Welcome to episode one of all about Agatha, in which we discuss Agatha Christie's very first published novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. I'm Kemper Donovan. I'm Katherine Brobak. We're going to start off with a really quick plot synopsis, emphasis on the really and the quick. I am not going to take more than two minutes to get through this, but it's important that we know the facts. Okay. Here goes. Three, two, one. It's July 1916 and Arthur Hastings in Jordan World War I runs into an old friend, John Cavendish, who invites him to his home, a biggest date in Essex called Styles. The lady of the house at Styles is John's stepmother, Emily Engelthorpe, who recently remarried a much younger man named Alfred. Everybody pretty much hates Alfred, especially Mrs. Engelthorpe's companion, Evelyn Howard, who is actually Alfred's cousin. Also at Styles, John's somewhat estranged wife, Mary, John's gloomy younger brother Lawrence, a rather whiny young ward of Mrs. Engelthorpe's named Cynthia, a sketchy seeming London doctor named Bauerstein, and a group of Belgian refugees from the war, including one air-cooled poro, a retired police detective. On the same day, Hastings arrives at Styles, Evelyn Howard gets into a big argument with Mrs. Engelthorpe about her awful husband Alfred. Evelyn leaves in a huff, claiming Alfred is a bad lot, capable of murder. Twelve days later, Mrs. Engelthorpe cries out from her bed in the early hours of the morning. The entire household wakes up, breaks down her door, and witnesses her painful gruesome death. It appears she has been poisoned. Hastings calls on his friend, Poirot, who he'd met years earlier in Belgium to help investigate. Initially, everyone suspects Alfred, especially when a chemist testifies that the inquest to having sold him a bottle of strickenine the day before the murder. Poirot discovers that Alfred couldn't have been the one to buy the strickenine. It was Miles' way carrying on an affair with the widow of a farmer. In the end, it's John Cavendish who gets taken away by Inspector Japa Scotland guard and put on trial. While the trial is still happening and going very badly for John, Poirot gathers the key players together and reveals in dramatic fashion that the murderer is in fact Alfred, who is scheming with his cousin and lover Evelyn the whole time to murder Emily and get her money. They're taken away. John and Mary are reunited, their love renewed. And the unlawrence admit to having been in love the whole time and are engaged and everyone lives happily ever after except Dr. Bauerstein who turns out to be a German spy. The end. So now that we're all caught up in the boss, when it comes to a murder mystery, we often think of them as a who done it at least in the case of Christie. But there's a better name for the genre that we came across in New York or article from 2010 that was written by Joan Akacala. And she refers to them as puzzle mysteries. Akacala has an excellent definition, I think. And she writes puzzle mystery is a story that is a contest between the author and the reader as to whether the reader can guess who the culprit is before the end of the book. And that's a pretty great and succinct description of the Golden Age detective novel that Christie perfected. We might even say that she invented it, but that is actually a little bit more of a controversial claim and something we're going to be adding into later. So for now, what we'd like to do is evaluate the way that this particular puzzle mystery in the mysterious affair at Styles works. Christie provides clues upfront. And it's a major element that she always argued was that she gives the reader all of the clues that they would possibly need to, they too could solve the mystery. So how she sets up the clues is actually important to her argument about this. So I guess jumping in, clue number one, Alfred Ingles or if an evil and howard are cousins. Basically, because Alfred and Evelyn are cousins and knew each other well before Alfred came to Styles, they have ulterior motives. And throughout the book, Evelyn makes a big deal out of how much she hates Alfred. And what we come to realize is that that is all a front. We have a lady-doth protest too much sort of a situation going on here. So a reader who is steeped in Christie's tricks may pick up on that fact that they're cousins and kind of just distrust Evelyn's hatred from the beginning and wonder if there isn't more going on between the two of them. There's also a little bit of a clue pretty early on in the book when Poirot has a line where he says that blood tells. And while he's using that to refer to the lack of a blood relation between John and Lawrence Cavendish and their stepmother Mrs. Ingles Thorpe, in retrospect, that line can actually be applied to Evelyn and Alfred as slightly weird as that is since they are essentially kissing cousins. Yeah, the blood tells the thing is interesting because this is a first novel and we're being set up with this idea which is going to come up repeatedly over many, many, many of her novels, right? That is always like how you should look at I think reading them is what the familial connections are because that is actually how she structures a bunch of them. The fact that she goes out from the gate with that is like a helpful guide post for further reading I think. It's true, family connections are more often than not key to solving a lot of the mysteries in these stories. And this is a good time to actually go into a little bit of biography about Agatha Christie. Agatha Christie was born in 1890 on the south coast of England in a seaside resort town called Torkey. Her father was actually an American and interestingly her mother and father knew each other since her mother was 10 years old and her father was 18 years old and they were actually step cousins which is an interesting tidbit especially in light of the kissing cousins motif in the mysterious affair styles. So what are other factors of how we're supposed to be able to solve this? I mean, I think one is always to look at the dates because she's usually