At the Villa Rose

At the fashionable spa of Aix-les-Bains, the wealthy Englishwoman Mme. Camille Dauvray is found murdered in her rented Villa Rose, her famous jewels stolen and her maid drugged and bound. Her young companion, the beautiful Celia Harland — once a stage medium, lately the stager of séances for her spiritualist mistress — has disappeared into the night. Everything points to the missing girl, and only one man refuses to believe it: Harry Wethermill, who loves her, and who appeals to a celebrated detective on holiday at the same resort.

He is Inspector Hanaud of the Paris Sûreté — stout, genial, theatrical, fond of his jokes and his food, and beneath it all formidably acute. With the comfortable, baffled amateur Julius Ricardo at his side, Hanaud takes the case on a single promise: that he will follow the truth wherever it runs, however bitter the end. What he uncovers is a conspiracy turning on a fraudulent séance — a trap baited with the supernatural, into which an innocent girl was led.

First published in 1910, At the Villa Rose introduced Inspector Hanaud and founded a series that ran for three decades. Its pairing of the brilliant Continental detective and his slower English companion is a clear ancestor of Agatha Christie's Poirot and Hastings, and its daring structure — the case broken partway through, the rest of the book spent reconstructing exactly how the crime was done — makes it one of the genuine landmarks of the detective story. Named a cornerstone of the genre, it remains, more than a century on, a tense and humane mystery about deception, the wronged innocent, and the one man who refuses to hold an opinion until he is sure.

This edition presents the complete public-domain text in clean, modern typesetting, with an editor's foreword on the novel and the detective tradition it helped found, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.