The ‘Styles’ of the title is Styles Court, a country house in Essex, a mile outside the village of Styles St Mary. In later novels, Mrs Christie tended not to specify the county, and even in this first novel she avoids using real names of towns. Characters may take the train up to London from the country, but if they have to visit a nearby country town it will not be identified as Chelmsford or Colchester, but will be given a fictitious name. The fictitious village of Styles St Mary is, for instance, seven miles away from the fictitious town of Tadminster, where one of the characters works in the dispensary of the Red Cross Hospital.
The Mysterious Affair at Styles, though not published until 1920, had been written during the First World War, and was set in the summer of 1916. Its narrator, Captain Hastings, is a young officer who has been invalided home from the Front and who, after spending some months ‘in a rather depressing Convalescent Home’, is still on sick leave when he runs into someone he had known as a boy: the forty-five-year-old John Cavendish who is ‘a good fifteen years’ Hastings’ senior. Hastings, then, is about thirty. Reading The Mysterious Affair at Styles now, the reader interests himself more in Captain Hastings’ personal details than Agatha Christie’s readers would have done in 1920, for they were not to know that Mrs Christie would go on to write scores of crime novels over the years and that Hastings would figure in eight of them (and in numerous short stories) as the associate of her detective, Hercule Poirot.
John Cavendish invites the convalescent Hastings to spend his leave in Essex at Styles Court. Cavendish’s stepmother, whom Hastings remembered as a handsome, middle-aged woman, is now an autocratic grande dame of seventy or more. After several years of widowhood, she has recently married Alfred Inglethorp, who is about twenty years younger than she, and ‘an absolute bounder’ in the opinion of John Cavendish because he has ‘a great black beard, and wears patent leather boots in all weathers’. Clearly, Alfred Inglethorp is a fortune-hunter, for Mrs Inglethorp has a sizeable fortune to dispose of. When she is found murdered, he is the chief and favourite suspect.
The other inhabitants of Styles Court include John Cavendish’s wife Mary, his younger brother Lawrence, a girl called Cynthia, who is a protégé of Mrs Inglethorp and who works in the dispensary of the nearby hospital, and Evelyn Howard, a forty-year-old woman who has been the old lady’s companion, factotum and general assistant. There is also a tall, bearded and somewhat mysterious foreigner, a Dr Bauerstein, who is staying in the village, recuperating after a nervous breakdown. He is said to be one of the greatest living experts on poisons.
When Mrs Inglethorp’s death, at first thought to be due to a heart attack, is found to have been caused by strychnine poisoning, suspicion falls not only upon her husband but, in turn, on most of her nearest and dearest. The local police are called in, but Hastings has encountered in the village an old friend of his, Hercule Poirot, a famous detective now retired, and it is Hastings who persuades his friend John Cavendish to allow Poirot as well to investigate the crime.
Before the First World War, young Hastings had worked for Lloyd’s of London. (Not until The ABC Murders in 1935 shall we learn Hastings’ first name to be Arthur, for Agatha Christie’s men habitually address each other in what used to be the approved English upper-middleclass fashion, by their surnames.) It was while he was working for Lloyd’s that Hastings had first met Poirot, in Belgium. Poirot had already retired from the Belgian Police Force, after a long career as its most illustrious detective, and had set himself up in private practice as an investigator. Hastings is surprised and delighted to meet him again unexpectedly in the village of Styles St Mary where Poirot, together with a number of other Belgian refugees, is living. Poirot accepts with alacrity the commission to find Mrs Inglethorp’s murderer, for, as he explains to Hastings, ‘she had kindly extended hospitality to seven of my countrypeople who, alas, are refugees from their native land.’ ‘We Belgians,’ he adds, ‘will always remember her with gratitude.’ Poirot, on his first appearance, is described in some detail:
He was hardly more than five feet, four inches, but carried himself with great dignity. His head was exactly the shape of an egg, and he always perched it a little on one side. His moustache was very stiff and military. The neatness of his attire was almost incredible; I believe a speck of dust would have caused him more pain than a bullet wound.3
Later, we shall discover that Poirot is not only fanatically neat but is also obsessed with symmetry. He is forever rearranging the objects he encounters, putting them into straight rows. He probably wished that eggs were square: he certainly, on one occasion, deplored the fact that hens lay eggs of different sizes (‘What symmetry can there be on the breakfast table?’) It is odd, therefore, that he should habitually carry his head tilted a little to one side. He cannot have been aware that he did so.
Poirot will acquire other personality traits in later books, or at least we shall learn more about him, but already apparent in Styles are his genuine affection for Hastings, of whose perspicacity he has a justifiably low opinion, his endearing vanity, his odd misuse of the English language and still odder occasional misuse of his native tongue, French (for, despite her Paris finishing school, Mrs Christie’s French was to remain obstinately unidiomatic). Incidentally, when he sees his old friend for the first time in several years, Hastings notices that Poirot now limps badly. But the limp is never referred to again: we must assume that it was a temporary disability from which Poirot soon recovered. Indeed, when he inspects Mrs Inglethorp’s room at Styles Court, Poirot, we are told, ‘darted from one object to the other with the agility of a grasshopper.’
Just as ‘Elementary, my dear Watson’, (which is not a direct quotation from any story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) is the phrase you most associate with Sherlock Holmes, so a habit of constantly referring to ‘the little grey cells’ of the brain is something closely associated with Hercule Poirot. But, though he is continually having ‘little ideas’, and recommending order and method to Hastings, Poirot mentions the ‘little grey cells’ for the first time only towards the end of Styles. He makes a point, however, of informing Hastings (and the reader of the book) well before the dénouement that ‘I am not keeping back facts. Every fact that I know is in your possession. You can draw your own deductions from them.’ Hastings, however, never wins a battle of wits with Hercule Poirot, and it is a reasonable assumption that even the most assiduous reader of Agatha Christie will do so only rarely.
Agatha Christie was conscious of the necessity to make Poirot very different from the most famous fictional detective of his day, Sherlock Holmes. After all, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes adventures were still appearing. The Valley of Fear was published in 1915, His Last Bow in 1917, and The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes in 1927. But it is only physically that Poirot differs greatly from Holmes. The two detectives share a number of qualities, among which vanity is by no means the least noticeable. Still, if Poirot owes something to Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, does he not also owe something to another crime novelist? Mrs Belloc Lowndes, sister of Hilaire Belloc, and writer of a number of historical and mystery novels and stories, was the creator of a detective who, like Poirot, was foreign, retired (in his case, from the Paris Sûreté), and incredibly vain. His name was Hercules Popeau. Agatha Christie must certainly have been aware of him when she began to write her first Hercule Poirot novel, and indeed throughout the nineteen-twenties and thirties when stories by Mrs Belloc Lowndes, featuring Popeau, appeared in the same anthologies as stories of Hercule Poirot’s exploits. In the mid-thirties, Mrs Belloc Lowndes published a Popeau story, ‘A Labour of Hercules’, which did not deter Mrs Christie in the mid-forties from calling a collection of Poirot stories The Labours of Hercules.
Devoted Christieans, who delight in assembling the ‘facts’ about Poirot in the same manner that Conan Doyle’s more fanatical admirers tend to research the great Sherlock Holmes, have somehow convinced themselves that Poirot retired