pretty specific about it in this book. We find out very early on when Evelyn leaves styles in a huff. She's gone actually for some time before Mrs. Engelsor passes away and it's set up there deliberately so that the reader is diverted, the attention has diverted away from Evelyn immediately. Yeah, it's interesting the way that Christie does. And to be honest, I found it to be a little bit awkward. Essentially Hastings comes to styles on the 5th of July and during that same day Evelyn makes a big to do with Mrs. Engelsor about how much she hates Alfred and she finally speaks her mind and she leaves in a huff. We then get the next chapter and I'm reading directly from the opening lines of the chapter. I had arrived at styles on the 5th of July. I come now to the events of the 16th and 17th of that month and it's kind of like, okay, why are we skipping over 11 days all of a sudden? Why did she set it up that way? There has to be a reason. The very astute mystery reader will immediately be thinking there's got to be a reason for that passage of time in the book just because it's kind of weird. The other thing that the date is important for is that we know that it's the middle of July. Because the primary clue and what will end up being poor is primary clue in a lot of ways to sort of untangling the mystery is that Mrs. Engelsor ordered a fire in her room even though it's July 17th and were told it's 80 degrees. So why anybody would be lighting a fire in their bedroom at night, what did they need to do? Absolutely. It should be an obvious clue and in fact, Poirot himself will tell Captain Hastings later in the book. Didn't you realize it was really weird that there was a fire in the room and that I pointed that out to you repeatedly and thus I'm also pointing that out to you, the reader. Yeah, I love that moment because Poirot is essentially reproving the reader. The only reason someone's going to order a fire in their room on July 17th when it's 80 degrees in the shade is because they want to burn something. So once we very early in the book find a fragment of a will burnt in the fire, we then realize okay Mrs. Engelsorb was burning her will in her fire. That's very, very key and if we can figure that out early on, it goes a long way to solving the mystery. I'd love to go back to just the issue of the dates as well for a second because there's one other really classic, Christy-ish clue dropped in this book and that is due to the fact that we know Evelyn Howard left on July 5th. At the Inquest, Evelyn Howard produces a letter that she says Mrs. Engelsorb wrote to her essentially saying, "Let's let bygones be bygones, you should come back to styles and let's make up." And the letter is reproduced in Mrs. Engelsorb's handwriting in the book. It's not a printed letter, it's an actual illustration of a handwritten letter and this is something that Christy does a lot in her novels and whenever you have something reproduced in the book, it's super, super important and to be examined as closely as possible. In fact, Polaro.
tells us at the end of the novel that if we look closely at Mrs. Engelthorbs handwriting in that letter, she uses a lot of spaces between characters and the date on the letter of July 17th is extremely cramped. So a clever reader is supposed to figure out from that reproduce letter that it was in fact written on July 7th, not July 17th. And that of course is very strange because why is Evelyn Howard the supposed great friend of Mrs. Engelthorbs not responding to this letter for that long? Why is she changing the date at all? Obviously there must be something else going on with her. So it's a it's a it's a really really at least for me devious clue. So I want to get to one clue that I think is among the trip the trickiest in this book and that I actually think potentially even breaks the rules. That rule is that knowledge required to solve a mystery should be fairly general knowledge. There can be some specialized knowledge maybe some something that you can you have to look up or something like that. But if it requires a PhD in physics to solve an agatha Christy mystery that doesn't completely seem fair. Mrs. Engelthorbs had bromide sleeping powders made up for her by her ward Cynthia who works at a essentially a pharmaceutical department in a hospital. And the very very knowledgeable reader will perhaps know that bromides can cause certain chemicals to come out of solution. So when we learn in the inquest that Mrs. Engelthorbs took a medicinal tonic every night which was administered to her by her husband in which also contained safe amounts of strickening and solution we perhaps can deduce her mat that it would have been possible for Alfred to add the bromide powder from the bromide from the sleeping powders to the tonic and thereby make the strickening settle to the bottom. So this if you can figure that out that is a huge implication for Alfred and that is in fact what he did and what Poirot figures out by the end of the novel. I would also note though you know in fairness to Christy she would have known that because that was her one job outside of the home was that during the First World War she worked in essentially a pharmacy right like she had some sort of like medical background during the First World War. So probably for Christy if not that she was trying to trick the reader so much as like it was a known fact to her. Right I don't think she was I don't think she was going out of her way to trick the reader I just think that it was an easy it was an easy clue to slip in for her because of her specialized knowledge and to me it feels like well most of your readers didn't work at a dispensary during World War One and they're not chemists or pharmacists so to really expect them to figure it out and actually so there's an there's a Christy expert named John Kern who's written these two really great books about Agatha Christie's notebooks and in his first which is just called Agatha Christie Secret notebooks he actually talks about this how the mysterious affair styles the solution turns on a scientific fact and he he more