All the reports agreed that Poirot’s contribution to the Cavendish trial did not convince and needed revision. They were referring to the denouement of the original manuscript, where Poirot’s explanation of the crime comes in the form of his evidence given in the witness box during the trial of John Cavendish. This simply did not work, as Christie herself accepted, and Lane demanded a rewrite. She obliged and, although the explanation of the crime itself remains the same, instead of giving it as witness box evidence Poirot holds forth in the drawing room of Styles, in the type of scene that was to be replicated in many later books.
Sutherland Scott, in his 1953 history of the detective story, Blood in their Ink, perceptively calls The Mysterious Affair at Styles ‘one of the finest firsts ever written’. It contained some of the features that were to distinguish many of her later titles.
Poirot and the Big Four
Hercule Poirot
There is an irony in the fact that although Agatha Christie is seen as a quintessentially British writer, her most famous creation is ‘foreign’, a Belgian. The existence of detective figures with which she would have been familiar may have been a contributing factor. Poe’s Chevalier Dupin, Robert Barr’s Eugène Valmont, Maurice Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin and A.E.W. Mason’s Inspector Hanaud of the Sûreté were already, in 1920, established figures in the world of crime fiction. And a title Christie specifically mentions in An Autobiography is Gaston Leroux’s 1908 novel The Mystery of the Yellow Room, with its detective, Monsieur Rouletabille. Although largely forgotten nowadays, Leroux was also the creator of The Phantom of the Opera.
At the time it was also considered necessary for the detective figure to have a distinguishing idiosyncrasy, or, even better, a collection of them. Holmes had his violin, his cocaine and his pipe; Father Brown had his umbrella and his deceptive air of absent-mindedness; Lord Peter Wimsey had his monocle, his valet and his antiquarian book collection. Lesser figures had other no less distinctive traits: Baroness Orczy’s Old Man in the Corner sat in an ABC Teashop and tied knots, Ernest Bramah’s Max Carrados was blind and Jacques Futrelle’s Professor Augustus S.F.X. Van Dusen was known as The Thinking Machine. So Poirot was created Belgian with impressive moustaches, little grey cells, overweening vanity, both intellectual and sartorial, and a mania for order. Christie’s only mistake was in making him, in 1920, a retired member of the Belgian police force; this, in turn, meant that by 1975 and Curtain: Poirot’s: Last Case, he was in his thirteenth decade. Of course, in 1916 Agatha Christie had no idea that the fictional little Belgian would outlive herself.
Readability
As early as this first novel one of Christie’s great gifts, her readability, was in evidence. At its most basic, this is the ability to make readers continue from the top to the bottom of the page and then turn that page; and then make them do that 200 times in the course of any, and in her case, every, book. This facility deserted her only in the very closing chapter of her writing career, Postern of Fate being the most challenging example. This gift was, with Christie, innate; and it is doubtful whether it can be learned anyway. Thirty years after The Mysterious Affair at Styles the reader at Collins, reporting on They Came to Baghdad, wrote in an otherwise damning report: ‘It is eminently readable and passes the acid test of holding the interest throughout.’
Christie’s prose, while by no means distinguished, flows easily, the characters are believable and differentiated, and much of each book is told in dialogue. There are no long-winded scenes of question-and-answer, no detailed scientific explanations, no wordy descriptions of people or places. But there is sufficient of each to fix the scene and its protagonists clearly in the mind. Every chapter, indeed almost every scene, pushes the story on towards a carefully prepared solution and climax. And Poirot does not alienate the reader with either the irritating facetiousness of Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey, the pedantic arrogance of Van Dine’s Philo Vance or the emotional entanglements of Bentley’s Philip Trent.
A comparison with almost any other contemporaneous crime title shows what a chasm existed between Christie and other writers, most of them now long out of print. As illustration, the appearance of two other detective-story writers also coincided with the publication of The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Freeman Wills Crofts, a Dubliner, published The Cask in 1920 and H.C. Bailey published Call Mr Fortune the previous year. Crofts’ detective, Inspector French, showed painstaking attention in following every lead, and specialised in the unbreakable alibi. However, this very meticulousness militated against an exciting reading experience. H.C. Bailey began his career as a writer of historical fiction but turned to crime fiction, much of it featuring his detective, Reginald Fortune. The two writers, although skilled plot technicians in both novel and short story form, lacked the vital ingredient of readability.
Plotting
Christie’s plotting, coupled with this almost uncanny readability, was to prove a peerless combination. An examination of her Notebooks shows that although this gift for plotting was innate and in profusion, she worked at her ideas, distilling and sharpening and perfecting them, and that even the most inspired titles (e.g. Crooked House, Endless Night, The ABC Murders) were the result of meticulous planning. The secret of her ingenuity with plot lies in the fact that this dexterity is not daunting. Her solutions turn on everyday information: some names can be male or female, a mirror reflects but it also reverses, a sprawled body is not necessarily a dead body, a forest is the best hiding place for a tree. She knows she can depend on the reader’s erroneous interpretation of an eternal triangle, an overheard argument or an illicit liaison. She counts on our received prejudice that retired Army men are harmless buffoons, that quiet, mousy wives are objects of pity, that all policemen are honest and all children innocent. She does not mystify us with the mechanical or technical; or insult us with the clichéd or the obvious; or alienate us with the terrifying or the gruesome.
In almost every Christie title the mise-en-scène features a closed circle of suspects: a strictly limited number of potential murderers from which to choose. A country house, a ship, a train, a plane, an island – all of these provided her with a setting that limits the number of possible killers and ensures that a complete unknown is not unmasked in the last chapter. In effect, Christie says, ‘Here is the flock of suspects from which I will choose my villain. See if you can spot the black sheep.’ It can be as few as four (Cards on the Table) or five (Five Little Pigs) or as many as the coach full of travellers on the Orient Express. The Mysterious Affair at Styles is typical of the country-house murders beloved of Golden Age writers and readers: a group of assorted characters sharing an isolated setting long enough for murder to be committed, investigated and solved.
Although an element of the solution in The Mysterious Affair at Styles turns on a scientific fact, it is not unfair as the reader is told from the outset of the investigation what the poison is. Admittedly, anyone with knowledge of toxicology has a distinct advantage, but the information is readily available. Other than this mildly controversial item, all the information necessary to arrive at the solution is scrupulously given: the coffee cup, the scrap of material, a fire lit during a July heatwave, the medicine bottle. And, of course, it is Poirot’s passion for neatness that gives him the final proof; and in a way that was to be reused, a decade later, in the play Black Coffee. But how many readers will notice that Poirot has to tidy the mantelpiece twice (Chapters 4 and 5), thereby discovering a vital link in the chain of guilt?
Fairness