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Mysterious Affair at Styles: A Hercule Poirot Mystery (Agatha Christie Collection)
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Manufacturer: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers
Author: Agatha Christie
Publisher: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers
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Our Price: $9.60
You Save: $ 2.40 ( 20% )
Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers
Author: Agatha Christie
Publisher: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers
Average Customer Rating:
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Mysterious Affair at Styles: A Hercule Poirot Mystery (Agatha Christie Collection) Description
Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.912
EAN: 9781579126223
ISBN: 1579126227
Label: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers
Manufacturer: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 224
Publication Date: 2006-09-01
Publisher: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers
Studio: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.912
EAN: 9781579126223
ISBN: 1579126227
Label: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers
Manufacturer: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 224
Publication Date: 2006-09-01
Publisher: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers
Studio: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers
Editorial Review of Mysterious Affair at Styles: A Hercule Poirot Mystery (Agatha Christie Collection)
In her first published mystery, Agatha Christie introduces readers to the heroic detective, Hercule Poirot. This is a classic murder mystery set in the outskirts of Essex. The victim is the wealthy mistress of Styles Court. The list of suspects is long and includes her gold-digging new spouse and stepsons, her doctor, and her hired companion.
Customer Reviews of Mysterious Affair at Styles: A Hercule Poirot Mystery (Agatha Christie Collection)
Customer Rating: 
Review Summary: "...the colossal cheek of the little man!"
Review: ...I got a hunch about 1/2 way through that one of the characters was the murderer - but could not even begin to see how they did it or were connected. My first read of a Christie book - and I'll be digging in to others since I enjoyed this one so much.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie
Review: The Mysterious Affair at Styles: A Hercule Poirot by Agatha Christie
Great eBook for Kindle!
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Somewhat Clunky Beginning for the Belgian Sleuth
Review: The first "grownup" novels I recall reading were those of Agatha Christie and P.G. Wodehouse, and while I periodically return to Wodehouse with great enjoyment, I haven't revisited the Christie books until now. I figured this, her first published work (written in 1916, published in 1920), would be a good starting place. As well as being her first work, it introduces my favorite of her recurring characters, the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot.
To my surprise, the story takes place during WWI (not after, as many suppose), a detail that plays a minor role in the story. The story is told by Poirot's occasional sidekick (he only appear in eight of the Poirot novels) Captain Hastings, who has been invalided home for the duration of the war. The specifics of his injury aren't explained, but he has gone to the Essex countryside to spend some time at a friend's family mansion (the Styles of the title). Things there prove to be rather tense, as the elderly matriarch has married a much younger man, whom everyone suspects of being a golddigger. Meanwhile, Hastings' friend and his brother are in tenuous financial circumstances due to the provisions of their dead father's will. Of course, the old lady ends up dead, and there are plenty of suspects to go around.
Fortuitously, Hastings runs into Poirot in the local village, where Poirot and some fellow Belgians are living as refugees from the war. The two had apparently met years before, and soon Hastings has enlisted him to investigate the old woman's death. Found dead in her locked room, she appears to have been poisoned, but by whom and how is a mystery. Clues abound (as do plenty of red herrings) in the somewhat complicated story, which finds Poirot already in full form. Alas, he is the only fully developed and lively character to be found, with Hastings already his usual naive sappy self, and none of the rest of cast particularly memorable. As a story, it's somewhat clunky, although all the elements that made Poirot such a popular character are there in abundance (except his mustache mania). Not a great read, but not a bad one either.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: And Introducing Monsieur Hercule Poirot
Review: "The Mysterious Affair At Styles" was Agatha Christie's first mystery novel, in which she introduced her enigmatic and eccentric Belgium detective, Hercule Poirot. She often later lamented that she should have made Poirot younger to begin with as he was to be the star detective in many of her mysteries afterward. But her retired police officer began his magnificent orbit with this intriguing mystery full of the twists and turns that would soon become Christie's trademark.