agrees actually with you Catherine because he he writes that it is not unfair as we are told from the outset of the investigation what the poison is admittedly anyone with knowledge of toxicology has a distinct advantage but the information is readily available. Where we are in terms of the puzzle mystery at this point is that we know that it's strickening that that killed her we know even how the strickening settled to the bottom of this bottle of medicine but there's still a central problem that plagues poor and the reader and hastings and everyone throughout the novel which is this. Strickening is incredibly quick to act so why does it take hours and hours from Mrs. Engle Thorough to react to the poison especially since she didn't eat well the night she was murdered we know that she didn't have a big appetite her stomach was fairly empty which means that the point at which she ingested the strickening she should have been in massive pain and convulsions minutes later not hours later as she was so figuring out this twist turns out to be incredibly complicated and this is where I want to showcase something that I think Christie does incredibly well we're obviously given a whole bunch of clues some of which turn out to be more relevant than others and I think that what a lot of lesser mystery novelists do is to just throw a whole bunch of what I what I'll call red herring clues at a reader and those are clues that end up having nothing to do with anything so there are a couple of those in the mysterious affair styles for example we're told that Lawrence Cavendish and Cynthia are incredibly good at impersonations but they end up not having been the ones to do any sort of impersonation that was just a red herring although that's a red herring it's a red herring that she spends an awfully long time she does she does spend a long time on that there's a lot there's if there's any character that I think she spends a lot of time trying to make suspicious who turns out to not be suspicious at all it's probably Cynthia in any case what Christie does really well is that a lot of the clues that don't turn out to explicate the central mystery actually explicate what's going on in side plots with other characters and it shows how complicated this these puzzle mysteries are because there's more going on than just the central murder mystery and in the mysterious affair styles we have this side plot with John and Mary Cavendish and this is a it starts at the very beginning and it goes to the very end and this is an incredibly important side story where basically John and Mary their marriage is on the rocks and Mary thinks that John is cheating on her John thinks that Mary is cheating on him and there's just a lot of hullabaloo going on about this at one point Hastings falls asleep in the woods and wakes up in witnesses and argument between the two of them which is interesting because of course Hastings falls asleep in the woods so basically this side plot of John and Mary the life and times of John and Mary's struggling marriage ends up taking up a large part of the clue basket and here's how that works essentially we have to figure out why again why when Mrs. Engelthorpe swall that Stricnean it didn't work on her right away and the answer to this ends up being because she was drugged by Mary Cavendish on the same night with an narcotic that ended up slowing the rate of the rate at which the Stricnean worked which just hold up for one second though with the idea that Mary Cavendish did essentially drugged two people yeah Mary as far as I'm aware is not a licensed dispenser of drugs and so the idea that she's just dumping narcotics into people's evening beverages like really doesn't put her in the best life but she didn't kill them so no all good yeah and this is the heightened world of Christie and we'll get into this a little bit when we talk about character and how how characters function within the world of Christie but basically what Catherine's talking about is that Mary Cavendish puts the narcotic in Mrs. Engelthorpe's cocoa she also puts the same narcotic in Cynthia's coffee and the reason for that is that Cynthia's bedroom is next to Mrs. Engelthorpe's and Mary Cavendish wants to be able to sneak through Cynthia's bedroom into Mrs. Engelthorpe's bedroom to get a letter out of Mrs. Engelthorpe's letter case that she thinks has something to do with her husband's infidelity so that's why when Mrs. Engelthorpe is in her death row as the entire household wakes up Cynthia is the only one who does not wake up she sleeps extremely heavily and that's always a very suspicious thing that needs to be explained so that's that's the reason for that it's all Mary Cavendish it's also the reason why there's a bit of dark green fabric stuck in the bolt of the door between Cynthia and Mrs. Engelthorpe's room because Mary Cavendish had on a dark green dressing gown and a little bit of a cot it's also why there's candle grease white candle grease on the floor in Mrs. Engelthorpe's bedroom that was Mary Cavendish's candle and she got startled when she was in the bedroom and Mrs. Engelthorpe cried out it's also why there is this strange lie that Mary Cavendish tells when she says she heard Mrs. Engelthorpe knock over a piece of furniture when she had woken up in her bedroom but Poirot test this and realizes that there's no way Mary Cavendish could have heard anything from her own bedroom that was going on at Mrs. Engelthorpe's bedroom so all those clues are thrown at the reader they're extremely confusing intriguing but confusing and not only that but first we get almost all of them in the same chapter I think yeah yeah there's a lot of clues there's a lot there's a significant number of clues in a very short number of pages I actually think it's pretty ingenious and pleasing to the kind of tying up of loose ends that we want in a puzzle mystery that they end up all not just being random but going toward this side story that's also been a part of the novel we're reading so I thought that was impressive also have the other
