Monday, January 2, 2017

The Mysterious Affair at Styles

The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Agatha Christie. 1920. William Morrow Paperbacks. Pages: 230 (plus an extra scene). [Source: Bought]

Who poisoned wealthy Emily Inglethorp and how did the murderer penetrate and escape from her locked bedroom? Suspects abound in the quaint village of Styles St. Mary - from the heiress's fawning new husband to her two stepsons, her volatile housekeeper, and a pretty nurse who works in a hospital dispensary. Making his unforgettable debut, the brilliant Belgian detective is on the case.


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Rating: 

Although I finished this novel on New Years Eve, this review comes a couple days too late and doesn't count towards the Back to the Classics challenge I participated in last year. Unfortunately, I went to college, and the course load didn't let me pick it up other than to move it around my dorm room.

I have mixed feelings about this mystery, I guess I'm still getting used to Agatha Christie's style, but I found this mystery to be rather long-winded. I get that this was the first book of her Hercule Poirot series and that she was basically introducing her character in this book, but there were some things that irked me.

Silly me, I found myself introducing myself to Agatha Christie through the tenth book in her Hercule Poirot series, Murder On the Orient Express. So it came as quite a shock when I began to read The Mysterious Affair at Styles and I found the story had been written in first-person - since the other had been written in third. I guess this is what I disliked the most about this book, because I came in expecting to follow Poirot around and instead found myself following this guy around whose last name was not 'Poirot'.

All in all, I did enjoy this novel, even though the time it took for me to finish reading this (which was 4 months) made it feel like the mystery had stretched on forever. I enjoyed the mystery because you couldn't tell who was the murderer until the very end. And the true murderer of Emily Inglethorp came as quite the shock to me. I never saw it coming!

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