The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1916/20) by Agatha Christie

Last time, I returned to Agatha Christie's The Murder at the Vicarage (1930) that marked the first appearance in a full-length novel of her secondary, but still very well-known and even beloved, series-detective, Miss Jane Marple – whom I first subjected to some criticism. The series never produced never produced a novel of the same caliber as the best from the Hercule Poirot series or standalone mysteries. Not even the best Miss Marples can hold a candle to the mid-tier Poirots. I never was a big fan of the Aunt Jane incarnation of the character who knits in a corner and quietly observes all that goes on around her.

The Murder at the Vicarage stands out in that regard as Miss Marple is introduced as a village gossip who spies on her neighbors with binoculars under the guise of "bird watching." While the plot lacked finesse, it offered a fascinating snapshot of a developing author trying out certain ideas that would go on to give shape to some of Christie's most celebrated detective stories of the 1930s. So not a bad beginning to the genre's golden decade and a pretty decent, quintessentially British village mystery that made me want to revisit Poirot's debut, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1916/20), to see how it compared to the first Miss Marple novel.

I figured The Murder at the Vicarage could put my assertion that even the best Miss Marples come up short against a middling Poirot title to test. After all, there are eight novels, three short story collections and a decade of experience separating The Mysterious Affair at Styles and The Murder at the Vicarage, which should have given the latter a decisive edge over the former, but that didn't turn out to be the case – quite the opposite. A back-to-back comparison of the two reinforced my initial opinion that even the best Miss Marple novels struggle to keep up with the minor titles from the Poirot series, because The Mysterious Affair at Styles is the superior detective story. And not by a small margin either. It was only Christie's first stab at the detective story! So let's gently probe this venerable 107-year-old mystery novel with a dissection lancet and see what's inside.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles was originally written in 1916, right in the middle of the First World War, when Christie served as a Voluntary Aid Detachments nurse in a hospital pharmacy. Which is where she picked up a couple of tricks that can be done with poisons and nursing Belgian soldiers obviously had a hand in shaping the character of Hercule Poirot. That makes it one of those frustratingly rare WWI-era mysteries and appropriately takes place while "not so very far away, a great war was running its appointed course." So even though the book was published years later, in 1920, it had that early, turn-of-the-century atmosphere still clinging to it and makes the story, stylistically, different from succeeding novels. But it really fitted the period in which it takes place.

Captain Arthur Hastings been invalided home from the Front, "pending some months in a rather depressing Convalescent Home," when he ran across an old friend, John Cavendish. Hastings had often stayed as a boy at the country place of John's stepmother, Emily Cavendish, who inherited Styles Court and an income to match upon her husband's death. Something considered distinctly unfair to his sons, John and Lawrence, but their stepmother always treated them generous and they always thought of her as their own mother – living all together at Styles Court. John abandoned his career as a barrister and settled down with his wife, Mary, to play country squire. Lawrence relinquished the profession of medicine to pursue his literary ambitions and spends all his money to publish "rotten verses in fancy bindings." The other characters at Styles Court of note are Evelyn Howard, "the mater's factotum, companion, Jack of all trades," and the daughter of an old school friend of Emily, Cynthia Murdoch. When Cynthia was left orphaned and penniless, Emily came to the rescue and she has been with them for two years now. Most importantly, there's Alfred Inglethorp.

One day, out of nowhere, Alfred Inglethorp arrived at Styles Court "on the pretext of being a second cousin or something" of Evelyn, but "she didn't seem particularly keen to acknowledge the relationship." Emily liked him at once, took him on as a secretary and were married a few months later. The now Mrs. Inglethorp is warned that Alfred "would as soon murder you in your bed as look at you." Hastings arrives at Styles Court to feel enough of the undercurrents to get "a premonition of approaching evil."

