Green Penguin Music
Caroline: Welcome to Shedunnit. I’m Caroline Crampton.
And welcome back to Green Penguin Book Club, a series within Shedunnit that documents my journey of reading and discussing every crime or green title from the main Penguin series, in order. Our book today is big one: The Mysterious Affair At Styles by Agatha Christie, Penguin 61.
But before we get into that, I’d like to update you on the Shedunnit Pledge Drive. If you’ve listened recently, you will know that every year at this time I run this little campaign over four episodes, with the aim of adding 100 new members to the Shedunnit Book Club, the podcast’s paying membership scheme that supports everything I do here. Basically, I talk about it now, so that I don’t have to talk about it for the rest of the year. At the time of recording this, just over halfway through that period, we’ve already met that 100 member goal. I’m so grateful to everyone who has joined the book club, recommended it to a friend, shared the podcast, left a review, or in some other way helped to raise its visibility. I really do appreciate the effort on your side that makes it possible for me to keep creating episodes for you.
So, what now? The Pledge Goal is met. I’m not going to move the goal posts and claim that there’s another, bigger goal that we now have to strive for just for the sake of it. We did what we set out to do, and fingers crossed what we have raised so far is going to all the rising costs for the next year. However, as a thank you to you, I’m going to leave the pledge drive perks and offer available for the rest of the period, ie until the end of November. That means, if you join the book club before then at shedunnitshow.com/pledgedrive, you can still get hold of the bonus audiobook of me reading Victorian detective stories to you, and you can still claim a free membership to give to a friend once you’ve joined (so you can do a bit of a buy one get one free if you’d like to pair up with someone else). Thank you again for all your support. Now, let’s get on with reading The Mysterious Affair At Styles.
Music
This was Christie’s first detective novel, first published in 1920, the start both of her writing career and, in a way, the golden age of detective fiction itself. This book includes the first appearance of Hercule Poirot and, as you’ll hear, lots of other elements that would come to be thought of as quintessential to Christie’s whodunnits. A rich old lady, a country house, a poisoning plot, a claustrophobic circle of suspects drawn from the victim’s friends and family — it’s all very familiar to us now, but when this novel first came out, it was the first time anyone had experienced any of this from Christie’s pen.
For those who are new to these podcasts, it’s worth knowing that the famous Penguin series with its iconic triband design included lots of different genres of books, of which crime fiction was just one, all given a number and arranged in sequence. Each genre had a colour, crime being green, of course, and I’m just reading the green penguins — that’s why the numbers I’m reading aren’t sequential. If you’d like to see the whole series and see what the next crime titles coming up are, you’ll find a full list of Penguins linked in the episode description.
To make matters slightly more complicated, this was not Agatha Christie’s first appearance in the green Penguin series, nor is it the first time The Mysterious Affair at Styles received the iconic green penguin cover. As you might remember if you listened to the second ever Green Penguin Book Club episode back in May with Christie expert John Curran, this book was first included as one of the original ten penguins in July 1935, as number six. It was there because publisher Allen Lane assumed that as Penguin’s parent company The Bodley Head had published Christie’s first book, they still held the paperback rights to it. Christie’s agents quickly disabused him of this notion, though, and The Mysterious Affair at Styles was rapidly withdrawn from the series and replaced in further print runs by The Murder on the Links as Penguin 6A — that’s the book that I discussed with John. Luckily for us, the rights issues were cleared up over the next 12 months and The Mysterious Affair at Styles rejoined the Penguin series as Penguin 61 on 29th July 1936.
The Mysterious Affair at Styles did not have a straightforward journey to publication, nor was it actually the first novel that Agatha Christie ever wrote. That honour goes to Snow upon The Desert, which has been variously described as a romantic novel and a comedy of manners, based on the winter of 1907–1908 that Agatha spent in Egypt with her mother. This book was rejected by all the publishers that saw it, and remains unpublished to this day. Then, a few years later, an idle discussion about reading material with her older sister Madge resulted into one of those antagonistic moments between siblings that has an outsize impact on one’s life. Agatha said she’d like to try and write a detective novel one day, and Madge said “I don’t think you could do it,” and then “I bet you couldn’t”. This bet was still in Agatha’s mind in 1916, when she was working as a wartime dispenser in the hospital in Torquay, and learning all about drugs and poisons. A story began to come to her, which she scribbled down in exercise books on her days off, and then typed up later, quite slowly, on her sister’s old typewriter. Later on in the year when she had some leave, she took a solo holiday to Dartmoor for two weeks and spent the whole time writing her whodunnit, completing a draft that she then edited over the next few months.
