, a few years before he hit it big in the children’s book world. I did not realize when I was listening to it that the murder mystery came first, and I kept being struck by how much the dynamic of Anthony Gillingham (the Sherlock figure) and Bill Beverly (the Watson) reminded me of Christopher Robin and Pooh.

Also the extent to which it is a world almost entirely without women, and all the ways in which it seems a world apart from the difficulties of real life. An idyll, a romp, Arcadia, despite the presence of a murder victim.