During the night, Hastings is awakened by Lawrence to tell him that something was seriously wrong. Mrs. Inglethorp appears to be very ill and is suffering from some kind of fit, but she locked, or bolted, herself inside her bedroom. So they break down the door to find a dying Mrs. Inglethorp, "the convulsions were of a violence terrible to behold," who died after a second convulsive attack. The circumstances suggests she had died from strychnine poisoning and an inquest has to take place. Hastings suggests calling in an old friend, "he has been a most famous detective," who happened to be staying in the village as a refugee.

In his time, Hercule Poirot had been "one of the most celebrated members of the Belgian police" who "had achieved triumphs by unravelling some of the most baffling cases of the day" with his personal credo that "all good detective work was a mere matter of method" – coupled with a strongly held believe that "everything matters." Right down to the smallest, seemingly insignificant detail. Hastings is reunited with Poirot when he arrives in the village and finds the once celebrated detective among the wounded Belgian refugees, who received a place to recover from Mrs. Inglethorp, but the old detective immediately springs to back to life when Poirot learns one of Belgium's benefactors has been foully poisoned. Now, I have to warn readers who easily get annoyed by Hastings that on his first appearance he's plays even more of a bumbling Watson than in later novels, which is not helped by his cocksure attitude and persistently being wrong. Everything from saying he based his own system of detective work on Poirot's method ("...though of course I have progressed rather further") to his silly theories ("a wild idea flashed across me. Was it possible that Mrs Inglethorp's mind was deranged?") or believing he grasps more than Poirot ("...but I restrained my tongue. After all, though he was old, Poirot had been a great man in his day"). So that is bound to annoy some readers, but nothing that should be to the detriment of a really strong, even innovative, debut showing Christie was a natural who was already ahead of the game in 1916.

First of all, I find it interesting Poirot mainly reasons here from physical clues rather than psychological ones as he stated in The Murder on the Orient Express (1934) that he seeks the psychology of a case and "not the fingerprint or the cigarette ash." But here he has to consider such physical clues as a shattered coffee cup, a coffee stain, keys to the victim's dispatch case, burned fragments of paper and a splash of candle grease on the bedroom floor. There's a psychological clue, of sorts, playing on Poirot's habit to straighten and tidy things, but nothing to extend as can be found in novels like Cards on the Table (1936) and Hercule Poirot's Christmas (1938). So the story has a different feel to it than most of the later Poirot mysteries and helped solidify that old-world, Doylean atmosphere that had slowly began to dissipate at the outset of the war. But where the story differentiate itself from most detective fiction of the 1910s and even the '20s are simply its fresh and clever ideas and approach to plotting a detective story. Even with the Watson-Holmes setup.

The poisoning-trick is extremely clever, simple and practical, which could have been used to turn The Mysterious Affair at Styles into a full-blown locked room mystery had Christie made more of an issue about how and when the poison, exactly, was administrated – as "strychnine is a fairly rapid poison." So circumstances would certainly have allowed it to be presented as an impossible poisoning a la Paul Doherty. Only drawback to the poisoning-trick is that it requires specialized knowledge to have a shot at solving it. However, this bears repeating, it's leagues ahead of most detective stories and novels dating from the same period. What I really enjoyed was to properly appreciate most of that I admire about Christie in its infancy.

I've always admired and praised Christie nearly unrivaled ability to rub the truth in your face with one hand and pulled the wool over your eyes with the other. This ability is on full display in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, but far less subtle, more on the nose and full of bravado. And, yet, it worked. Sort of. Admittedly, it only worked, sort of, because the central idea propping up the plot not only allowed it, but kind of demanded it. But what a great idea! And somewhat of an original plot-twist for 1916 or even the early twenties. Christie would go on to prodigiously improve over the decade when it came to structuring and clueing her detective stories and became the undisputed queen of the least-likely-suspect gambit. So the many masterpieces or merely the excellent, first-rate mysteries she would go on to create have since completely overshadowed The Mysterious Affair at Styles, but it remains an auspicious debut, bursting with promise and new ideas, introducing a writer and character who would as inextricably-linked to their period of genre as Doyle and Holmes were to the turn-of-the-century detective story. A absolute diamond-in-the-rough!