A Mysterious Affair Style

5 Reviews

• 1 person find this helpful

  

  This book is almost from 100 years ago. One would expect that, with all the mysteries and crime novels and CSI seasons we are used to, the plot will look very naive and childish to a modern eye.
  One would expect that and be completely and utterly wrong.

  The clockwork machinery devised by Christie i ... (continue)

  This book is almost from 100 years ago. One would expect that, with all the mysteries and crime novels and CSI seasons we are used to, the plot will look very naive and childish to a modern eye.
  One would expect that and be completely and utterly wrong.

  The clockwork machinery devised by Christie is still working perfectly, even after a century: the reader can enjoy trying to understand who the culprit is, but he'll also enjoy being fooled when it turns out the killer is not at all the character he expected.

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  Simbul said on Mar 20, 2010 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

• 

  Un inizio grandioso

  Potremmo dire "La cara vecchia Agatha non si smentisce mai, è sempre grande anche dopo tutti questi anni". Non possiamo, non poteva smentirsi: non ci sono precedenti, questo romanzo è l'inizio di tutto.
  Le parole migliori che trovo per commentare questo libro sono nell'introduzione.
  "Agatha Christi ... (continue)

  Potremmo dire "La cara vecchia Agatha non si smentisce mai, è sempre grande anche dopo tutti questi anni". Non possiamo, non poteva smentirsi: non ci sono precedenti, questo romanzo è l'inizio di tutto.
  Le parole migliori che trovo per commentare questo libro sono nell'introduzione.
  "Agatha Christie sent the typescript for The Mysterious Affair at Styles – the book that introduced Hercules Poirot and in many ways began the “Golden Age of Detective Fiction” – to three publishers and received three rejection notices, ranging from the polite to the blunt, before finding a publisher willing a take a chance on then unknown writer. I sometimes wonder what, a few years later, the owners of those three publishing houses said to the editors who had lost the chance to have Agatha Christie as one of their authors.
  […]
  The Golden Age of Detective Fiction became a period in which the greatest authors saw the story as an attempt by the writer to fool the reader, and many of them had their own methods in doing so. […] Christie specialized in the Least Likely Suspect gambit, and it was amazing the number of changes she was able to ring on that single theme. She was the mistress of the unexpected (but obvious when revealed) motive, of creating a character who seems to play one role while actuallt playing another – in short, of authorial legerdemain. As Jonh Dickson Carr pointed out, Agatha Christie was like a magician who could make the reader look one place while she calmly palmed the ace.
  It all began with The Mysterious Affair at Styles.”

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  Benguitar90 said on Jan 13, 2011 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

• Synopsis:

  The Styles Court lost its peace when its mistress Emily Cavendish was infatuated and got married with the young Alfred Inglethorp, a bare-faced fortune hunter. As her factotum Evelyn Howard predicted, Emily Cavendish was poisoned and found dead in the bedroom once she shared with her hu ... (continue)

  Synopsis:

  The Styles Court lost its peace when its mistress Emily Cavendish was infatuated and got married with the young Alfred Inglethorp, a bare-faced fortune hunter. As her factotum Evelyn Howard predicted, Emily Cavendish was poisoned and found dead in the bedroom once she shared with her husband. Invited by Captain Hastings, a friend of the Cavendish’s family, Monsieur Hercule Poirot came to the Styles Court to investigate the death of Emily Cavendish and solve the mystery of a locked-room murder. While all the evidence was pointing at Alfred Inglethorp in a disadvantage position, paradoxically he did not defend for his innocence but seemed to be eager to be convicted. Was Alfred Ingethorp really innocent or was there a twisted plan behind his odious mind?

  The curtain rises: Monsieur Poirot enters the stage of crime

  Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot are my MOST favourite male detectives in English (British & American) mystery.

  “Tears came into his (Poirot) eyes. ‘In all this you see, I think of the poor Mrs. Inglethorp who is dead. She was not extravagantly loved – no. But she was very good to us Belgians – I owe her a debt.” (The Mysterious Affairs at Styles)

  To Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, methodological deduction is the method of investigation; being sentimental will not only cloud one’s judgement but also make people wave away from the truth, and thus it should be strongly discouraged. But Poirot is sentimental; he cried upon hearing the death of Emily Cavendish, and to return her kindness of sponsoring 7 Belgian refugees (including himself) coming to England, he vowed to find her murderer. Likewise, no matter how unsentimental Sherlock Holmes seems to be, occasionally we also can find the human inside this reasoning machine:

