Poirot Retrospective #2: The Mysterious Affair at Styles

 

Poirot Retrospective #2: The Mysterious Affair at Styles

The Mysterious Affair at Styles is the very first Poirot book, and also Christie's first novel, published way back in 1920. Written in 1916 during WWI, on a dare from her sister, it was an immediate bestseller and established her on the literary scene from day one, but man ... you can really tell this is an early one.

Among the characters, only Poirot and Hastings are fleshed out - everyone else is like a walking silhouette (although you could perhaps blame this on shallow Hastings narration). Let's take a moment to say a few words about Hastings, one of the great unsung sidekicks in literary history.

Everyone and their mother-in-law knows John H. Watson, the medical doctor who assists Sherlock Holmes and writes up the stories after Holmes has concluded them (much to Holmes's distaste, ha!). In the books, Watson is no moron - he just has the misfortune of rooming with the greatest logical mind that the art of crime has ever encountered. Watson is also physically brave, robust, a ladies man, sensitive to the emotions of others, easily insulted, and tremendously loyal to his friends.

It's easy to see that Christie created Captain Arthur J. M. Hastings in the direct model of Watson. Instead of a doctor, Hastings is a decorated WWI veteran, and now dabbles in various ventures, including (eventually) a successful and profitable farm in Argentina. Hastings is brave, loyal to a fault, has a real weakness for redheads, has a somewhat easily bruised ego but also recovers rapidly, is fairly sensitive and intuitive, and never tires of adventure. He is basically Watson Jr.

Christie invented Hastings only 15 years or so after the most prominent Watson book, The Hound of the Baskervilles, in which Sherlock barely appears and Watson does all the heavy lifting/observing/participating. I think it's natural that she should follow this model. In a future review I'll compare Poirot and Holmes (not quite as similar), but it's safe to say that here Christie really follows the archetype.

Hastings is a fun sidekick because he has obvious foibles and is rather obviously a slightly untrustworthy narrator: his views on women, especially redheads, and especially vulnerable redheads, cannot be taken at full value, ever.

Poirot gently pokes fun at him throughout all the novels for his notorious fondness for the fairer sex, and it's present in this very first novel: Hastings is rather taken by woman after woman. He believes whoever likes him the most at any given moment. If a woman laughs at him, hurts his pride, or rejects his flirtation in any way, his descriptions of that woman gets immediately colder and austere - it's quite a riot.

But on a dimmer note, the murder is preposterous and over-complicated and too many important things are withheld for too long to allow the reader to really participate in solving it. Clearly she's working out the kinks here.

This isn't the worst of the books, but it's down there.