At the Villa Rose (1910)

Published in 1910 in Britain by Hodder& Stoughton, in Canada by The Musson Book Company and in America by Charles Scribner’s Sons, this is the first of six novels and a short story featuring Inspector Gabriel Hanuad, the French detective. By this time, Mason had been a published novelist for fifteen years and despite being the first book in the Hanaud series, it was a best seller.

In creating the character of Inspector Hanaud, Mason was determined to create a detective as unlike his fictional contemporary, Sherlock Holmes, as possible. Where Holmes is tall and gaunt, Hanuad is ‘stout and broad shouldered with a full and almost heavy face’ and thick black hair, (one character describes him as being like a Newfoundland dog), affable by nature and he is also a professional police detective working for the Sûreté, not a gifted amateur like the cool mannered Englishman. In addition, Hanaud uses psychological insights to catch culprits, rather than gathering scientific evidence in the manner of Holmes – although neither man is prone to moral judgements. However, Hanaud can be light of foot for a large man – he ‘moves as lightly as an antelope’ – his insights are equally incisive as those of Holmes and he will brook no lack of co-operation from witnesses. His quiet eyes miss nothing and his periodic buffoonery has a purpose and disguises an incisive mind. As Mason says in the novelHouse of the Arrow, those who encounter Hanaud must be prepared ‘to be awed at one moment, leaped upon unpleasantly at the next, ridiculed at a third and treated with great courtesy and friendship at the fourth.’ Hanuad is also like Holmes — with both men, we can never fully know or understand them, perhaps because of their mercurial temperament and superior skills. It has been suggested that Mason was influenced in the creation of Hanaud by Robert Barr’s French policeman detective, Eugene Valmont (1907).

Whilst Holmes clearly was not the inspiration for Mason’s detective, two real life police officers were — Macé and Goron both led the Parisian Sûreté and it is known that Mason studied their respective memoirs. It has been suggested that he was also influenced by novelist Émile Gaboriau’s fictional detective, Monsieur Lecoq. In his turn, Mason and his character are thought to have been an inspiration for Agatha Christie when she developed her own Belgian detective, Hercules Poirot – as an example, Hanaud refers to himself in the third person, something Poirot also does and both men have an occasional slip in their use of spoken English.

Mason’s strong belief in the necessity for outstanding characterisation was evident in the preface he wrote to an omnibus collection of the first three Hanaud novels: ‘Detective fiction… has been judged not so much by the ingenuity of its plots, but by the higher standard of its characterisation.’ His efforts did not go unnoticed by his peers – contemporaries such as fellow mystery author Dorothy L. Sayers and literary critic Howard Haycraft, both praised his use of psychology in the development of characters and stories, the latter stating Mason was the first such writer after Wilkie Collins to do so effectively; he also wrote ‘… among the most subtly conceived and described in the genre…Hanaud easily stands out as one of the indisputable ‘greats’ among fictional sleuths.’

In 1931,The A. E. W. Mason Omnibus: Inspector Hanaud’s Investigations was published. In the preface, Mason expanded on his approach to writing detective fiction:

‘I was haunted by a desire to make the story of what actually happened more intriguing and dramatic than the unravelling of the mystery and the detection of the criminal. I wanted that the surprise which is the natural end of a detective story should come in the middle and that the victims and criminals should between them, when brought into the witness-box, tell a story which, while explaining, should transcend in interest all the doubts and even the alarms which a good mystery is able to provoke. I wanted… to combine the crime story which produces a shiver with the detective story which aims at a surprise.’

The novel was adapted for film in 1920, the same year a stage version debuted at the Strand Theatre in London’s West End. Following this silent movie, a sound version was released in 1930, filmed in both in English and in French (asLe mystèrede la villa rose) at Twickenham Studios — this was