side thought which is that Lawrence Cavendish is in law with Cynthia. And so he is the one who vouches originally for the bedroom door being bolted because he says he bolted it, which whether or not this is a mistake, I don't know what he's using it the Christie mistake. Yeah, so I think I caught and I might be wrong and if anyone thinks that I'm wrong and it's horrified that I'm claiming the queen of crime made a mistake in her very first novel, I would love to hear it. But essentially as Catherine saying, there's this other side plot that Cynthia and Lawrence are in fact in love with each other. They're very shy around each other in the book and we do find out at the end that they're engaged and they were in love the entire time. And poor Cynthia just believes that Lawrence hates her. Hates her. Right. And Lawrence is so in love with Cynthia that he thinks that he tampers with the crimson. He tampers with the crime scene really badly because I guess he loves her so much that he's okay with the fact that she might be a murderer and wants to make sure that she just doesn't get caught. So Lawrence claims Lawrence, there's this moment where Hastings sees Lawrence look at the wall that has the door between Cynthia and Mrs. Inglethorps bedroom and he looks horrified and we don't know what he's horrified by. And we eventually find out. Poro tells us what he saw is that the bolt on Mrs. Inglethorps side was in fact unlocked. So the bolt had been drawn back meaning all you had to do to open that door was draw back the bolt from Cynthia side and you'd be able to open the door. And the reason why that happened is because Mary Cavendish again had stolen in to try to steal a letter and then when Mrs. Inglethorps woke up she ran out and she bolted the door on Cynthia's side but of course she couldn't bolt the door on Mrs. Inglethorps side. So that's all well and good and that moment where Lawrence looks at the door horrified is fine but a couple pages before that when the household is trying to break down one of the three doors that goes into Mrs. Inglethorps bedroom to try to help her because she's convulsing and crying out in pain. And moaning and crying. And moaning. There's a moment when John Cavendish runs into Cynthia's bedroom to test that door and he comes back and he says no no good it's bolted. And it could never been. I suppose you could I suppose you could make it argument that Mary Cavendish is in the room at the time right because she's trying to wake up Cynthia. Wake Cynthia. That's true. Yeah. I mean so you could you could make the argument Christie doesn't I'm just sure I do her. Sure. Portlessly. But I think you could make a very valid case that John rushes in and Mary's like no no the door is already bolted like I tried. Wow you're you're really spending her that's it's it's possible. Okay so we only have one more we only have one more major clue deduction scenario and that involves the letter case the aforementioned letter case that Mary Cavendish was trying to break into when Poirot and Hastings come back to Mrs. Engle Thorpe's bedroom the day after the murder. Poirot notices the letter case which is purple that's mentioned almost every time the letter case is mentioned and I I get it it's purple and he sees that there's a key in the lock. So he takes the key out of the lock check and make sure it's locked he takes the key out and he says we'll go over the contents of it with the family which obviously would be more appropriate rather than two strangers going over the contents of the case. They leave the room they come back the same day not not that much later I'm honestly not sure how much time has passed but they've questioned a few people and come back and when they come back the letter case has been broken open. Obviously Poirot is no idea what's been taken out but he that's not a hard deduction that something's been taken out and he gets so annoyed that he starts pacing around the room and he goes up to the mantle piece of the in the bedroom and he straightens out the ornaments on the mantle piece. The thing that I actually left out which I should have mentioned is that the first time they're in the bedroom earlier that day he also straightens out the ornaments of the mantle piece. So for some reason Poirot straightens out the ornaments of the mantle piece. Because he's the anal retentive? That's the thing. I mean so I have I this is my first problem with this with with this clue and deduction scenario. We're told even in this book where we're first introduced to Poirot that he is a clean a cleanliness freak and there's I believe there's one section where he removes an imaginary speck of dust off of his sleeve. We certainly get lots of those passages in novels to come. I actually feel like if there were anyone in the entire world likely to straighten something that had already been straightened it would be here Kool Poirot. So no I was not in any way alerted to any to something strange going on when he straightens the ornaments of the mantle piece for the second time. However this ends up being a crucial and very late in the novel Hastings reminds Poirot as he is building a house of cards as he does that he did this that he straightened the ornaments a second time and Poirot rushes back to styles because at that point they're in London and retrieves something from the bedroom or at least does something and what Poirot deduced is that something must have been done to the ornaments and he finds on the mantle piece a it's sort of uh I don't honestly don't even know what this is because I certainly have never had spills as an interior design motif in any of my dwellings but spills I guess are like these paper these spirally paper vaguely stem of flower looking things that you can put into a vase. Sort of imagine that you know like when people have super Etsy weddings and they have like you know the displays that are made out of like a Jane Austen book you know what I mean that's kind of what I picture. It was super Etsy. Yeah the Engelsor president was like you know really Etsy. Whoever took something out of the letter case essentially tore up the letter into three pieces