  “I have never loved, Watson, but if I did and if the woman I loved had met such an end, I might act even as our lawless lion-hunter has done.” (The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot)

  Nonetheless, if we put these two infamous detectives under one roof, they are likely to kill each other within a day or so. This is how Dr. Watson describes his roommate:

  “Mrs. Hudson, the landlady of Sherlock Holmes, was a long-suffering woman….His (Holmes’) incredible untidiness, his addiction to music at strange hours, his occasional revolver practice within doors, his weird and often malodorous scientific experiments, and the atmosphere of violence and danger which hung around him made him the very worst tenant in London.” (The Adventure of the Dying Detective)

  In contrast, our Monsieur Poirot, pays so much attention to tidiness that he almost can live with the OCD detective Adrian Monk:

  “The neatness of his (Poirot) attire was almost incredible; I believe a speck of dust would have caused him more pain than a bullet wound.”
  “John flung the match into an adjacent flower bed, a proceeding which was too much for Poirot’s feelings. He retrieved it, and buried it neatly” (The Mysterious Affairs at Styles)

  Indeed, deduction acquires neatness & tidiness in one’s thought-processing.

  “Presently, when we are calmer, we will arrange the facts, neatly, each in his proper place. We will examine and reject. Those of importance we will put on one side; those of no importance, pouf….blow them away.” (The Mysterious Affairs at Styles)

  The plot of the story is very “Agatha Christie” – Big mansion, a group of people glaring at the family’s inheritance, conspiracy and cold-blooded murder. As most detectives do, Poirot keeps Captain Hastings (as well as the readers) in the dark until the end of the book.

  Who the murderer is? Does the murder have an accomplice? If yes, who?
  Why did the murderer commit the crime?
  How did the murderer commit the crime?
  When did the murderer commit the crime?
  Where did the murderer poison the victim?

  Although the guilt of the murderer is too strong to pass under my noise without arousing any suspicion and the motive is too obvious to conceal, the questions of “how”, “when” and “where” are most difficult for me to answer. Without answering these three questions, even if I can identify who the murderer is, I solve the crime by pure guessing but not deduction. I did not have the answers until Hercule Poirot gave his explanation at the end of the book(/_\). Although we have been in the dark for too long, I cannot blame the author for not giving us enough hints. In fact the hints have already been lying in front of us since the beginning of the book (e.g. the temperature of the day) but I simply did not see them. What I can blame probably is that my grey cells have not been working properly nowadays.

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  京極堂的好夥計 said on Jul 20, 2010 | Add your feedback

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  Downloaded from eLibrary

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  Psc said on May 19, 2010 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

• 

  Hard to believe this is her Majesty's first book. Even harder to believe that this books was rejected 5 times before it was being published officially. Obviously the publisher that time were not ready to welcome the Golden Age Detective (GAD) era.

  This book introduced the famous detective, He ... (continue)

  Hard to believe this is her Majesty's first book. Even harder to believe that this books was rejected 5 times before it was being published officially. Obviously the publisher that time were not ready to welcome the Golden Age Detective (GAD) era.

  This book introduced the famous detective, Hercule Poirot. He was a retired Belgian police officer, this would make his age at least 67 according to Christie's biographer - Charles Osborne.

  Anyway, I was surprised to see that the narrator, Hasting already knew Poirot even before this fist case. I thought they came to know each other only in this case. They just bumped up to each other as Hasting was the guest of Styles and Poirot was some sort of refugee that stayed somewhere nearby.

  The murderer is not difficult to guess. Somehow we shouldn't "guess" the identity of the murderer but have to use our grey cell to deduce based on the clue. Christie is very generous with clues in this book. In fact, he clues are over abundant and over-whelming. I have to reread the books twice even after the last chapter to see where Christie placed the clues.

  Regardless you are (or your are not) Christie's fan, don't miss this book.

  Rating : 4 stars.

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  City1369 said on Feb 4, 2009 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

Book Details

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• English Books
• Hardcover 292 Pages
• ISBN-10: 0571234259
• ISBN-13: 9780571234257
• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Pub date: Jan 01, 2007
• Dimensions: 1161 mm x 903 mm x 194 mm Just how big is that?
• Also available as: Mass Market Paperback, Paperback, Audio CD, Audio Cassette, Unbound, Others and eBook
• In other languages: other languages 繁體書, 简体书, Livres Français, Deutsche Bücher, Libros en Español, Libri Italiani, Nederlandse Boeken, Česká kniha

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