Wounded at the Western front, Captain Hastings is invalided home and has a chance encounter with his old friend John Cavendish. John invites him to his family's estate for a visit, which Hastings gladly accepts. But Styles, the family's home, is hardly full of happy characters. Both sons are disturbed by their stepmother's behavior - for she has married Alfred Inglethorp, a man twenty years younger than she. Almost everyone is convinced that he is solely after her money and when Mrs. Inglethorp dies suddenly one night of strychnine poisoning, her husband is the immediate suspect. But there are others within the household who would have benefitted from the old lady's death, especially when a fragment of a freshly written will is found burned in her bedchamber. Could someone within her own family have cleverly carried out her murder? Only Hercule Poirot can find all the missing pieces to solve this puzzler of a crime.
Agatha Christie's name is forever cemented in the echelons of mystery writers, and with good reason. Her varied background helped to make her a near expert in matters of poisons, which have played an important role in many of her novels, and her travels to exotic locales have created heightened settings for some of her best mysteries. Her first novel must certainly have been a tough act to follow with its quick pace and plot twists; it fails only at times through its slightly weak narration by Captain Hastings. "The Mysterious Affair At Styles" introduced the world to Agatha Christie, and readers have never looked for better, returning time and again to each mystery she ingeniously crafted.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: As It Was in the Beginning
Review: She didn't really have it together yet but after all it was her first novel! And as such it's pretty amazing how much Hercule Poirot is him glorious self already. pompous, witty, abrasive, yet kind and chivalrous especially to a "woman's secret heart," for he goes to crazy lengths to ake things come out all right for two separate couples by the time STYLES is over.
I just finished Gilbert Adair's abstruse takeoff on Agatha Christie, MYSTERIOUS AFFAIR OF STYLE, so I decided to go back to the real, original thing, see what I hadn't seen in years. I was surprised to find that, in the twenty years since I had read the book, very little of it had remained in my memory--outside of the central trick. In a way, the book is spoiled by an ugly racial remark thatv just seems to slip out of the lips of the one character in the book everyone loves, the faithful white servant "Dorcas." It's not that Christie wants to characterize Dorcas as a prejudiced sort, but just take a look at page 137 and you'll get the shivers. It's rather odd in Christie, for often enough she lets her characters' racialized remarks tell against them, but here it's just the opposite and you can tell that Dorcas is supposed to be more cute after making it.
What's hard to figure out is why, in CURTAIN, Christie decided to return to the scene of her first novel, for it doesn't really have as much weight as some of the country houses she describes elsewhere. Oh well, it must have been a sentimental mise en scene for her, the site of the meeting of Hastings and Poirot; the place where her first novel located itself, etc. CURTAIN is a book very few of us have ever been able to plumb to its depths--and I thought a reread of STYLES might help. No, but it's great fun all on its own, and the plot is so crazily complicated that it takes the final fifty pages to work out all the kinks and false solutions of the story, before Poirot finally shows what his "last link" has led him to.
One more thing that was strange, how there are only 12 chapters in the book, of very uneven lengths--some a few pages only, some upwards of 30. I don't remember Christie ever returning to this noticeably choppy way of telling a story?
Review Summary: "...the colossal cheek of the little man!"
Review: ...I got a hunch about 1/2 way through that one of the characters was the murderer - but could not even begin to see how they did it or were connected. My first read of a Christie book - and I'll be digging in to others since I enjoyed this one so much.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie
Review: The Mysterious Affair at Styles: A Hercule Poirot by Agatha Christie
Great eBook for Kindle!
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Somewhat Clunky Beginning for the Belgian Sleuth
Review: The first "grownup" novels I recall reading were those of Agatha Christie and P.G. Wodehouse, and while I periodically return to Wodehouse with great enjoyment, I haven't revisited the Christie books until now. I figured this, her first published work (written in 1916, published in 1920), would be a good starting place. As well as being her first work, it introduces my favorite of her recurring characters, the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot.
To my surprise, the story takes place during WWI (not after, as many suppose), a detail that plays a minor role in the story. The story is told by Poirot's occasional sidekick (he only appear in eight of the Poirot novels) Captain Hastings, who has been invalided home for the duration of the war. The specifics of his injury aren't explained, but he has gone to the Essex countryside to spend some time at a friend's family mansion (the Styles of the title). Things there prove to be rather tense, as the elderly matriarch has married a much younger man, whom everyone suspects of being a golddigger. Meanwhile, Hastings' friend and his brother are in tenuous financial circumstances due to the provisions of their dead father's will. Of course, the old lady ends up dead, and there are plenty of suspects to go around.