rolled them up and added them to the spills that were already in a vase and in the course of doing that they put the vase a skew that's why he straightened it again and Poirot when he has his bit his grand finale when he gathers everyone together back at the Cavendish's drawing room in London he produces the letter and reads the letter and uh I would actually would love to read the letter because I also have an issue with the letter itself because I think it is a little too convenient. Really? Really you think so. Go ahead. Go ahead. Dearest Evelyn you will be anxious in hearing nothing it is all right only it will be tonight instead of last night you understand there's a good time coming once the old woman is dead and out of the way no one can possibly bring home the crime to me that idea of yours about the bromides was a stroke of genius but we must be very circumspect a false step and then the writer breaks off because he was in fact interrupted and of course this was Alfred Engelthorpe writing to his cousin slush lover Evelyn Howard and the case is solved. Why would he have left it there just like tear it into pieces like put it in your pocket why on earth would you just like have this incredible piece of evidence and then just leave it there and not only that but at any point I mean I guess you know we find out that Poro has essentially been using the servants as little birds and everybody in the house has been under intense watch because Poro has spies on them so I mean I suppose you could big it argument that that's the reason why the letter isn't removed at a later date but if you think about the fact that it's been sitting there for weeks if not months weeks yeah if not much at any point it could have been destroyed and instead it's just left there for Poro to eventually go back and find in addition in the in addition to being a handwritten confession of a murder plot which it seems like generally not a good idea I will I will say I will say this much um I was reading a story I think last week or the week before where some dude posted on either Twitter or Facebook about how much he wants to murder his roommate and then the next day he murdered his roommate and I mean he posted that I'm a public forum and it kind of feel like that is a pretty consistent story like in our digital age of people basically confessing to crimes on social media so perhaps um Kristi Apologist well no I'm equally critical I'm just saying that people people remain it really really stupid about putting their confessions to crimes at right age no you're right and also and this I would argue we'll see as we as we read more but I think a throughline through Kristi is that she doesn't she doesn't necessarily have a lot of respect for
her murderers. Some of her murderers are ingenious, endeavious, but they're ultimately with one exception, I think, never more ingenious than a detective. And a lot of them are blinded by various emotions or just kind of dumb, not necessarily dumb, but they do stupid things. One of the irony is is that overly plotted crimes run a huge range of risks for the murderer, right? The more the more moving parts makes it more interesting as a puzzle mystery, but the more moving parts there are, the more at risk. The worst it, the worst it really is. I mean, the guy that's so true, it was a good point. The best crimes in reality are the simplest crimes. But of course, those are also the most boring crimes. So you can't, you can't falter for that. This is a perfect segue to our next thing because we're a little bit dancing around two different motifs that that Agatha Christie introduces in this novel and would go on to use a lot and would become very important for the genre. So the first is the double bluff. And I'm going to go back to John Curran in his book, Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks, again, because he does a good job of explaining it partially, because he actually quotes Agatha Christie herself from her own autobiography. But this is what Agatha said about a good detective story. The whole point of a good detective story was that it must be somebody obvious, but at the same time for some reason, you would then find out that it was not obvious that he could not possibly have done it. Though really, of course, he had done it. And what that is essentially a double bluff. At first, this person seems obvious, then oh, no, no, there's no way they could have done it. And then finally in the end, oh, wow, they did do it. And of course, that's exactly what happens with Alfred Engelthorpe here in this book. And Curran notes that Christie would return to the double bluff several times in her career. And particularly when the explanation revolves around a murderous alliance. And of course, that is the case in styles where we have an alliance between Alfred Engelthorpe and cousin lover, Evelyn Howard. And the reason for that Curran notes is that unless carefully handled this solution, the double bluff runs the risk of producing an anti climax here in styles, it's skillfully avoided by uncovering the presence of an unexpected co-conspirator in the person of Evelyn Howard. And that's really true. If we, if we just found out at the end that, oh, actually, it was Alfred all along, it wouldn't be as exciting. But the addition of evil into the mix, oh my God, the woman who's been spending half the book talking about how much she hates this guy and what a great friend she is to the murdered woman actually turns out to be one of the, one of the co-conspirators and one of the two murderers who did it. A lot of the mysteries come down to a sort of Occam's razor. You're actually, she's very, very good at convincing you to overthink something. But that was not the primary point that I was going to make the primary point was that in addition to the double bluff, the fact that she's using double jeopardy here. And that's like a fascinating early concept that will come up again. Because she uses it, I mean, I will spoil this because it's not a novel. But I mean, she uses it probably more famously and witnessed for the prosecution, where