It did not fare well with publishers, though. At least six of them rejected it that we know of, and Agatha soon gave up sending it out and focused on other matters, including the return of her husband from World War One in 1918. But then in the autumn of 1919, not long after she had given birth to her daughter Rosalind, Agatha received a letter from one John Lane, an editor at The Bodley Head publishing firm. With some alterations, he was interested in publishing her novel. Agatha was so excited that she signed a very unfavourable contract that she would greatly regret in years to come. But at the time, she was thrilled to be an author at last. The major change that Lane requested of her was to the courtroom scenes towards the end of the book. Originally, as in Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room, Hercule Poirot delivered his solution to the mystery from the witness box in court during a trial. In Christie’s rewrite, the solution itself is unchanged, but is shared by Poirot during a private gathering of suspects in a drawing room, a motif that would recur regularly in Christie’s fiction in the future. For those who are curious, the original courtroom version does survive, and can be read both in John Curran’s edition of Agatha Christie’s notebooks and as an appendix some editions of the novel.
The Mysterious Affair at Styles was eventually published in late 1920 in the US and early 1921 in the UK. It received warm reviews from critics, my favourite being this from the Times Literary Supplement: “The only fault this story has is that it is almost too ingenious.” Readers were certainly keen for more from Christie and Poirot, and, as we know, the following decades would provide what they desired.
Joining me today to discuss this book is Dr Kathryn Harkup, a former chemist and writer who has written wonderfully about the scientific underpinnings of Agatha Christie’s work. Her 2016 book A is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie is essential reading for anyone who wants to know their cyanide plots from their strychnine ones. She has appeared twice on Shedunnit before, in episodes about Agatha Christie’s wartime dispensing job and the chemistry of her book The Pale Horse — both of those will be linked in the episode description too. As both a Christie fan and a chemistry expert, I can’t think of anyone better than Kathryn with whom to revisit this, one of Agatha Christie’s great poisoning plots.
Before we get into it, though, I’ll give my usual spoiler warning here. Until you hear me say that we are “entering the spoiler zone”, you can safely listen without hearing major plot details. The timestamp for that point will also be in the episode description. After that, you can expect to hear major spoilers, up to and including the full solution to the mystery. For maximum enjoyment of Green Penguin Book Club episodes, I recommend that you read the book ahead of listening. And at the end of every episode, I ask my guest to award the book a rating, so stay tuned to the end to hear how many green penguins out of five Kathryn gives this one and why.
Music
Caroline: Shall we start at the beginning? Kathryn, how did you first come to read The Mysterious Affair at Styles?
Kathryn: I know that I read a lot of Agatha Christie when I was a teenager. I went through the Agatha Christie section in my local library, and I know I read a lot of Hercule Poirot stories, I preferred them to Miss Marple. So it was probably then, but I have gone back to this book so many times, I couldn’t tell you the first time anymore. So it’s been with me for a long time, and I’ve revisited it in reading it from many different points of view since then. I’m too old, it’s obscure in the mists of time.
Caroline: The first time you read it then will have been like the first time I read it, just for the sake of a really good murder mystery, seeking more of Christie that you already knew.
Kathryn: Pure entertainment.
Caroline: And then you said later you came to it with different angles in mind. What kind of things drew you back to it?
Kathryn: I think, certainly I go in and out of phases of reading Agatha Christie. And sometimes it is just pure entertainment. It’s just escapism for an afternoon. Oh, this will be a good book. It’ll just occupy me for a few hours. It’ll be lovely. A bit of nostalgia. And then you read about it, it’s oh, I vaguely remember that, I can’t remember who did it, or it’s on TV, so you get a reminder.
And then later, when I got to write about Agatha Christie and her poisons, I read it purely from the poisons point of view, studying all the chemistry, the clues that she gave away. When I reread it for this podcast, I was looking at all the other stuff that I’d completely failed to miss the previous four or five times I’ve read it, and there were still things that I picked up on. It’s like, oh, I didn’t realise she hinted at that. So it stands up to a reread, even when you know whodunit.
Caroline: It is a really impressive book. That was my big takeaway coming back to it after a period of years to prepare for this. Astonishing debut. I don’t know that I know of a better debut novel.
Kathryn: Yeah, she just comes out of the gate almost fully formed. It is a bit messy by Agatha Christie’s standards. It’s not messy by general standards, but by Agatha Christie, I think she got cleaner in the way she told her stories further on.
So many of the tropes and the things that we love about Agatha Christie are in this book from the very beginning. This fussy, pernickety Belgian detective and his not so clever sidekick, and the country house and the dead bodies, it’s all there. And the humour, she’s funny from the beginning. I love her for that.
