Librarian's note: the first fifteen novels in the Hercule Poirot series are 1) The Mysterious Affair at Styles, 1920 2) The Murder on the Links, 1923 3) The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, 1926 4) The Big Four, 1927 5) The Mystery of the Blue Train, 1928 6) Peril at End House, 1932 7) Lord Edgware Dies, 1933 8) Murder on the Orient Express, 1934 9) Three Act Tragedy, 1935 10) Death in the Clouds, 1935 11) The A.B.C.
Suspects are plentiful, including the victim’s much younger husband, her resentful stepsons, her longtime hired companion, a young family friend working as a nurse, and a London specialist on poisons who just happens to be visiting the nearby village.Īll of them have secrets they are desperate to keep, but none can outwit Poirot as he navigates the ingenious red herrings and plot twists that contribute to Agatha Christie's well-deserved reputation as the queen of mystery. When Emily is poisoned and the authorities are baffled, Poirot puts his prodigious sleuthing skills to work. The motive was easy to suss out on this one, and if you read a lot of Christie, you will quickly recognize certain plot elements that she recycled later on, but for a first novel, this really is a genuine classic.Agatha Christie's debut novel was also the first to feature Hercule Poirot, her famously eccentric Belgian detective.Ī refugee of the Great War, Poirot has settled in England near Styles Court, the country estate of his wealthy benefactor, the elderly Emily Inglethorp. At times, it is even enough to throw the reader off, but every now and then, Christie allows us to be more intelligent than her investigative assistant often is, and that's always good fun. And it's always a trip to see just how confused Poirot's non-answers tend to make him. Either Hastings will be completely wrong as to the identity of the killer (which you can usually tell as a reader right off the bat, if that is the case), or he is right about the killer, but MASSIVELY off about the reasoning and logistics behind it. I can say, having read quite a few short stories with Hastings as the narrator previous to this story, that I always know that one of two things will be the case.
Given how xenophobic a lot of the characters are in Christie works, one must imagine that this anti-foreign sentiment was shared by a lot of Christie's English readers as well (at least in the earliest works.) But I enjoyed this mystery immensely.
Now, I had already read three Poirot novels and numerous short stories, but I do like to imagine what the ideas were of the readers who were introduced to him through Hastings' observations about the famous Belgian detective in this first novel of Christie's.
A fun first adventure to introduce readers to what would become one of literature's most famous detectives: Monsieur Hercule Poirot.
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