the entire plot there hinges on the idea of double jeopardy. And I mean, if you get down to the core of what, you know, and Howard and Alfred and before do is that their entire plot, everything that they've set up is to make him look guilty without having any evidence so that he goes to trial. The entire idea of the plot that they set up and the suspicion that Evie herself was setting up was that if Alfred went to trial, there was no evidence. And he couldn't be tried again. It's also really classic noir plot, right? I mean, it's like, it's funny that we get this, this book came out in 1920. And such a classic noir plot. Yeah. Yeah, it's really true. It's just it has none of the noir tone, obviously, but she's doing everything plot wise that is done in a classic noir, including the weird sexual relationship. It's true. I mean, she doesn't explicitly talk about the sex life of Evie as Alfred, but I mean, they are. It's implied that they are. It's implied. It's implied. And I mean, it's sort of implied that Alfred, Alfred and Emily are not really doing much of anything. I mean, it's a little bit edgy. Emily Anglethorp is, I think, north of 70. And he's obviously much younger. So I think we're supposed to be another writer would, would, you know, have some sort of torrid scenes in which Evelyn and Alfred are meeting on the landing and like, rutting against a balcony railing or something like that. As Emily Anglethorp sleeps with her bromide powder is in strickening tonic. But, but we don't get that. What I at least got out of really breaking down the mystery puzzle for this first novel of Christie's was a sense that she already knew so much of what she was doing in this first novel. And I think it's really impressive how much she was accomplishing. Basically, I want to talk about character. I want to shift the conversation to character. And often I mentioned earlier that people cite Christie as the one who, if she certainly didn't invent the detective novel, people usually point to a girl in Poe or Milky Collins in the 19th century as the inventors of the modern detective novel. But Christie did influence the genre and she popularized the genre. But one thing that I, and I believe Catherine as well, I don't want to speak for you. But one thing I was really surprised by when in revisiting the mysterious affair styles was one author and his creation in particular, that influenced Christie more than any other. And it's really staring us in the face from the very first page and even referenced outright a few pages later. And that is Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. And I think we can argue that Arthur Conan Doyle's detective and sidekick had so much influence over the mysterious affair styles that this novel in a way is a version of fan fiction. And I don't mean for that to sound, I don't mean to belittle the novel or any of the accomplishments that we just spent a while going through in terms of its mystery plotting and its mystery puzzling. But this is really more when it comes to considering the characters of Hastings and Poe who are introduced for the first time, of course, in this novel. Well, and I mean, I think that you can look at it into possibly lighting ways, maybe not. But one is that she's writing this for money. This is not a Christie, this is not begin as a Christie passion project necessarily, not that she didn't love the idea, I think, but she's doing it because, you know, I think she was a stay at home mom and I think funds were a little short and she saw it as something that, oh, maybe she'd be good at. And so understandably at some level, I think she's using homes as a template. It's not even quite that it's fan fiction, right? It's that she's using almost exactly the template of study and scarlet down to down to the fact that it begins with almost exactly the same beats with Watson versus Captain Hastings. So Captain Hastings introduces himself as he's in a con lesson home, he's back from the war, and he's, you know, clearly injured. And he even says in the first paragraph, I've been asked by Poe Roe and the family involved to write this story down, which so to me, and I could even hear Watson's voice. And that is something that goes away very quickly in these novels. Like I could hear Watson's voice saying that when I when I read it. No, absolutely, although the difference and the really odd difference is that, I mean, it could have to do with the fact that they're writing in a different century. And so obviously the tone is going to be slightly different. But Doyle's tone, Watson's tone at the beginning of study and scarlet is much more detailed. He goes into immediately more details about his life, about his experience in the war, whereas we actually got very, very little. It's true. I was actually reminded and I never made this connection when I was reading the books as a child. I in reading Hastings was reminded actually of PG Woodhouse and birdie Worcester and the way in which when birdie narrates the jeez and Worcester tales, we get a lot of very intentional, obviously, comedy in the filter of information or interactions that are coming that are between birdie and jeez, you know, birdie puts his kind of dippy spin on them and it's amusing. And we can see jeez teasing him or dismissing him or birdie just thinking something, thinking about something the wrong way. And there's common.
