The Mysterious Affair at Styles

Agatha Christie’s very first novel introduces a detective who would become one of fiction’s most beloved: Hercule Poirot, the fastidious Belgian refugee with his egg-shaped head and his little grey cells. Invalided home from the Great War, Captain Hastings visits the country house of Styles, where the wealthy Emily Inglethorp is soon found dead of strychnine poisoning. Suspicion falls first on her much younger husband, but a tangle of alibis, a burned scrap of a will, and a locked bedroom demands a sharper mind. Narrated by Hastings and built around a clever, fair-play puzzle, the book set the pattern for the classic English whodunit. It still makes a satisfying introduction to Christie’s craft. This free PDF and EPUB edition offers the complete novel.