One of the most enjoyable things about reading short story anthologies is the number of pleasant surprises you get. In the Golden Age of Detective Fiction (the 1920s & 1930s) everyone who wrote in Britain tried their hand at mysteries. Even Winnie-the-Pooh’s famous creator, A.A. Milne.

Milne’s short story “Bread Upon the Waters” is an unexpected delight: well-written, humorous, and with a surprise ending. Just want you want from a “cozy.”

I discovered this little gem in a collection called Bodies from the Library: Lost Tales of Mystery and Suspense from the Golden Age of Detection. It is a collection I very much recommend.

As with any mystery short story, saying very much about the plot of “Bread Upon the Waters” is risking giving too much away. So here I am just going to whet your appetite with some quotes from Milne’s great little masterpiece.

Julian Crayne … was an unpleasantly smooth young man who lived with his Uncle Marius in the country. He should have been working, but he disliked work.

___________________________

Rich, elderly bachelors often become bores, and bores prefer to have somebody at hand who cannot escape.

___________________________

As we all know, the motives for murder are many. Revenge, passion, gain, fear, or simply the fact that you have seen the fellow’s horrible face in the paper so often that you feel it to be almost a duty to eliminate it.
The only person I have ever wanted to murder is—well, I won’t mention names, because I may do it yet.
But the point is that the police, in their stolid unimaginative way, always look first for the money motive, and if the money motive is there, you are practically in the bag.

Milne also wrote a very popular Mystery novel called The Red House Mystery which is in the Public Domain. I have downloaded it to my Kindle and will no doubt be reviewing it here at ClimbingSky at some point down the road.