Book Review: The Mysterious Affair at Styles

Title: The Mysterious Affair at Styles 

Author: Agatha Christie

Date: 1920

Publisher: Bodley Head (1920); many reprints; e-book at gutenberg.org

Quote: "“Is there anything the matter, Aunt Emily?” asked Cynthia. “Certainly not,” said Mrs. Inglethorp sharply. “What should there be?”"

Famous Last Words. Mrs. Inglethorp has just changed her will again. Several people, including even Cynthia, stand to benefit in some way from Mrs. Inglethorp's demise. Would any of them be so cruel as to put strychnine in her coffee? In the 1910s very few chemicals were regulated, but strychnine was one of the few; though tiny amounts of it were used in the dreadful over-the-counter "tonics" of those days, less than a full apothecary's grain of it was known to be enough to cause a peculiarly painful death. Mrs. Inglethorp's exit from her fictional world is so painful that the doctors, and detective Hercule Poirot, know it has to have been caused by strychnine.

Almost any of the characters in this novel might have poisoned the old lady's coffee. The domestic staff aren't considered as suspects, though in real life they might well have been. Cynthia seems too nice, and seems to have been sleeping soundly in a bedroom close to her aunt's--or pretending to. Could it have been one of the other relatives with whom she's quarrelled, mostly about her recent marriage to a younger man who they think could only possibly be after her money? The younger man, himself? The doctor, disliked and suspected mostly because he's German, lacking a clear motive unless someone's paying him, but certainly having means? The old lady's own sons--one of whom bought strychnine not long ago, or so the clerk who sold it to him says, though he denies it?! 

Things look bad enough for the narrator's kind friends, who have offered him a place to recuperate from his wounds (the novel was written in 1916), that he feels obligated to send for Poirot. An almost acceptable case can be made against any of a half-dozen people; a perfect case, good enough for Poirot, against none. 

By the time I came along Dame Agatha Christie had written so many mystery novels that she'd been knighted; she was older than several characters in those novels who are regarded as old people. She died in 1976. Her name was guaranteed to sell books and she was suspected of coasting on this fact, recycling the same plot through the last few stories she wrote. Some think her alarmingly keen mind might have been reacting, in its peculiar way, to Alzheimer's Disease; her novels certainly juggled complicated plots, but perhaps she was forgetting which plot she'd used last. But the books she started writing in the 1910s and selling in the 1920s were fresh, at the time, and were classics. 

The Mysterious Affair at Styles was not reprinted as often as some of her other books because of one unfortunate detail. There was a war on with Germany, so it's not surprising that Dr. Bauerstein would be disliked for being German; but Christie unfortunately described him as being a Jewish German, which was seen, at the time, as the worst kind. The case against him is the weakest, but everyone wants him to be guilty. In fact most of the characters are guilty of something or other, only not of the murder. Bauerstein's guilty secret is even worse than a petty theft or an adulterous thought. He seems to others to be acting guilty because he is--but, readers must ask as they read, is that merely because he kept a healthy distance from others, and is that merely because he is or was brought up as Orthodox? Well, it's not. Arguably his religious identity functions to warn readers to check their prejudices. Or, since he has good reasons to be guilty and those reasons don't fill out his character in the lovable sort of way Cynthia's secret crush does, does it function to affirm prejudice? Or, since Christie was not known for antisemitism and didn't put Jewish or Arab villains into every book, is Bauerstein Jewish just because he has to be something? (Writers of fiction have been known to assign traits like ethnicity to characters by writing the details on paper and shaking them up in a box.) Publishers didn't want to decide and so The Mysterious Affair at Styles is currently available at Gutenberg.org. 

A more cheerful mystery is why I'm reviewing this book now. I file my own Gutenberg downloads separately, and have been neglecting them during the Booktober Blitz. Someone wanted to generate buzz for this title, and sent me a copy, during the Blitz. Was that merely because person thinks my standards for Book Funnel and Kindle mysteries are low? I read Dorothy Sayers and Arthur Conan Doyle and, yes, I have read several of Dame Agatha's books; I don't expect everyone who writes a cozy detective story to be that good. Given that copyright has expired and anyone can reprint early Christie novels, is someone planning to bring out a set of reprints? I have no inside information about any such plans. 

I can say, however, that readers who like detective stories usually think early Agatha Christies were among the best. If you don't have an opinion yet, read a few and form one.