Your Own Adventure!
You are Captain Arthur Hastings, and you are slowly falling in love with a Belgian.
The feelings are embarrassing at first you find the Belgian himself to be quite an embarrassment, But there is just something about him, Could it be his suave, continental sense of humor, . . his keen sense of justice, . . his shapely, rubenesque figure Or is it simply his hypnotic mustache, perhaps The passion develops in fits and starts, You dont want to love him, you really dont, You dont want to follow him around, adventure after adventure, You dont want to be his little bitch, always at his beck and call, sniping and moaning at him but loving it nonetheless.
You dont like mysteries but you are about to fall victim to the greatest mystery of them all: the mystery of the human heart! Try as you may, the Belgian has hold of you, heart and soul.
You will follow him forever,
If you decide that to love somebody, you must set them free, . . preferably in Iraq, choose
sitelink goodreads. com/review/show
If you decide to follow the little Belgian to the ends of the earth, choose sitelink goodreads. com/review/show/ Agatha Christie begleitet mich eigentlich schon seit meiner Kindheit, Ich habe schon recht früh begonnen, ihre Bücher zu lesen und habe die meisten immer sehr gemocht,
Auch dieses Buch habe ich vor Jahren bereits gelesen, aber es war mal wieder Zeit für eine Wiederholung.
Ich mag es immer noch sehr! :
Es ist ein klassischer, sehr unterhaltsamer Detektivroman, Hercule Poirot ist einfach unschlagbar, This is my first introduction to Agatha Christie, Having never read her before, I was interested in starting her with the Poirot series which includes her famous detective, Hercule Poirot.
The story is a cleverly written murder mystery with interesting twists and turns, all the time not giving away the real culprit.
I had my hunch of the criminal and motive, and though they prove correct at the end, time to time doubt entered my mind as to whether I figured it right.
:
The character set was mostly nice and likable, The eccentric Poirot it seems all detectives are rather eccentric people Sherlock Holmes comes to my mind! and his friend and narrator, Mr.
Hastings provided contrasting points of view on the case keeping the reader in curious wonder as to the turn of the events.
I was very much impressed by Poirot's methods of solving the mystery, It is both genius and humane, His enthusiasm for truth and justice never makes him inconsiderate of human feelings, I truly liked this characteristic of Poirot,
Overall, it was a very interesting first read, I'm very glad to have finally started up with Agatha Christie, though a little late in my reading life, I certainly have missed on a great murder mystery author, Ok. Let's get down to business, This is an old fashioned British mystery novel, So much information! Trying to keep it all straight in my head was extremely difficult, My brain was all over the place but that's what makes a good mystery, in my opinion,
This is the first book starring the world famous Hercule Poirot and his friend Hastings, Poirot is an eccentric detective from Belgium who fled to England during WWI, Hastings is a little on the dramatic side, always jumps to the wrong conclusions, and never catches on to the hints that Poirot throws his way.
It definitely helps inject some humor into what would normally be very dour subject matter,
The first part of this book other than the murder of course is a little slow due to character building, so for about the firstpages.
After that, Scotland Yard gets involved and that's when things start to get a bit more interesting, The investigation heats up. There are six suspects. People start being cleared or becoming suspicious, At this point it could be anyone, Everyone in this book seems a little shady for one reason or another, The servants seem to be the only ones you don't suspect, Also this book has a lot of dialogue, You have the suspects talking to each other, Poirot interviewing people for information, and Poirot explaining clues, and of course when he reveals everything at the end of the book.
I might be a little biased because I love David Suchet as Poirot in the TV show but I really enjoyed this book.
It kept me guessing and it was intricate and interesting enough to keep my attention, If you enjoy an old fashioned mystery but have never read Agatha Christie before, this one is a good place to start : Poirot is introduced in this book, so how can you not love it!
Actually, pretty easily.
This simply isn't Agatha Christie's best work,
And that's mainly due to this being her first book, Yeah, so not only was she still figuring out who Poirot was, she was still figuring out this whole mystery writing gig.
I mean, for her first stab at it, she did a phenomenal job, But if you go into this thing thinking you're going to get her best story, you'll more than likely be disappointed.
Sorry, Hercule.
For those of you who are already fans, I think you'll find this a fun book because, while he's not entirely fleshed out yet, all the trademarks of Poirot are there.
Hastings is still a bit of a wellintentioned dumbass, and Japp shows up and gives the weird little Belgian free reign to solve the case under the table.
Plus the whodunnit was appropriately twisty and turny,
My advice
If you're new to Poirot don't start here, Yeah, I know that it'sbut you don't need to read these books in order, Think of The Mysterious Affair at Styles as a prequel that you can go back and read after you get hooked on Hercule.
