AT THE VILLA ROSE, a 1910 detective novel by the British writer and liberal politician A. E. W. MASON, is the first to feature the character Inspector Hanaud. It was first published by HODDER AND STROUGHTON in 1910. The story became Mason's most successful novel of his lifetime. On its publication in book form in 1910 the novel received a warm reception, and it achieved a circulation greater than any other of Mason's novels. According to The British Weekly, it was "one of the best, most artistic, most engrossing detective stories ever written", with other papers also echoing its praise. In 1940 Hugh Walpole called it "The best detective novel of the last thirty years." It was adapted by him as a stage play in 1920, and was used as the basis for four film adaptions between 1920 and 1940. It was the first novel adapted to radio and broadcast by the BBC in the United Kingdom. Inspector Hanaud, the well-known French detective, is on holiday in Aix les Bains when he is asked by a young Englishman, Harry Wethermill, to investigate the murder of a wealthy widow, Mme Dauvray. Mme Dauvray has been strangled and her valuable jewels, which she wore ‘with too little prudence’, are missing. Her maid Hélène Vauquier has been discovered upstairs, unconscious, chloroformed, and with her hands tied behind her back. Suspicion immediately falls on Mme Dauvray’s young English companion, Celia Harland, who has vanished. A element of spiritualism is prevalent.