Every fact that I know is in your possession. What Poirot says to Hastings near the end of Styles might well be taken to describe Christie’s own attitude towards the presentation of clues to the reader: ‘I am not keeping back facts. Whodunnit? How? And why? And how are we to work it out? No one handles this kind of story better than Agatha Christie, largely because her puzzles almost always play fair. In doing so, however, she also established a winning formula in which a small group of people are gathered in an isolated setting (often a country house) before one of them is bumped off. She decided early on that the cast of suspects would all be drawn from the same family circle, since this would be the most realistic approach to the kind of murder she had in mind.
When Mrs Inglethorp dies suddenly of strychnine poisoning, therefore, it’s lucky for everyone that another of Hastings’s old friends happens to be staying at a local establishment for Belgian refugees – a certain retired policeman by the name of Hercule Poirot.Ĭhristie’s debut novel pretty much establishes the good, the bad and the downright ugly in terms of what we can expect of the rest of her long literary career.
The new spouse is one Alfred Inglethorp, whom the family view with understandable suspicion, both on account of his being twenty years his new wife’s junior and also because of his great big bushy beard. John and Lawrence’s stepmother (who owns the house and has sole control of the family fortune) has recently remarried. Also living at Styles are John’s wife Mary, John’s brother Lawrence, a lady companion named Evelyn Howard, and Cynthia, a protégé of John and Lawrence’s stepmother. Having been invalided out of the army, Captain Hastings (also our narrator) is staying at Styles court with his old friend John Cavendish. This is Agatha Christie’s first novel, written in 1916 and finally published in 1920 – it’s also one of the handful of her books that I hadn’t previously read.
Note: contains spoilers for Styles and for The ABC Murders (1936)
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