How did I go for so long without reading an Agatha Christie! I wish I'd picked one up sooner! I figured my first read should be the first book published I have an irrational need to read books in order and I have to say that this is a fantastic debut novel.
Most authors' work gets better with time if Christie gets better than this then I have some treats in store!
Long story cut short: Mrs Inglethorp, the old lady owner of Styles Court, suffers a violent fit early one morning and dies.
It appears that foul play is in the air and the family bring in Hercule Poirot to investigate, . .
This book was everything a murder mystery should be, There were intriguing characters which, incidentally, are nicely fleshedout, a pageturning plot, plenty of clues and redherrings and, best of all, it kept me guessing right until the very end.
The narration also works well by having Hastings as the narrator, we don't get to see inside Poirot's head, so we can continue to form our own conclusions right to the end.
I also liked how quaint this was, As a reader of more modern thrillers such as James Patterson, Lee Child and David Baldacci, it was nice to realise that there isn't always a requirement for violence, blood and guts in order to have a good plot.
I will definitely be picking up more of Christie's work, Agatha Christie is the best selling author of all time, were told, Sure, Shakespeare. Sure, The Holy Bible. But literally billions of books sold, without question, Mainly Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple mysteries, but short story collections and many plays, too, This is the way this gets started: Her sister challenges her to write a mystery, During WWI she is working in a hospital, gets interested in toxicology, and thinks: okay, poisons, you could kill someone with those.
But let's just imagine how, hmm, It takes Dame Christie yes, the British, quite right Queen honors her at the age of, finally about five years to get published, and right way this first novel gets pretty rave reviews.
I have over my lifetime read a few of her books and seen acclaimed movies and some of the acclaimed tv series based on her books, but I am not particularly interested in mystery as a genre.
Okay, well, I admit I am a willing part of the current Sherlockization I hereby patent this word, friends because no one else wants it! of the planet, Ill admit it.
And twenty years ago in a production of her longest running play in English of all time, The Mousetrap, I actually played Christopher Wren, so theres that.
But I would not have picked this up except I passed it at a library display and on a whim thought: This is her very first Poirot mystery.
Maybe I will just read this one and then the nextof them, I am in a decade of my life when I seem to recall people do such things, . . Well see.
So: Its pretty good, I have read better from her and maybe will again, And at times you see flashes of what is to come, the brilliance, The less than good part features an idiot of a narrator and sidekick character, Hastings, who never understands anything, who never gets it, who never outguesses or comes up with any good ideas.
But why would Poirot realistically want to spend any time with him He barely does, and when he does, he barely lets him in on anything, but who would
Okay, you need a foil in these things, like the bumbling Watson, the everyman smartenough guy who is US, the reader, who gets blinded by the dazzling insights of the Brilliant Savant.
We and Watson are the spectators, The chorus. We are not smart enough or good enough or logical enough to be Sherlock or Poirot, But like watching chess matches or football games, we fancy we can maybe get a little smarter if we listen and watch The Master.
But this idiot Hastings seems at this point TOO dumb, and is an unfortunate narrator most of the time, Hes stuffy and dull and not observant, almost never, I guess Hastings is written for laughs, but why would anyone like Poirot really want to spend any time with hm I don't like him at this early point.
And then, and then! after several dull pages she would have cut years later, she has Hastings admire Poirot, and in this very first book, where almost no character is interesting or fully realized, Dame Christie does this brilliant thing, this Dedalus thing, this Pygmalion thing, she creates this fully realized amazing guy and breathes him into life.
In the FIRST book he is already there, in her very first description:
"Poirot was an extraordinarylooking little man.
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.
Yet this quaint dandified little man, who I was sorry to see, limped badly, had once been in his time one of the most celebrated members of the Belgian police.
"
Poirot is a Belgian transplanted to England, Hes parodied in Peter Falks Colombo, who is an opposite Poirot, a slob, And Inspector Clouseau, of course! Every time Poirot arrives on the scene, every time he speaks, in this first book, he is great!
Christie has this nice idea to have Poirot, when he is really cooking on a problem, make houses of cards: “No, mon ami, I am not in my second childhood! I steady my nerves, that is all.
This employment requires precision of the fingers, With precision of the fingers goes precision of the brain, ” Things like that are rare in this first volume, but when they appear they are little gems,
Some weird things that may have been a function of the time and her early career:
What is there about “foreigners” like Russians and Germans that get configured as darkly exotic One character may be a German spy its WWI, okay, but still, in many of her mysteries foreigners create a certain mysteriously criminal atmosphere.
The German guy is also Jewish, and there might be a tad bit of antiSemitism in her conception of said character.
