Rainy Day Cabin Reading: the Post-War British Detective Experience

I have no intention of reading all of Agatha Christie's novels, at least for now as part of my self-created college course. For my first Agatha Christie novel, however, there was no choice. It had be her first complete novel, published 101 years ago in 1920, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. 

I obtained it for free through Kindle Unlimited. I used the AmazonClassics version in this case, after a little bit of research. It turns out that there are many versions of these classics on Kindle and some of them are just awful in digital form.  Some of them are apparently transcriptions fo audio version and include things that "[garbled]" in the text! Or they missing entire pages or paragraphs.  In this case the AmazonClassics version was sufficient for the most part although it was sadly lacking the illustrations of the original, which are part of the narrative (for example in presenting handwritten notes). In this case it didn't mar the experience much, but it left me feeling a tad incomplete in the experience.  

This particular novel also happens to the debut of Christie's most famous detective, Hercule Poirot. The parallels with Holmes are obvious and well-known, namely that the story is not told through an omniscient narrator, or through the detective, but through a friend of the detective who tags along, amazed at his powers of thought and deduction. 

I also noticed the progression from the theme of the British colonial experience in India that dominates the tableaux of the Victorian era detective story. Christie was writing in the wake of the trauma of the First World War, and we get an update of this theme of overseas experience "coming home" to Britain in the form of a crime story. The narrator Hastings, Poirot's "Watson", is coming back from being injured on the European continent. Poirot himself is from Belgium the main theater of the war, where the British Expeditionary Forces suffered enormous casualties. His Belgian background is critical in the set-up the story, in linking him to the victim of the crime. 

That being said, the story itself takes place in a delightfully stereotypical Essex country house. Anyone who watched Downton Abbey would feel right at home. I particularly loved the grey-haired servant Dorcas, who is never a suspect, but who supplies a critical piece of information to Poirot.

Christie's novels are easy reads, as I remember from the ones I read years ago in my youth. I read this one in less than a day, finishing it yesterday while the rains poured outside our cabin and the mist was rolling over the mountains nearby. I never guessed the solution. It felt like a little bit of heaven.