CHAPTER ONE:
THE
1920s
The period between the completion of Agatha Christie’s first detective novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, and its publication in book form was a frustratingly lengthy one for Christie. However, her tenacity in getting the book completed and then published would bode well for the challenges that she’d face during the 1920s. She would soon prove her skills as a writer of mysteries and thrillers time and again, which included a slew of Poirot short stories and five novels featuring the detective before the decade was out. For her first effort she’d written a murder mystery steeped in influences from her own reading of the genre, most particularly Sherlock Holmes, but presented the plot in such a way that it felt fresh and unpredictable, while setting a template that she’d continue to offer twists on for more than half a century.
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
(Novel, 1921)
Set in 1916, The Mysterious Affair at Styles concerns the inhabitants of the eponymous English country house, in which the wealthy matriarch Mrs Emily Inglethorp is murdered. Several family members, including her younger husband Alfred, are obvious suspects, but the accumulated evidence eventually presents a surprisingly complex picture. In the days when typescripts would be sent to prospective publishers in order of desirability (or likelihood of interest), the initial rejections meant slow progress as the companies held on to the story for months at a time. For a while Christie gave up hope, as she explained in an unpublished portion of her autobiography:
Although she generally didn’t lack perseverance, Christie had become busy with family life following the birth of her daughter Rosalind on 5 August 1919. Eventually, it was publishing house The Bodley Head that showed an interest, although by Christie’s later recollection more than two years may have passed since she had sent it to them.[2] The Bodley Head’s first reader’s report had seen Styles as a potentially worthwhile commercial venture, despite feeling that it had ‘manifest shortcomings’. The report claimed that the book was an ‘artificial affair’, while the positives of characterisation and atmosphere were undone by a court-based denouement that was considered to be less dramatic and thrilling than it should be. The second reader’s report echoed these concerns about the ending, which was felt to be improbable, but decided that publishing the novel was ‘quite worth doing’. Christie was asked to change the final chapter for publication, which she did. In doing so she set the template for the lengthy reveal in the company of key characters and suspects by the detective in domestic surroundings that would become famous components of her novels, although this type of scenario actually occurred less often than many may assume.[3] One area that pleased the writers of both reports was the ‘exuberant personality’ of the ‘jolly little man’ who operated as the story’s Sherlock Holmes and was identified as the novel’s most original feature. The identity of this ‘welcome variation’ on the detective character was, of course, none other than Hercule Poirot.
It’s no surprise that The Bodley Head noted similarities between the Poirot of Styles and Sherlock Holmes. For one thing, the emphasis on seemingly innocuous details that have a greater significance – such as ash in the fire grate, or the arrangement of apparently ornamental items – echoes the approach to solving mysteries advocated by the original consulting detective. But perhaps more significantly, the relationship between the detective and his less accomplished assistant (and narrator) has particularly close parallels – if Poirot is this story’s Holmes, then Hastings is most definitely its Watson. It’s through the eyes of Arthur Hastings, our establishment figure as an invalided captain who is recuperating near to Styles, that we first meet one of the Belgian refugees finding refuge away from the war being waged across the Channel:[4]
This description of the odd-looking little Belgian would be solidified and repeated over the next five decades and more. While events changed around him – characters, locales, even wars – he stayed fixed (mostly, at least – the mysterious limp is soon healed). Christie later felt exasperated when asked to clarify the physical details of Poirot, but recalled that she twice saw people who fitted the description. In a draft discussion of Poirot and his cases penned for a newspaper serialisation in 1938 she pondered:
In her autobiography, Christie remembered Poirot’s creation in terms of necessity – she needed a detective for her story, but also needed one unlike those that had gone before. Having dismissed the likes of a schoolboy investigator or a scientist, she found inspiration in the Belgian refugees who had settled near to her home. ‘People always think you have a real person starting you off, but it isn’t the case,’ she said later. ‘Some characters are suggested to you by strangers you’ve never spoken to – you see someone at a picnic and make up stories about them like a child. I was worried about finding a detective for my first book, and we’d had Belgian refugees at the beginning of the war, so I thought that quite a good idea. But I didn’t really know any.’[6]
