Agatha Christie’s career as a novelist spanned six
decades, beginning her writing in 1916 with The Mysterious Affair at Styles
which would not be published for four years in 1920. Written during World War I, there is an
interesting tinge to the tone of the novel that reflects the active threat that
is ravaging the world on a level that hadn’t really been seen before this point. Christie worked as part of the Red Cross
during the war and it was here where she begun work on this novel. It is incredibly fitting that this is a
locked room mystery involving death by poisoning, since working in a dispensary
is where she learned quite a bit about medicine and poisons. There is this general pop culture idea that
Christie as a novelist could get away with murder and that genuinely doesn’t
surprise me since as a mystery novelist while her own inspirations included Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes.
What the reader will find from reading The Mysterious Affair at
Styles is that unlike Doyle, Christie has actually taken the time to think
out her plot and mystery so the conclusion is something that could happen. The actual clues in the novel end up adding up
so not only the actual murderer is revealed properly if you’re paying
attention, but also so that the misdirects feel like they could also adequately
work.
While Christie as a novelist is already leagues ahead of
Doyle’s mysteries (only The Hound of the Baskervilles really deserves
its status in the great listings of mystery novels), you can tell that she has
taken inspiration from Doyle in terms of structure. Hastings is the narrator of The Mysterious
Affair at Styles, working as the Watson to Poirot’s Holmes. He’s a character who is there to ask
questions and be impressed when Poirot investigates and makes strides in the
case while sharing at least some intelligence of his own. If one was to compare this to A Study in
Scarlet (the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes), Christie devotes a large
early portion of the novel to Hastings and his experiences at Styles: he’s
there in an attempt to relax after serving time in the war. This only serves as a reminder of the fact
that World War I is happening on the continent which adds this tension. It’s not a tension of invasion, but it adds this
layer of mistrust and sadness since a calm summer’s day should be just that but
it almost cannot be. There is a
character revealed to be a German spy as a red herring to the murder itself and
while there is an issue with the way the character is described, falling back
on Christie’s tendency for otherizing foreigners, especially non-white foreigners,
there is an interesting acknowledgement of the war.
The murder itself is almost immediately given to strychnine
poisoning though the rest of those at Styles hope it could just be a simple
case of heart failure. This is all a
family affair, the Cavendish’s and the Inglethrop’s living at Styles as well as
a few of their close friends who have close connections to the family. Christie’s first interesting implication is
that this may have been made to look like a woman committed the murder since it
was done with poison, while a man would do something more forceful. Gender is honestly an interesting recurring
theme in Christie’s work and it’s interesting how it develops since her work
spans nearly 60 years. The women of The
Mysterious Affair at Styles are all wives and domestics while the men are
gentlemen and professionals, but there is one female character who is allowed
to work closer to a man’s field. Cynthia
is an orphan who works in a nearby hospital’s dispensary, someone who might be
considered an author insert character, Christie losing her father at a young
age and spending time during the war in a dispensary. There is even some gender ideas played around
with in the characterization of Hercule Poirot, not quite living up to the
traditional 1920s masculinity. As well
as being a foreigner, he is incredibly obsessive-compulsive about his
appearance and the strange little man persona is something that Christie will develop
over future novels with this interesting sense of almost a manipulative streak.
Overall, while The Mysterious Affair at Styles is clearly a first novel yet
has an amazing little locked room mystery that almost deconstructs the society
it takes place in. There are points that
haven’t aged well and some prose mistakes from Christie, but you can clearly
see why she became popular and grew into the Queen of Crime. 8/10.
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