This year's Read Christie Challenge has the changing decades of publication as its theme. And January's choice is this novel that set the ball rolling.
MY THOUGHTS:
This is the story that started it all. It's Agatha Christie's debut mystery, written in 1916 and published in 1920. She first introduces us to Hercule Poirot, who is already considered one of the finest detectives of his day. Belgian refugees were fleeing from the thick of World War One and arriving in Christie's home town, to which we owe the conception of her most famous personality. We also meet other recurring characters; the ferret-featured Inspector Jimmy Japp, and the surprisingly youthful Captain Arthur Hastings, a 30-year-old soldier invalided home from the Front. I admit, I'd never imagined him as such a relative baby before.
Young Hastings is invited to stay at the grand country estate of Styles, where he spent time in his boyhood. His old friends, John and Lawrence Cavendish still live there with their stepmother, Mrs Inglethorp, although she has now married her male secretary, a far younger man everyone suspects of gold-digging. When poor Mrs Inglethorp suffers an agonising death in bed late one night, an autopsy reveals a dose of strychnine killed her. But was it administered to her nightcap cup of coffee or her supper mug of cocoa? The finger of suspicion points straight at her unpopular husband, but Inglethorp turns out to have a rock solid alibi. Yet it's unthinkable that her stepsons, grateful boarder or loyal staff members could have done it. Hastings' cleverest move in the whole story is dashing off to beg Poirot's help to figure out the mess.
Hastings sets up his pattern of being a bit of a doofus, for which he's teased by Poirot throughout all their subsequent cases, committing errors of extremes. He either skims the surface of clues where he should have probed deeper, or flails in way too deep, jumping to rash conclusions and letting his imagination run away with him. As Poirot says, Hastings has no instincts. And he's also a sucker for flattery.
I like this passage, in which Poirot muses about the crook and gives Hastings a backhanded compliment.
'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.'
I acquiesced.
'There, mon ami, you will be of great assistance to me.'
I was pleased with the compliment. There were times when I hardly thought that Poirot appreciated me at my true worth.
'Yes,' he continued, staring at me thoughtfully. 'You will be invaluable.'
Yet we readers are challenged not to be too hard on Hastings, since it's written in such a way that we probably won't piece together the solution from the patchwork of clues right in front of us either. I didn't, although I did foresee a nice little romance.
I enjoyed the intro to this edition, written by Agatha Christie herself. She describes how she was inspired to write this story by her wartime work in a Red Cross dispensary, similar to the character of Cynthia Murdoch in this story. Christie admits that her war work helped her establish poisons and drugs as her very favourite murder weapon in her stories. Turns out she felt far less confident with firearms. 'People can't, of course, be poisoned every time, but I'm happier when they are. Especially the drug that allows the victim to gasp out one, unnecessarily cryptic sentence before expiring.'
I'm glad she could be so tongue-in-cheek about what turned out to be such a brilliant career for her. And I agree that for a debut murder mystery by a young author, this was pretty good and watertight.
🌟🌟🌟½
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