The Mysterious Affair at Styles

Agatha Christie wrote the book on a bet. Her elder sister Madge said she could not write a good detective story, and Christie, working through the First World War in the dispensary of a Torquay hospital, took the bet and chose poison because poison was what she knew. For a detective she took the Belgian refugees who had settled in the town after the German invasion, and made hers a retired officer of the Brussels police. She wrote in her autobiography that she remembered the colony of Belgians in the parish of Tor and asked herself why her detective should not be one of them.[1][2]

Six publishers turned it down. John Lane of The Bodley Head accepted it in 1919, four years after she finished it, on a contract she later called exploitative, and asked her to move the final explanation out of a courtroom and into the house. The Times printed it first, as an eighteen-part serial in its Weekly Edition from February to June 1920. John Lane published it in New York in October 1920 and The Bodley Head in London on 21 January 1921.[3]

The chemistry was checked by professionals. The Pharmaceutical Journal, the trade paper of British chemists, reviewed the novel and approved its poisoning, which the estate records as an unusual honour for a work of fiction. When Christie and her first husband Archibald Christie bought a house, they named it Styles.[2]

The book was among the first ten Penguins, number six in the sixpenny paperbacks launched on 30 July 1935. Because it was published in 1920 it entered the public domain in the United States long ago, and Project Gutenberg carries the full text as ebook number 863. In the United Kingdom and Europe it remains in copyright until seventy years after Christie's death in 1976.[3][4]

Arthur Hastings, on sick leave from the Front, goes to stay at Styles Court, the Essex house of his friend John Cavendish. The house belongs to John's stepmother Emily Inglethorp, seventy, rich and generous with conditions, who has lately married Alfred Inglethorp, a bearded man twenty years younger whom the household calls a fortune hunter. Also in the house are John's wife Mary, his younger brother Lawrence, and Mrs Inglethorp's ward Cynthia Murdoch, who works in a hospital dispensary. Her companion Evelyn Howard quarrels with her over Alfred and leaves, warning Hastings to watch him.

In the village Hastings meets an old acquaintance, Hercule Poirot, a famous Belgian detective now living as a refugee in a house Mrs Inglethorp has provided. On the evening of 17 July Mrs Inglethorp is heard quarrelling with someone in her room, makes a new will, and drinks her coffee. In the small hours the house is woken by her cries. Her door is bolted on the inside. When the men break it down she dies in convulsions. Dr Bauerstein, a London specialist staying nearby, says strychnine.

Poirot examines the room. He finds a coffee cup ground into the carpet, candle grease on the floor, and a fragment of green cloth caught on the bolt of the door to Cynthia's room. In the grate are the burned remains of a will. The despatch case where Mrs Inglethorp kept her papers has been forced. A chemist's register in the town shows that Alfred Inglethorp bought strychnine on the Monday, signing his name. Alfred refuses to say where he was that afternoon.

At the inquest the case against Alfred looks complete, and Poirot, to Hastings's fury, works to prevent his arrest. Suspicion moves through the house. John and Lawrence inherit. Mary Cavendish was in the passage that night and will not say why. Lawrence was seen with a coffee cup. Cynthia handles poisons at work, and a box of her bromide powders has been emptied. Dr Bauerstein is arrested, but for spying.

John Cavendish is charged with the murder and tried at the Old Bailey. The defence shows that the quarrel overheard in Mrs Inglethorp's room was with John, about money and Mrs Raikes, a farmer's wife. Poirot, who had promised to find the last link, finds it. He gathers the household in the drawing room.