The Mysterious Affair at Styles

“I recalled her as an energetic, autocratic personality, somewhat inclined to charitable and social notoriety, with a fondness for opening bazaars and playing the Lady Bountiful. She was a most generous woman, and possessed a considerable fortune of her own.”

Emily Inglethorp is the first in a long career of generous but flighty dowager victims towards which Poirot will feel a debt of justice. Christie was attuned to the vulnerability of older women in society.

‘“Like a good detective story myself,’ remarked Miss Howard. ‘Lots of nonsense written, though. Criminal discovered in last chapter. Everyone dumbfounded. Real crime—you’d know at once.’”

Christie teases the reader’s expectations here, revealing herself to be as much a fan of the cozy mysteries as her audience. Even at this early stage in her career, Christie could expect that her readers were well aware of the most familiar tropes of the form.

“A vague suspicion of everyone and everything filled my mind. Just for a moment I had a premonition of approaching evil.”

Unlike the Cavendish brothers, Arthur has an extraordinary sensitivity to the emotional tenor of his surroundings. Lacking Poirot’s superior brain, however, he can only react with clumsy bewilderment to his flailing instinct for trouble.

“If only you knew how fatally easy it is to poison someone by mistake, you wouldn’t joke about it.”

Like Cynthia, Agatha Christie worked in a medical dispensary during the Great War. Consequently, she had a nearly encyclopedic knowledge of poisons and their effects, which she put to good use in her novels. Poison was her most common means of fictional murder.

“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.”

In the world’s first glimpse of detective Hercule Poirot, we get a lovingly complete description of the man and his characteristics. In particular, his neatness will reflect back on his methodology as a detective, in which no stone will go unturned and no question unanswered.

“Wilkins hadn’t any idea of such a thing, until Bauerstein put it into his head. But, like all specialists, Bauerstein’s got a bee in his bonnet. Poisons are his hobby, so of course he sees them everywhere.”

John Cavendish, already disinclined to give Bauerstein the benefit of the doubt because of the man’s closeness to Mary, John’s wife, here upbraids Bauerstein for his professionalism. As a member of the gentry, John finds the narrow self-interest of the professional class untrustworthy.

“Presently, when we are calmer, we will arrange the facts, neatly, each in its proper place.”

Poirot is not simply an emotionless calculating machine like Sherlock Holmes. Rather, his painstaking method is also informed by bursts of emotion, as when Arthur points out his shaking hands at a crucial point of conflict.

“I noticed that there was an emotional lack in the atmosphere. The dead woman had not the gift of commanding love.”

Poirot and Arthur use empathy as a reasoning tool. Times, dates, and chemical reactions are important parts of their detecting arsenal, but equally critical are the emotional valences each suspect evinces.

“You gave too much rein to your imagination. Imagination is a good servant, and a bad master. The simplest explanation is always the more likely.”

This restatement of Occam’s razor (“plurality should not be posited without necessity”) takes on a specially ironic meaning in a book in which the central murder involves a multi-part poisoning performed with as much complexity and forethought as humanly possible.

“This Mr. Inglethorp, I should say, is something of a scoundrel—but that does not of necessity make him a murderer.”

It is typical of murder mysteries to place special emphasis on one or two suspects from the start. Typically, these suspects exist in moral grey areas but are proven to be red herrings, turning the viewer away from the true suspect. In this case, guilt is turned back toward Alfred Inglethorp at the end, but only after a circuitous route around a few other subjects.

“Real evidence is usually vague and unsatisfactory. It has to be examined—sifted. But here, the whole thing is cut and dried. No, my friend, this evidence has been very cleverly manufactured—so cleverly that it has defeated its own ends.”

What drives Poirot is a vague but clearly deeply personal dissatisfaction with disorder. His mind is sharp, but his neurosis is sharper, leading him to impulsively correct and tidy everything within his sight.

“I am disappointed in Japp. He has no method!”

While Poirot’s credentials as a detective are in order, it is important to note that the middle-aged Belgian is both retired and out of his jurisdiction. The reason he can get into the details of his suspects’ lives is precisely because he is a foreigner to them, a luxury Inspector-Detective Japp doesn’t have.

“We have cleared away the manufactured clues. Now for the real ones.”

The freeing of Alfred Inglethorp from the coroner’s inquest marks a turning point in the case. From this point on, Poirot will play things much closer to the vest, leaving Arthur (and the reader) out of his reasoning.

“We all lived in a blast of publicity.”

From the first moments of the novel, Arthur scoffs at the press and its abuses. He is disdainful of a press which fed on the scandals of notable people.

“I don’t hold with foreigners as a rule, but from what the newspapers say I make out as how these brave Belges isn’t the ordinary run of foreigners, and certainly he’s a polite spoken gentleman.”

The distrust the housemaid Dorcas feels for “foreigners” is echoed by her upper-class employers, who cultivate xenophobia and anti-Semitism (as we see in their treatment of Dr. Bauerstein, who is Jewish). This prejudice makes the Cavendish family clueless toward the crime before them, and it makes the unprejudiced Poirot exceptional at the work.

“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.”

Poirot, in a gentle jab, enlists Arthur as the perfect person to convince the enemy that his pursuers are not intelligent at all, a role to which the loyal Arthur eagerly consents. In this way, Christie places a small wedge between the reader and the narrator.

“These little grey cells. It is ‘up to them’—as you say over here.”

In subsequent novels, Poirot will often refer to his beloved “little grey cells,” i.e. the inert cellular matter that forms the bulk of the brain. This is the first use of the famous repeated phrase.

“Everybody’s murderer is probably somebody’s old friend [...] You cannot mix up sentiment and reason.”

Poirot, though a more empathetic detective than some, is also very talented at compartmentalizing his sentiment from his analysis. This is most evident when he realizes that, in order to continue with his investigation, he must leave Mary Cavendish to suffer through her sense of betrayal a little longer.

“That I can build card houses seven stories high, but I cannot [...] find [...] that last link of which I spoke to you.”

Here, the usually cool Poirot emphasizes his words by banging on the table repeatedly. Like many technically exact thinkers, Poirot cannot tolerate disorder, especially disorder that reflects back to the functioning of his own “little grey cells.”

“You were in a towering rage. Do you remember? It was when you discovered that the lock of the despatch-case in Mrs. Inglethorp’s bedroom had been forced. You stood by the mantelpiece, twiddling the things on it in your usual fashion, and your hand shook like a leaf.”

With Arthur’s imprecise assistance, Poirot uses his obsession with order and straightening things (such as Emily’s mantelpiece) central to solving the case. It helps that Alfred Inglethorp left the mantle untidy after hiding evidence there.

“Had it been a little clearer in its terms, it is possible that Mrs. Inglethorp, warned in time, would have escaped. As it was, she realized her danger, but not the manner of it.”

Emily’s complex and reactive nature means that when she utters the name of her husband as her last words, the family wonders whether she is calling out to her beloved or naming her murderer. This revelation makes it plain that it was the latter.

“There’s a good time coming once the old woman is dead and out of the way. No one can possibly bring home the crime to me. That idea of yours about the bromides was a stroke of genius!”

The damning letter not only condemns Alfred, but explicitly names Evelyn as the mastermind behind the poisoning scheme. This neatly ties together a formerly knotty set of plot contrivances.

“Because, mon ami, it is the law of your country that a man once acquitted can never be tried again for the same offense. Aha! But it was clever—his idea!”

This highly technical aspect of the case is not revealed until the final chapter, though it is slyly alluded to earlier, when Poirot sums up the unsatisfying inquest.