Mr. the idiot, yes totally clueless Hastings at one point actually asks a woman, Cynthia Murdoch, the beautiful, orphaned daughter of a friend of the family, whom he hardly knows, it seems, to marry him.
“'Cynthia, will you marry me Dont be silly, ” She laughs and turns him down and runs away, to her credit, But when you read it, you say loud: Whuuuuut! Too dumb,
The characterizations of almost any other characters than Poirot are almost absent, Therere almost no descriptions of anyone or anything, It is almost all dialogue, as good as that dialogue might be, Is. She can write, already in her early twenties !, but its not a whole book, Better than most mysteries ever, dont get me wrong, but not as good as she gets,
Christie says it herself: "I was still writing in the Sherlock Holmes tradition eccentric detective, stooge assistant, with a Lestradetype Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Japp.
" So she knows, looking back, that while its good, it's not yet great, But Poirot is great from the first she must have known this, as all the critics already did, And the tight and inspired plotting too is there, right from the first, Oh, but she makes another mistake she could not have anticipated, exactly: She makes Poirot wellretired, in his sixties! How will she be able to write him for decades without aging him! Oops.
You should have anticipated becoming internationally famous, Agatha, The diminutive portly Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, seems to have sprung from nowhere, complete with his perfect dandy attire, patent leather shoes, waxed moustache and all.
We know his sharp wits, his quick smile and “quietly twinkling eyes”, We know that “if anything excited him, his eyes turned green like a cats”, We know of his “eggshaped” head and his insistence on neatness and order in all things, to enable the “little grey cells” of his brain to work.
Here we also see an exuberant side to him: “I am like a giant refreshed, I run! I leap! And in very truth, run and leap he did, gambolling wildly down the stretch of lawn outside the long window.
”
“Sometimes, I feel sure he is as mad as a hatter and then, just as he is at his maddest, I find there is method in his madness.
”
But where did he spring from Did one of Agatha Christies most famous creations, who starred in a wealth of novels and stories, just arrive, fully formed I determined to read the first novel in which he appeared, to see for myself.
It was The Mysterious Affair at Styles, which although written in the middle of the First World War, in, was first published in.
Almost at once it is obvious that Agatha Christie is paying homage to the great Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
What we are reading, is an account set down by one “Captain Arthur Hastings”, of the recent events at a country house called “Styles Court”.
Captain Hastings is a rather formal, pondering, oldfashioned sort of chap, and although he diligently records everything in logical order, he makes sure his readers know that he only selects what he himself considers to be pertinent.
Does he remind you of anyone A certain other rather bluff exarmy doctor perhaps called “Doctor John Watson”
Captain Hastings also refers to a Belgian policeman, now retired, whom he used to know.
His tone is rather deprecating, as he admits that this detective used unusual methods, and had some success, but that he had really had his day, poor chap.
“I restrained my tongue, After all, though he was old, Poirot had been a great man in his day, ”
Captain Arthur Hastings, however, had rather a flair for these sorts of things, although he said so himself.
He would develop these methods, and streamline them into a modern way of detecting, Such too, had been Dr, John Watsons early impressions of Sherlock Holmes, as a rather eccentric fellow, given to fanciful and fantastic ideas, which repeatedly confounded Watson, as they often turned out to be right.
This is almost a direct parallel,
We smile to ourselves, as Agatha Christie has skilfully shown us by this uncanny reference, that we can enjoy the inside joke, whether or not we know Hercule Poirot of old.
In The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Captain Hastings is on sick leave from the Western Front, and currently a guest at “Styles Court”, a country manor house in Essex, belonging to a wealthy old lady, Emily Inglethorp.
Poirot has now settled in the village, near to the home of Emily Inglethorp, who had helped him start out again, after being a Belgian refugee of World War I.
Sure enough, Hastings bumps into Hercule Poirot himself in the village, Both men are delighted and surprised, We too are delighted but not at all surprised,
Neither are we surprised at the murder which ensues, By the time of Poirots appearance, we are perhaps a third of the way through the book, We are also to meet another reincarnation this time of a police officer, already known to Poirot,
Sherlock Holmes had his Detective Inspector Greg Lestrade to contend with, Lestrade was a solid police officer, who was originally set against the amateur Holmes, but as time went on, rather grudgingly acknowledged that Holmess wit and methods were way in advance of his.
So with the trio here, Hercule Poirot is ably assisted by the lacklustre Hastings, and we are introduced in this first novel to Agatha Christies own PC Plod, who is Inspector James Japp:
“Mr Poirot It was inhe and I worked together the Abercrombie forgery case you remember, he was run down in Brussels.
Ah those were great days, Moosier ”
“He was considered one of the finest detectives of his day”,
Captain Hastings faithfully sets down the order of events at Styles Court, and we follow along with him, through the story, as he recounts the events one by one.
