The Mysterious Affair at Styles: Agatha Christie’s First Novel and Hercule Poirot’s First Case
A woman dies of poisoning at Styles Court, a country house in Essex. Everyone involved, everyone close to her, seems to have an alibi for the moment the crime took place. This is where it all began: Agatha Christie’s first novel, and the first case of Hercule Poirot and his friend Captain Hastings.
Author: Agatha Christie (1890–1976)
Title: The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920)
Format: English paperback (HarperCollins), 288 pages
Scope: Hercule Poirot novel; Christie’s debut
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/0007527497 (ASIN 0007527497)
Strychnine and a Suspect
Poirot becomes convinced that the main suspect, the person all the evidence seems to point to, is innocent. The hard part is proving it, because every clue found so far points the other way.
Right Under His Nose
The clue that finally solves the mystery is right under everyone’s nose, and after long sleepless nights and some awkward situations Poirot manages to catch the real culprits.
How It Began
Christie wrote the novel during the First World War, partly in response to a challenge from her sister Madge, who doubted she could write a detective story in which the reader could not guess the culprit. At the time she was working in the dispensary of a hospital in Torquay, where she learned a great deal about medicines and poisons. That knowledge shows in the book: the poisoning at its centre is described with such accuracy that a pharmaceutical journal later praised it.
A Detective Is Born
Torquay had received a group of Belgian refugees during the war, and Christie decided that her detective would be one of them: a retired Belgian police officer, small, fastidious and vain, with an egg-shaped head, a magnificent moustache and an absolute faith in order and method. Hercule Poirot was born. Christie could not have imagined that he would appear in over thirty novels and dozens of stories, or that she would eventually grow tired of him.
Hastings and the Cavendish Family
The story is told by Arthur Hastings, a soldier sent home wounded from the Front, who is invited to Styles Court by his old friend John Cavendish. John’s wealthy stepmother, Emily Inglethorp, has recently married a much younger man, Alfred, whom the family detests. When she is poisoned, suspicion naturally falls on him, but nothing in this house is as simple as it seems, and Hastings, by chance, knows that his old acquaintance Poirot is staying in the village.
A Difficult Start
Several publishers rejected the manuscript before The Bodley Head accepted it, and it was finally published in 1920 in the United States and the following year in Britain. It sold modestly at first, but it established the formula that would make Christie famous: a closed circle of suspects, a fair trail of clues and a final explanation that surprises the reader.
Full Circle
Poirot’s very last case, Curtain, published in 1975, brings him and Hastings back to Styles, now a guesthouse. Reading the two books together, first and last, is a moving experience for any Christie fan. The novel was also adapted for television in 1990, with David Suchet and Hugh Fraser, as a special to mark the centenary of Christie’s birth.
Before You Start
The language is a little more formal than in her later books, but the plot moves briskly, and it remains a satisfying puzzle.
Look out for Poirot’s habit of tidying the mantelpiece.
Why Read It
A story full of intrigue and mystery in which Poirot and Hastings show, for the very first time, how well they work together. It is fascinating to see how many of Christie’s trademarks, the country house, the poison, the gathering of suspects, are already here in her debut.
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