Fortuitously, Hastings runs into Poirot in the local village, where Poirot and some fellow Belgians are living as refugees from the war. The two had apparently met years before, and soon Hastings has enlisted him to investigate the old woman's death. Found dead in her locked room, she appears to have been poisoned, but by whom and how is a mystery. Clues abound (as do plenty of red herrings) in the somewhat complicated story, which finds Poirot already in full form. Alas, he is the only fully developed and lively character to be found, with Hastings already his usual naive sappy self, and none of the rest of cast particularly memorable. As a story, it's somewhat clunky, although all the elements that made Poirot such a popular character are there in abundance (except his mustache mania). Not a great read, but not a bad one either.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: And Introducing Monsieur Hercule Poirot
Review: "The Mysterious Affair At Styles" was Agatha Christie's first mystery novel, in which she introduced her enigmatic and eccentric Belgium detective, Hercule Poirot. She often later lamented that she should have made Poirot younger to begin with as he was to be the star detective in many of her mysteries afterward. But her retired police officer began his magnificent orbit with this intriguing mystery full of the twists and turns that would soon become Christie's trademark.
Wounded at the Western front, Captain Hastings is invalided home and has a chance encounter with his old friend John Cavendish. John invites him to his family's estate for a visit, which Hastings gladly accepts. But Styles, the family's home, is hardly full of happy characters. Both sons are disturbed by their stepmother's behavior - for she has married Alfred Inglethorp, a man twenty years younger than she. Almost everyone is convinced that he is solely after her money and when Mrs. Inglethorp dies suddenly one night of strychnine poisoning, her husband is the immediate suspect. But there are others within the household who would have benefitted from the old lady's death, especially when a fragment of a freshly written will is found burned in her bedchamber. Could someone within her own family have cleverly carried out her murder? Only Hercule Poirot can find all the missing pieces to solve this puzzler of a crime.
Agatha Christie's name is forever cemented in the echelons of mystery writers, and with good reason. Her varied background helped to make her a near expert in matters of poisons, which have played an important role in many of her novels, and her travels to exotic locales have created heightened settings for some of her best mysteries. Her first novel must certainly have been a tough act to follow with its quick pace and plot twists; it fails only at times through its slightly weak narration by Captain Hastings. "The Mysterious Affair At Styles" introduced the world to Agatha Christie, and readers have never looked for better, returning time and again to each mystery she ingeniously crafted.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: As It Was in the Beginning
Review: She didn't really have it together yet but after all it was her first novel! And as such it's pretty amazing how much Hercule Poirot is him glorious self already. pompous, witty, abrasive, yet kind and chivalrous especially to a "woman's secret heart," for he goes to crazy lengths to ake things come out all right for two separate couples by the time STYLES is over.
I just finished Gilbert Adair's abstruse takeoff on Agatha Christie, MYSTERIOUS AFFAIR OF STYLE, so I decided to go back to the real, original thing, see what I hadn't seen in years. I was surprised to find that, in the twenty years since I had read the book, very little of it had remained in my memory--outside of the central trick. In a way, the book is spoiled by an ugly racial remark thatv just seems to slip out of the lips of the one character in the book everyone loves, the faithful white servant "Dorcas." It's not that Christie wants to characterize Dorcas as a prejudiced sort, but just take a look at page 137 and you'll get the shivers. It's rather odd in Christie, for often enough she lets her characters' racialized remarks tell against them, but here it's just the opposite and you can tell that Dorcas is supposed to be more cute after making it.
What's hard to figure out is why, in CURTAIN, Christie decided to return to the scene of her first novel, for it doesn't really have as much weight as some of the country houses she describes elsewhere. Oh well, it must have been a sentimental mise en scene for her, the site of the meeting of Hastings and Poirot; the place where her first novel located itself, etc. CURTAIN is a book very few of us have ever been able to plumb to its depths--and I thought a reread of STYLES might help. No, but it's great fun all on its own, and the plot is so crazily complicated that it takes the final fifty pages to work out all the kinks and false solutions of the story, before Poirot finally shows what his "last link" has led him to.
One more thing that was strange, how there are only 12 chapters in the book, of very uneven lengths--some a few pages only, some upwards of 30. I don't remember Christie ever returning to this noticeably choppy way of telling a story?