I believe a speck of dust would have caused him more pain than a bullet wound. The neatness of his attire was almost incredible.

His moustache was very stiff and military. His head was exactly the shape of an egg, and he always perched it a little to one side. He was hardly more than five feet, four inches, but carried himself with great dignity. Poirot was an extraordinary looking little man. Then, a few pages later, Poirot shows up, and Hastings as the story’s narrator describes him: Even though the reader hasn’t met the Belgian detective yet, the reader has a strong sense that Hastings is a harmless braggart. Yet, more than a bit puffed up with pride. My system is based on his - though, of course, I have progressed rather further.” He used to say that all good detective work was a mere matter of method. “I came across a man in Belgium once, a very famous detective, and he quite inflamed me. But, as a story-teller - as a teller of this sort of story - she was on the mark from the start.įour decades and more ago, I read most of Christie’s novels, and what I found especially pleasing in reading (most probably re-reading) The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 2018 was the way elements of that first story would resonate down the half century of other Poirot novels.Ĭonsider Arthur Hastings, that loveable doofus who, in his amiable cluelessness, is a stand-in for the reader.Įven before Poirot has appeared on Christie’s pages, Hastings is telling friends about him: She got a little smoother later as a writer, true. Yet, whatever flaws might be found, it is a book that struck me as full-fledged Christie. The Mysterious Affair at Styles, as a Christie murder mystery, is of course complicated although her plotting here seems a bit clunkier than it would be later as she got into the flow of her novel-writing.

He was residing in that dreamworld of long-running fictional characters. Was Poirot 105 when he was solving his last case? He was the center of 32 later books (out of Christie’s 66), and, by the final one, Curtain, he is definitely old - suffering from heart attacks and in a wheelchair because of his arthritis.Ĭurtain, although written in the early 1940s, was published in 1975, or 55 years after The Mysterious Affair at Styles. This book, written in 1916 and published in 1920, was Poirot’s first appearance. What “old” means isn’t specified, but it would seem not a stretch to say he’s at least 50. When characters become the central figures in a long-running series of novels, they enter into some other dimension where they may age but essentially remain the same - where they don’t experience the passing of years in the way the reader does.įor instance, in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Agatha Christie’s first published mystery, Belgian detective Hercule Poirot is already old.

The mysterious at styles