and that and I actually think Christie is doing the same thing here. There are several moments in the book, lighter moments, to pepper in with all the clues and murder. I would make an argument that they're serving similar functions and that they're serving as commentary on the English of a certain class. The only difference I would say is that Woodhouse was not of that background. She was pretty middle class too. Christie was thoroughly upper middle class lived in like, you know? No. She was middle. She was upper middle class but then actually she the family, I mean her father died when she was 11 and before that had a lot of money troubles and after that they continued to have money troubles and didn't have the ability to have any income through him and her brother was a bit of a near-do-well who never actually did much of anything or contributed anything. So they had it was it was mixed. But I mean I do think that in both cases having a sort of useful idiot as a lens is helpful to understanding the characters of the story. And I actually think that Christie did this very purposefully because there's this tension in a mystery puzzle between the mystery itself and the characters. So going back to that New Yorker article by Joan Akatella she put it really really well and this is what she said. She said, "Christy made lists of possible victims, culpers and mo's. Then she picked the combinations that pleased her. Curin, I think this is John Curin who we've already mentioned, Curin thinks that this shows the fertility of her imagination. I think it shows her willingness to work by formula and thereby to forego depth in favor of the puzzle. If she had given her characters any psychological definition we could have solved the mystery. But as long as they are kept suspended opaque as they must be in order for the book to be a puzzle any one of them could be the culprit." So to me that's really interesting because it means that there's this tension between having flat characters but a great puzzle on the one hand and three-dimensional realistic characters but a predictable puzzle on the other hand. And what Akatella is arguing is that Christie always chose the puzzle over characters but I would actually take Akatella's argument a little further and say that I think it's an oversimplification to treat it as an either or. I actually think that there is a balance to be found between puzzle, mystery and character. And it's true if you have two deep of characters or too much of psychology you are going to ruin the puzzle. But if the characters are too shallow if it feels too purely like a puzzle like just a crossword with 300 page crossword puzzle that's not good either. And some of Christie's books do a better job of finding this balance than others. And when we get to the end of the episode and we go over how we are going to rank these novels that's really going to be central to the ranking. So I'm not saying that Christie did it perfectly in styles or that she always did it perfectly but I think finding that balance is really key to perfecting the murder mystery genre at least as conceived by Christie. The other thing that she has going for her is that all of these are for the most part going to be series. So she is relying a little bit on the shorthand that we will know poro. And you can say that there's a better balance that you can find a better balance and that certainly there are people like PD James is a good example like another absolute master of the mystery novel. PD James did not have a lot of respect for her Christie. Yeah she referred to her characters as cardboard. Yeah and I mean to you know two of a certain degree. They are right. They are. But that's what I mean that I would argue that she does get and we'll we'll be talking about that as a real more novels but like just to pick a famous one and then there were none does not feature any of the detectives that we get to know better in the series. I would argue that the characters at least some of the characters and then there were none are more sophisticated, more memorable, more interesting than any of the characters we meet in the mysterious affair styles. Oh I mean I think that's right. Separate from separate from the puzzle the mystery puzzle that story which is of course in itself brilliant and ingenious. I'm really just talking about character though. I think she absolutely got better at it in certain books. So let's talk a little bit about setting because many setting and setting in tone many of Christie's novels are set on country states such as this one in the mysterious affair styles but settings differ very widely in her books. Many are set in exotic locations. She traveled a lot starting from when she was a child and through adulthood especially with her second husband Max Malowin who was an archaeologist. They went to the Middle East every year for a period of at least 20 years if not 30 years. So we get a lot of settings that I think really enhance the mystery puzzle and so in some novels they're better than others and the same really goes for tone because often and I think this is something that people tend to overlook with Christie but her stories can be imbued with the sense of dread or creepiness or even humor and we we touched on a little bit of the humor in styles and that's important too. I would argue unfortunately that I think for the mysterious affair styles we're not getting much in the way of setting her tone. No, a little short on all of those things. The tone out actually say comes off you know we mentioned earlier the fact that they witness Mrs. Ingalls Thorpe in her death throws and the narration is very much like casual we'll put it that way. It's matter of fact. Yeah matter of fact. I mean you're watching a woman that you know and that he's apparently known since he was a child captain he was saying is right. Mm-hmm. He's watching this woman die and the tone is so matter of fact. I mean in some way it's actually almost charmingly a cliche of what like keeping a stiff upper lip is. All right let's move on to theme and the first thing we should discuss is can a murder mystery even have a theme other than who did the murder and I would argue of course it can and I actually to open up the conversation about theme want to turn to do a little background on Edmond Wilson. Edmond Wilson was the literary critic of the New Yorker for decades from like the 1930s onward he is arguably probably the most significant American literary critic of the mid-20th century and he uh he was famously difficult. He didn't so much like things. He wrote a number of essays and a book in fact about sort of male pop-poiler writers but he wrote a number of essays criticizing genre fiction which is what I assume you're bringing up. Yeah so I want to bring up this essay that he wrote where