The Mysterious Affair at Styles

Original review here

This book was a bit confusing at first with the dozen or so characters that are presented during the beginning chapters. However, I quickly familiarized with them—I still mixed up some of the last names but I knew who was who. It is a simple story in theory: a rich lady with an inheritance, a second husband, two sons and a wife of one, some servants, a doctor, you know the drill.

Honestly, this was very fun to read along someone else, after each chapter we each had our suspects and opinions on the cast, it was as entertaining as the novel itself every time Poirot explained his findings and changed our whole perspective on the events all the way up to the final reveal, which is just amazing.

It is funny and well written, a definite page turner for me, I read the last four chapters altogheter because all the revelations and explanations were quite mind-boggling to me—also because isa kept reading ahead, so evil lol.

I recently acquired And Then There Were None, considered to be one of Agatha Christie’s best work, and one of the best selling books of all time, because if this one amazed me, I can’t help but wonder what her best writing would be like. Yes, I have an e-reader but I couldn’t help myself. Good stuff.

I might continue my read of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, just to refresh myself and see the way both fictional detectives work, and have some more fun outside of the Science Fiction genre.

This was my first Agatha Christie ever, and the only comparison I have to make is to the Sherlock Holmes stories. I enjoyed it. I think I was getting used to Doyle's writing by the end of the Holmes stories, because I could pick up on a lot of the clues by then, but with this I didn't clue on to much at all. I wonder if that will change as I read more of Christie's work? What I will say, though, is that Hastings is a bit whiny and petulant compared to Watson...

It's almost hard to credit this as the beginning of what, to me, was a very enjoyable television series. David Suchet playing Poirot onscreen was a staple of my childhood, the series is, after all, almost as old as I am. Last year's Curtain, broadcast on a Wednesday last November, brought back many memories of sitting down with my grandfather to watch a performance.
Early Poirot is seemingly more clue-based, more your typical detective than his future depictions seem to indicate. Latterly he seemed very much to look for reasons, whereas for the majority of the novel he's seeking clues. I did enjoy poor old Hastings bewilderment throughout, and will I am sure read the rest of these over the years.

Agatha Christie's first book. For that it was very enjoyable. According to Wikipedia she wrote it as part of a challenge to write a book the reader could not spot the perp in. Turns out she did that by making it so obvious that noone ever thought this character could really have done it, and then adding multiple levels of other things that complicate matters.
The book does suffer a bit in other areas: characterization is flat for most of the characters. Sometimes I found it hard to follow who actually was saying what to whom at any given point, despite not usually having this problem. And in the end Poirot and the narrator painstakingly put together the plot in form of a Socratic dialogue stretching over pages and pages while obviously all the other characters in the scene are just sitting there twiddling thumbs.
All in all not a bad read, but justly overshadowed by her later mysteries.