The Mysterious Affair at Styles--Agatha Christie

 The Book

    Captain Arthur Hastings, recently wounded and discharged from The Great War happens upon his friend John Cavendish in London. John invites Hastings up to his country home called Styles. There Arthur renews his acquaintance with John and Lawrence, and their step-mother who has recently married a much younger man and is now Emily Inglethorpe. Her husband, Alfred is a cousin of Emily's companion Evelyn Howard (back in the days where rich ladies paid other rich ladies to live in their households.) So our dear Captain Hastings is meeting Alfred, Evelyn, John's wife Mary, and the poor orphaned relation the Cavendishes have taken in, Cynthia Murdock. 

Hastings rapidly takes a liking to John's wife Mary, thinking she is a nice woman. It's obvious, since Mary has a crush on a newcomer, and doctor Dr, Bauerstein, that John and Mary's marriage is unhappy. This however is no impediment to the entire household hating Alfred, since everyone believes he's a gold digger, trying to get Emily's money. This leads, very shortly, to a fight between Evelyn and Emily, and Evelyn declares to Cynthia she has had enough and moves out rather than watch her cousin steal from Emily. (It is rumored that Alfred is having an affair with a local woman named Mrs. Raikes.)

A few days later, Alfred decides to spend the night with a friend after concluding his business in the village late. That night Emily has a mysteriously violent health attach which awakens the entire household. Hastings, John and Lawrence try to open Emily's door, but it is bolted. They go in through Alfred's room, but door is bolted there as well. As is the door to the other adjoining room, Cynthia's. 

Hastings and Lawrence break down the door, only to find Emily in the last moments of her life. Hastings runs out to fetch a doctor, and finds instead of Emily's regular doctor, Dr. Bauerstein in walking books and dirty clothes in the road close to Styles. He rushes in to attempt to save Emliy, but to no avail. With her last breath she says Alfred's name. 

From here, John and Lawrence are suspected because they could inherit. Cynthia is suspected because she never woke up during the commotion. Alfred, although nobody knows how he could have done it is suspected because he too could inherit

Enter, the recent émigré, Hercule Poirot, one of the Belgian refugees Emily has taken in. Poirot and Hastings met in Belgium some years past, and Hastings rapidly vouches for the fussy little man with the precise mustache.  Such is our introduction to one of the most famous detectives in all of fiction. 

Of course, Poirot uses he famous "little grey cells" to solve the crime.

My Thoughts   

    So for a very first published novel, I think Agatha Christie does a marvelous job. Her plotting is face paced, her clues are subtly planted and it has a satisfying conclusion. The version of the book I read had an appendix which included the final scene as Christie originally wrote it. A lady ahead of her time, Christie wrapped up the mystery Law and Order style, in the middle of a courtroom with Poirot on the witness stand, explaining what actually happened and why, to the jury. I like that ending, but her editor did not and forced her to change it. So she kept the explanation the same, but gathered everyone into the drawing room for Poirot's denouement. Classic. 

 

 When All About Agatha got started, the basic review of this book is that it is Agatha Christie fanfiction of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes series. I will admit it is hard to ignore the parallels between Hastings and Watson, but even Watson wasn't the first time this particular device of having a sidekick narrate the story. There's a reason for that, most artfully articulated by David Schmid in The Great Courses: The Secrets of Great Mystery and Suspense Fiction, the sidekick is the competition to the reader. It provides the reader a pacer, so to speak, can we solve the mystery and therefore catch up to The Great Mind before the sidekick does? It's part of what makes detective stories fun. 

    This, the fun, is the reason I think Christie has sold so many books. Her books are breezy reads told with deceptively simple words. She makes the read a game, and a fair game at that. The authors who came before her, most notably Poe and Doyle have different aims in their work. Poe was making an argument about the rationality of humankind, the ability of any of us, to use logic and evidence to come to a conclusion. You may hate the way he ended Murder in the Rue Morgue, but it is very definition of rationality. In fact, Poe himself call it ratiocination, which means the "process of exact reasoning" according the Miriam-Webster's Dictionary. So the puzzle in Poe's work have more to do with how far can one take a line of reasoning and still have it hold together in a story. 

    Doyle, on the other hand, is blending the ratiocination and the adventure story. The fun in many of his stories comes from the adventure, the show down with the baddie, and not the process of reasoning itself. 

    No, it's Christie who hones this genre to it's peak, placing emphasis on pacing and readability of her works. She is not interested in showing her readers how many words she know, or how fart she can stretch a point. She cares about whether or not the story is fun. And for that, she is one of the best selling authors of all time. 

How Much My Library Card Saved Me

Book 3 of my summer reading adventure, 47books to go. 

This book was sent by a member library in the consortium that covers my part of Illinois. Not being familiar with that library's practices, I don't have any notes to pass on about the particular copy of the book I had. A little sleuthing online reveals this to be a newer paperback edition. I will use the Amazon price of $9.00 for this experiment, as I don't seem to have a copy of the checkout receipt. I hope that will do. 

This Book:                 $9.00

This Summer            $52.99