Last week I was rushing out the door to work and, having finished one book and uncertain what to tackle next, I grabbed Christie's The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) on a whim. This delightful novel became my commute companion and a warm nostalgia swept over me as I read this first story featuring Hercule Poirot.The novel begins with Arthur Hastings, a soldier who goes to convalesce at his old friend John Cavendish's family manor Styles. John's stepmother Emily Inglethorpe has recently remarried a younger man, who is much loathed by the Cavendish family. There are concerns that he is a gold digger out to steal the fortune and property away from John and his brother Lawrence.
One morning the house awakes to a racket, as Mrs Inglethorpe is dying from being poisoned. But who could have done such a thing? Enter Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, a friend of Hastings who is staying nearby to wait out the war. Over the coming days Poirot makes many deductions and discovers a great deal of evidence. Poirot warns his friend that evidence can be too conclusive and that 'real evidence is usually vague and unsatisfactory.'
Christie is a masterful storyteller and a queen of the whodunit genre. She throws in enough red herrings to keep the reader guessing, and brings everything together in a room full of suspects where Poirot outs the true villain.
It was great to go back to the start and see how Christie introduces Poirot, who 'might look natural on a stage, but was strangely out of place in real life'. And now that I have begun again, I am keen to read more and see how the characters evolve.