She is a socialite and is heavily involved in fundraising for the war effort. Emily InglethorpĮmily Inglethorp is the matriarch of the Cavendish family. He trusts Poirot's judgment implicitly and is very grateful to have him helping out on the case. Japp works for the Scotland Yard and is, at least in an official capacity, the lead detective on the Styles case. Hastings is infatuated with Mary Cavendish, his friend John's wife. Hastings fancies himself an amateur sleuth, but he is extremely insecure about his investigatory prowess and desperate for the approval of Hercule Poirot. He ends up at Styles Court after a brief stint in a convalescent home, recovering from injuries he sustained during WWI, which is still ongoing during the events of the novel. Arthur HastingsĬaptain Arthur Hastings is the narrator of the novel. He is obsessively neat and is always rearranging rooms and fixing people's outfits when they are askew.

Poirot is somewhat of a trickster and tends to keep everyone in the dark about his investigations while they are still ongoing.

He has had an illustrious career and is known far and wide and trusted by Scotland Yard (the city of London's police), as is evident from Detective-Inspector Japp's reception of him. 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.Poirot is a retired detective and a Belgian refugee in Essex, UK during WWI. 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.

The mysterious affair at styles