The Mysterious Affair at Styles

It is an old favourite and a book I like to read when I need something not too taxing. It is the first of the Poirot novels and every few years I like to re-read all the books in order. This book is such a favourite, I named the PI in my own books after the house.

This book is signature Christie: well-plotted and paced, full of exciting characters, all of whom had motive and potential to kill…and we meet her most beloved character, Poirot. What’s not to like?

I hadn’t read any Christie books in decades, and this was the one that rekindled my love affair with her craft.

Captain Hastings narrates these books (a la Watson’s retellings of Holmes’s brilliance) and points out Poirot’s eccentricity and fastidiousness from the initial introduction. Poirot seems so silly and stuffy…until those little gray cells kick in, and we get some keen insights.

Someone pointed out to me that… show more.

What I found remarkable about this book is that it was Christie’s first published book. Written over 100 years ago, here was a fully-formed Poirot with an established fact-finding system and method of deduction. Memorable, Belgian, polite, small, slightly overweight, fastidious in dress, and reliant on his "little grey cells" to solve the crime. I loved his difference from all other detectives.

After I read it and realised it was her first novel, I imagined being the lucky publisher on whose desk it first landed. I would have broken out the champagne and celebrated my successful future. Amazingly, she was… show more.