I think he unwittingly made an argument for one of the the major themes of the detective novel and of course he did so uh in in a critical sort of condescending way but I think it's actually quite easy to to turn it around so basically in this essay Wilson says that the detective he claims he makes this claim that the detective story was as popular as it was in the two decades between Rural Rwandan Rural 2 because for a quote-unquote deep reason and this is what he writes "the world during those years was ridden by an all-pervasive feeling of guilt and by a fear of impending disaster which it seemed hopeless to try to over because it never seemed conclusively possible to pin down the responsibility who had committed the original crime and who was going to commit the next one nobody seems guiltless nobody seems safe and then suddenly the murderer is spotted and relief he is not after all a person like you or me he is a villain and he has been caught by an infallible power the supercilious and omniscient detective who knows exactly where to fix the guilt" and quote "what he's saying is that the detective novel is filling this need that people had in a time of great moral uncertainty um the holocaust of course comes to mind more than anything else um in which they were grappling with these philosophical sociological whatever you know this histological questions of are we monsters are is humanity even worth the planet on which it lives i mean these were real questions that people had after after the horrors of both of those wars and the detective novel provides this great sense of comfort that
There is evil in the world and the evil can be found out, it can be explained and it can be removed. The end. And of course he's saying that he's making the argument that this is why the detective novel is inferior because it's providing comfort and sucker or whatever to a reader, but I have no problem with that. And I actually agree with him. [laughs] Uh, he ranks mystery novels up there with a vice like Crossword puzzles. Smoking. I think he puts it somewhere between smoking and Crossword puzzles, yes. [laughs] I will say this as a clear lover of mystery novels and a Crossword puzzle. Um, I don't know that that means diminished intelligence. I do think that he's also hitting a point that explains why historically, especially in the 20th century. Mystery novels were really heavily written by women and I think really heavily read by women. Christy, you know, is probably the forebearer of them, but if you think about the fact that women had originally limited agency. And I'm sure that a lot of her readers felt like they had limited agency and they get to read a novel and piece the clues together and solve the puzzle. You get to actively do something, right? The idea, I think, in theory of reading a mystery novel is that it's active. And I mean, I think that that's, I think that can't be understated. That's sort of weird importance. You know, the idea that you should not underestimate people. That's like, you know, the significant lesson, right, even here. I mean, I think it's actually significant that Evie Howard is an older lady. And of course, she's ultimately culpable. Yeah. Non-underestimating people is a through-line theme in pretty much every Christian novel. Both the, it usually is non-underestimating the bad in them, but in fact, it's almost always is. I mean, if there may be no greater pessimists than I get to Christy, it's still non-underestimating people. I mean, it's still saying that there are hidden depths that people have. And most, which most people never access. And yeah, I agree. I think that's really significant. Per act of creating a puzzle that in theory anybody could solve in theory. You know, we've been over the possible reasons why that wouldn't happen. With a little bit of studying up on bromides, yes. Yeah, yeah, with a lot of studying up on bromides. What she's creating, yeah, it is a little bit like a crossword puzzle. But I don't know that that is a bad thing. And I don't know that it doesn't have sort of the intrinsic merit that Wilson is discounting completely because he wants it to be a joyser wolf. That's what he wants it to be. Literature in general has tricks. And if you just discount somebody like Christy, or you know, I mean, we're not talking about them, but like Dorothy Sayers, or whomever else. Right. That's picking and choosing which literary tricks you're willing to tolerate. Yeah, certainly have not done an exhaustive survey of the writings of Edmund Wilson. But in the essays that I did read, he really does seem to pick on the preeminent female authors of the genre. And it is true. I mean, people often talk about the four queens of, well, I think the Christie is the queen of crime, but the four leaders, which were Christy and Dorothy Sayers and Marjorie Allingham and Nihomarsh. And he name checks all of them and says they're all terrible. He basically gives more credence to the American pulporator with Christy and I think with sort of mystery fandom. There is a dismissal that is gendered to evaluate Christy and her impact. And you know, the, you know, other great ladies of Golden Age detective novels to evaluate them with a critical eye is to also evaluate the history of popular literature by women in the 20th century. Well, we thought that was a good place to stop for this episode, which as it turns out is part one of the mysterious affair styles. We don't intend to make a habit of dividing our episodes, but we're still getting our podcasting legs here, so bear with us for now. Part two will feature a discussion of the TV adaptation of styles as well as an explanation of our ranking system. Please let us know what you thought of the episode. You can rate and review us on iTunes, which is a big help for getting the word out in general. Or you can find us on Twitter @allaboutthedane. You can find Kemper @ KemperDawnovan, K-E-M-P-E-R-D-O-N-O-V-I-N, and Catherine @Brobcat, B-R-O-B-C-A-T. You can also find us on Instagram @allaboutthedane, or just email us @
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