Once the broad background of the detective had been settled, why not make this detective character a retired police officer, she reasoned. ‘What a mistake there,’ she later conceded, as Poirot must surely have been well over 100 by the time of his later cases.[7] Christie also decided to make him ‘very neat – very orderly’, before wondering ‘Is this because I was a wildly untidy person myself?’[8] Certainly she saw some elements of Poirot’s character as a reaction against her own personality. ‘If you are doubly damned – first by acute shyness and secondly by only seeing the right thing to do or say twenty-four hours late what can you do? Only write about quick witted men and resourceful girls whose reactions are like greased lightning!’[9]
All that was left was to decide his name. Christie fancied that, like Sherlock Holmes and his brother Mycroft, the name should be a ‘grand’ one, and so she settled on the amusement of this small man being named Hercules. When a surname of Poirot was decided upon (Christie claimed not to remember how or why), Hercules didn’t seem to fit, and so the Belgian sleuth was christened Hercule instead.[10] Just as Holmes had been an outsider due to his egotistical attitude and obsessions, so Poirot can never truly blend into the scenery; he stands out from his English contemporaries while his idiosyncrasies allow much of society to underestimate his powers of deduction. The Bodley Head’s request to rework the courtroom setting of the ending to take place elsewhere would unwittingly reinforce this template of Poirot as an outsider. The original ending had the retired detective testifying in court at length, describing his solution to the case, which effectively made him part of the traditional system of law and order, rather than set apart from it as a private individual. Conversely, the final version leaves the likes of Inspector Japp (also introduced in this first novel) with the more mundane tasks of ensuring that the law is upheld and the villain prosecuted; for Poirot, the simple satisfaction of piecing together the puzzle can now be the prize.
The plot of Styles balances interesting and plausible elements (the nature of the poisoning, for example, is effectively depicted – unsurprisingly, given Christie’s familiarity with poisons from her wartime service in a dispensary) with first class misdirections and a vivid set of characters. Alongside this are some less convincing elements that Christie would soon offer better examples of, such as a less than believable disguise and a highly unlikely disposal of key evidence. If the story sometimes requires an excessive suspension of disbelief then at least it happens infrequently and briefly, and the unconvincing elements soon fade away while the overarching story grips the reader as the puzzle pieces slot into place. Essentially, the novel is an exercise in distraction, as Christie works to keep the reader from looking too closely at some suspects and events. She employs a layer of obfuscation with suspicious characters and a story with a highly satisfying double bluff at its centre. Compared to her later novels, these distractions are overly complicated, as Christie seems to signify a slight lack of confidence in her technique by throwing in so many clues and red herrings that the reader would have to be very astute indeed to ignore them all and tread the correct path to the solution. The result is a busy mystery that shines because of the overall impression it leaves once the author shows her hand at the end.
As was common during this era, the first appearance of The Mysterious Affair at Styles in print was as a newspaper serialisation rather than as a novel. In this case, Christie was paid £25 for the rights for the story to appear in The Times’s ‘Colonial Edition’, also known as The Weekly Times, between February and June 1920. By October 1920 the book was finally published as a novel in America, but not yet in Britain, which prompted Christie to write a letter to her publishers that dispensed with niceties and opened with a simple question: ‘What about my book? I am beginning to wonder if it is ever coming out’.[11] It’s worth bearing in mind that at this point a year had passed since the positive reader reports, and the wartime events of the story were threatening to make it feel like a period piece by the time it was available in bookshops. Meanwhile, Christie had gone into battle with The Bodley Head over a single detail, the spelling of the word ‘cocoa’. Christie correctly insisted on the final ‘a’, but (to use Christie’s own description) the ‘dragon’ at the publisher who oversaw such details insisted that ‘coco’ was correct. The debate might seem innocuous, but the memory of the incident was strong enough that Christie remembered it for her autobiography decades later. This seems to have been something of a turning point in the relationship between author and publisher – whereas Christie had earlier assumed that The Bodley Head would know best, she now knew that not to be true. ‘I was not a good speller, I am still not a good speller, but at any rate I could spell cocoa the proper way,’ she explained in her autobiography. ‘What I was, though, was a weak character. It was my first book – and I thought they must know better than I did.’[12]
Despite requesting pre-Christmas publication, it wasn’t until 21 January 1921 that the novel was made available in Christie’s own country, with the requested dedication to her mother, and a cover depicting characters in candlelight that Christie approved of, calling it ‘artistic and “mysterious”!’[13] The novel was well received, with The Church Times saying that ‘the book held the attention well’, while commending the first-time author for offering a surprising solution that the reviewer had not worked out beforehand. ‘Looking back, knowing the solution, it is possible to point to a good many faults,’ the review also claimed, but ‘a book of this type must be judged on the firs...
