Agatha Christie: Thy Mysterious Affair at Styles
Agatha Christie: Curtain
Agatha Christie’s first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was published in 1920 and soon brought fame to the author and also to her fictional detective, Poirot. Hercule Poirot investigates in a total of 33 novels and 7 short story collections. Since The Mysterious Affair at Styles, there have been many movie, theater, cartoon and graphic novel adaptations. There was even a video game made about the Belgian detective, and his most famous movie actor is David Suchet. Adaptation of the stories is still happening in the form of movies and series. Thanks to Sophie Hannah, we can see the world’s most famous detective investigating again in book pages.
Poirot arrives in Styles St. Mary as a refugee, where he soon has to investigate the death of his benefactor in a house where no one lived happily. The author was inspired by the Belgian refugees who arrived in Torquay after the German invasion of Belgium. Agatha Christie’s first novel already exemplifies her extensive forensic knowledge, as she equips Poirot with a crime scene kit before the police have even introduced it.
The two novels were previously published in Hungarian in one volume. This was logical, since Poirot returns to the place where his story began for his final investigation. The Styles mansion is now a hotel, but its walls still hide a lot of sadness. Although Poirot’s body has aged, the ‘little gray cells’ can still solve one of the most complex mysteries of his life. Agatha Christie wrote this novel (along with Miss Marple’s last case) during World War II, but she placed it in a bank safe and only published it in the last year of her life. She always strived for perfection in everything. Her goal was always to provide the reader with some sort of comfort and catharsis, because, as she wrote in Ordeal by Innocence, the innocents were important, not the guilty ones.
