The Mysterious Affair at Styles

Agatha Christie, an English writer, wrote her first mystery novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, during the First World War, and it was published in 1920. It introduces Hercule Poirot, Inspector Japp and Captain Hastings.

Arthur Hastings, invalided home from the Western Front, is invited by his old friend John Cavendish to stay at Styles Court, a manor house in Essex. The household is already at quiet war over the recent marriage of its wealthy widowed owner, Emily Inglethorp, to a man twenty years her junior, and Hastings has come out to the countryside to convalesce.

One morning the household wakes to find Emily dead, and the cause turns out to be poison. Hastings, who knows a Belgian refugee detective from before the war, brings in Poirot, who is living nearby, to look into the death.

Christie wrote the book in 1916, drawing on her work in a wartime hospital dispensary for the detail about poisons, and it appeared first in the United States before reaching Britain the following year. It was her first novel, and it set the pattern for the many Poirot books that followed, with Hastings narrating several of them.