“Ive always had a secret hankering to be a detective!”
He is so confident at the start that he will demonstrate to Poirot how to solve the case, that it is a joy to watch the interaction between the two.
We have a cast of several characters, all of whom are on the scene, and staying at Styles Court,
First of all, there is the victim of the case, Emily Inglethorp, who had inherited her fortune and the manor house, Styles Court, following the death of her first husband, Mr Cavendish.
She had recently married Alfred Inglethorp, a much younger man than herself, who was considered by her family to be nothing but an arrogant fortunehunter.
We also meet John and Lawrence Cavendish, Emilys two stepsons, from her first husbands previous marriage, Lawrence Cavendish is known to have studied medicine, John is married to Mary Cavendish, a friend of Dr, Bauerstein, Emilys doctor. Dr. Bauerstein is a wellknown toxicologist, who is not actually in the house, but resides quite close to Styles Court,
There is also a sharp, no nonsense sort of woman, Evelyn Howard, Emilys companion, who is the most outspoken of the residents about her dislike of Alfred Inglethorp: “Watch that devil her husband”.
There is also a kind of “poor relation”, Cynthia Murdoch, She is an orphan, and the daughter of a deceased friend of the family, Cynthia is never allowed to forget that she does not share the same privileges as the others, but it becomes clear from the start that Captain Hastings is sweet on Cynthia and in fact that he has a soft spot for all young women.
Cynthia Murdoch works at a nearby hospitals pharmacy, still doing warwork, Finally we have Dorcas, a maid at Styles, and an honest and true “salt of the earth” character,
When Emily Inglethorp is poisoned with strychnine, it is up to Poirot to use his detective skills, developed in the Belgian Police Force, to solve the mystery.
As we learn more about each of the characters, our suspicions veer back and forth, from one suspect to another.
“The idea crossed my mind, not for the first time, that poor old Poirot was growing old.
Privately I thought that it was lucky that he had associated with someone of a more receptive type of mind.
”
We follow Captain Hastingss indignation with delight, as Poirot innocently seems to ignore the obvious explanation, and go off on wild goose chases, until the final showdown.
Poirot loves his theatrical endings, where he assembles all the suspects together: “bowing as though he were a celebrity about to deliver a lecture” before gradually explaining why each of them, one by one, could have committed the murder.
This time his grand revelation is set in the Styles library, and we know that the last one to be announced, will be the one who did it.
“Yes, he is intelligent, But we must be more intelligent, We must be so intelligent that he does not suspect us of being intelligent at all, ”
“You see, my friend, you have a nature so honest, and a countenance so transparent, that enfin, to conceal your feelings is impossible!”
“You gave too much rein to your imagination.
Imagination is a good servant and a bad master, The simplest explanation is always the most likely, ”
I can almost promise that you will not guess the ending to this one, A classic whodunnit set in a large, isolated country manor, with many other guests the murder of a wealthy woman, in a closed room.
“All the doors had been bolted on the inside, ” To aid our own attempts at detection, the novel includes maps of the house, the murder scene, and a drawing of a fragment of a will.
“Beware! Peril to the detective who says: “It is so small it does not matter, It will not agree. I will forget it. ” That way lies confusion!”
There is an abundance of clues, and half a dozen suspects, most of whom are hiding facts about themselves.
Perhaps there are almost too many red herrings,
“A vague suspicion of everyone and everything filled my mind, Just for a moment I had a premonition of approaching evil, ”
Agatha Christie had begun working on The Mysterious Affair at Styles in, writing most of it whilst staying at an hotel on Dartmoor.
She said that the character of Hercule Poirot was inspired by her experience working as a nurse, ministering to Belgian soldiers during the First World War, and also by the Belgian refugees who were living in her home town of Torquay.
Just as with Victorian novels, The Mysterious Affair at Styles was first published in serial form.
It was serialised
weekly in “The Times” newspaper, including the maps of the house and the other illustrations included in the book.
Later, it was to become one of the first ten books published by “Penguin Books” when the publishing house was established in.
“The Times Literary Supplement” said in: “The only fault this story has is that it is almost too ingenious.
” Nevertheless, it is extraordinary to think that The Mysterious Affair at Styles was Agatha Christies first ever mystery novel.
She only got better, to earn her title as the Queen of Crime, and one of the best ever exponents of the golden era of detective murder mysteries.
Added Edit: Poirot's first ever entrance, viewed by Captain Hastings:
“Poirot was an extraordinary looking little man.
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, Yet this quaint dandyfied little man who, I was sorry to see, now limped badly, had been in his time one of the most celebrated members of the Belgian police.
As a detective, his flair had been extraordinary, and he had achieved triumphs by unravelling some of the most baffling cases of the day.
”.