In Howards End is on the Landing, Susan Hill mentions The Mysterious Affair at Styles as part of a list of books with good titles, and it reminded me that I haven’t read much by Agatha Christie. Before this, I’d only read Murder on the Orient Express, and I liked detective Hercule Poirot in that one, so it seemed like a good idea to read Christie’s first book, which is also the book in which Poirot first appears. I ended up bringing The Mysterious Affair at Styles on a trip to England, thinking it’d make good plane reading; I ended up sleeping for most of the flight from JFK to Heathrow and not reading on the plane at all, but it did turn out to be a pretty good book to read in my hotel room over the course of a few post-work evenings, wrapped in a blanket and drinking instant hot chocolate and eating cookies biscuits.
In her introduction to this edition of the book, Elizabeth George quotes Dorothy L. Sayers saying that in a mystery, “it is better to err in the direction of too little feeling than too much,” and George herself says that Christie wrote books that are “delightful diversion without deadly drama, intellectual puzzles without personal angst” (xxiv). I don’t think of myself as a particularly character-driven reader, but as I read this book I found myself wanting more emotional interest, less distance, though the puzzle aspect of the book (it’s a locked-room mystery, in which a rich old woman is poisoned at her house in the country; there are plenty of suspects, all of whom probably want her money) was pleasing.
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