THE MYSTERIOUS AFFAIR AT STYLES
Agatha Christie®
HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
100th Anniversary Edition 2020
First published in Great Britain by
The Bodley Head Ltd 1921
The AC monogram logo and the Poirot Icon are trade marks and AGATHA CHRISTIE, POIROT and the Agatha Christie Signature are registered trade marks of Agatha Christie Limited in the UK and elsewhere.
Copyright © Agatha Christie Limited 1920. All rights reserved.
‘Drugs and Detective Stories’ by Agatha Christie first published in University College Hospital Magazine Vol. XXVI (6) copyright © Agatha Christie Limited 1941
Introduction copyright © John Curran 2013
Agatha Christie Notebooks/‘The Last Link’ unpublished original version
copyright © Christie Archive Trust 2013
Death on the Nile copyright © Agatha Christie Limited 1937
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020
Cover photograph © Darkened Studio/Alamy Stock Photo
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN 9780008400637
Ebook Edition © February 2020 ISBN 9780007463497
Version: 2020-02-12
To my mother
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Preface: Drugs and Detective Stories
Introduction by John Curran
5. ‘It isn’t Strychnine, is it?’
11. The Case for the Prosecution
Appendix: ‘The Last Link’—Original Unpublished Version
Footnote
Keep Reading …
About the Author
Also by Agatha Christie
About the Publisher
by Agatha Christie
In the last war in 1916, I worked in the dispensary of the Red Cross Hospital in Torquay. It was whilst working there that I wrote my first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles.
It is odd to find oneself, after a lapse of twenty-five years, back doing the same job. Finding, alas! that one is much slower, much less confident, much more apprehensive of making a mistake. Hordes of proprietary preparations now bewilder and confuse one. One asks the same question again and again. The white dispenser’s coat has now to be of outsize!
And uneasily there comes to one’s memory the scorn with which, twenty-five years ago, one regarded ‘these old dug-outs who come and try to do things and are too slow for anything!’ Alas, one is now a ‘dug-out’ oneself! So is Time avenged.
It was during slack hours in the dispensary, in 1916, that the idea of writing a detective story came to me.
Stimulated by my surroundings, the near proximity of the poison cupboard, of Martindale’s Extra Pharmacopœia, of various books on therapeutics and dispensing which I had recently read with devout attention, the only difficulty I experienced was the embarrassing richness of the choice of material. The victim was selected. I saw her in my mind’s eye—an elderly, purse-proud woman surrounded by avid relations awaiting her death. The murderer I had also selected from among them. It remained only to determine the method of her removal.
I finally found my inspiration in one of the instructional books on the art of dispensing. In the same book, by the way, was a naïve and revealing sentence. It ran, as far as I can remember, ‘but the best dispensers do not breathe on their pills however much this may facilitate their manipulation.’ I have had a distinct preference for