Caroline: That was something that I had not really clocked. I remembered, of course, this is the one where we meet Poirot for the first time, and I knew that Hastings was involved. When I opened the first page of the book, I was like, Oh, this is narrated by Hastings in the first person, very much in that Watson frame narrative way of he starts off saying “there’s been a lot of publicity around what is known as the Styles case and we thought it would be a good idea to set down a clean record of it” which I don’t know that she ever really did again.
I know she was very obsessed with Sherlock Holmes when she was in her teens and early 20s and so on and I think maybe that was what she was thinking about when she was framing this book. That to me also feels a little bit early, young, juvenile perhaps, she drops that later on. But yes, as you say, so many of the other elements, including the detective and all of his mannerisms, are there right from the start.
Kathryn: That’s what I picked up on this time when I read it, was how much she was picking and choosing from existing crime literature. So that introduction of this is the story I’m going to narrate. You can read that in Gaston Leroux. You can read it in Sherlock Holmes. That was a given way of introducing a crime story. So she’s borrowed and adapted to her own purposes, I think much more in this novel than in others. In later novels she knew all of those tropes and she played around with them, very tongue in cheek, but this time she’s almost doing it by the book.
This is how you write a detective story, I’m gonna tick the boxes as I go along. Not that that’s bad, but you can certainly see her knowledge of existing crime literature is extensive, and she’s picked up on the best bits of it.
Caroline: I was comparing it in my mind as well to what comes immediately after , and I think this feels more accomplished in some ways. Thinking about things like The Man in the Brown Suit or The Secret of Chimneys, those kind of books that are in the first half of the 1920s.
And I wonder whether the publication history of the book, the fact that she wrote it back in 1916, worked on it a long time, sent it around lots of different publishers, that it took a while, that it’s matured for longer in her brain. And then she was on this, got to get them out, got to please the publisher schedule.
And then she came back up into her own with the ones from 1925 onwards, maybe, was how I was thinking about it as I was reading it.
Kathryn: Yeah, her golden era in the 30s and early 40s, some of the stuff she wrote through the Second World War is astonishingly good. This is when all of her real classics came out, and she wasn’t quite there in The Mysterious Affair at Styles. She was a long way towards it, but she wasn’t quite there.
Yeah, maybe you’re right. She got this one out. She thought about it. She was thinking about all of these tropes of detective fiction. And when she went on to things like The Secret of Chimneys and some of those more adventure, spy thriller esque stories, I think they were also very light hearted, but they are a slightly different genre.
And she also tapped into the tropes of those genres when she was writing them. But they are much more loosely plotted. They’re not as detailed over the clueing because they don’t need to be. You’re swept along by the story and the characters in it. Whereas obviously, the whole point of Agatha Christie, not the whole point, but a lot of the point of Agatha Christie’s novels, is there is a puzzle to solve and I’m going to lay out all the clues for you and see if you get there before the detective.
Caroline: I do want to get into the poisoning and the chemistry of it all, but before we do, you mentioned that you noticed other things apart from that when you were rereading this time. What were those things that came to your attention?
Kathryn: Agatha Christie’s plots are significantly helped by the fact that medical attention always arrives late. Otherwise we wouldn’t have a dead body to speculate over. There would be no mystery, or very little mystery. But this time a doctor does arrive, they’re too late, but he does administer what was for the time, accepted CPR. CPR as a thing wasn’t really established, but of course people tried to revive people who were clearly close to death, and he does everything right.
He’s moving the arms, trying to expand the chest so that air will get into the lungs, and all of the right things it just doesn’t work. He arrives too late and I was surprised that first aid was even attempted in this first novel because there’s many other novels I can think of for an example The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side.
A woman dies after drinking a cocktail at a party. And this party is specifically fundraising for the St. John’s Ambulance. Is there no one in that house that knows how to do first aid, please? There’s no attempt made whatsoever, because then we wouldn’t have a mystery to solve. So it was interesting to me that it was included, she gave a specific detail, whereas she glosses over it in all the other novels I can think of.
Caroline: That’s such a good point. I hadn’t clocked that at all, but you’re completely right. The doctor in Agatha Christie is mostly a writing death certificate job, not a treating patient job.
Kathryn: No, they’re checking a pulse, they’re maybe holding a mirror to the mouth, this person has ceased to be. Sometimes they say, oh, we worked on her. Well, what the hell does that mean? What do you mean worked on her? It’s always very vague and a lot of the times her victims are deliberately put into situations where medical help cannot arrive in time. And she’s very clever at setting up those situations. But in Mysterious Affair at Styles, yes, there is opportunity, the doctor arrives, the patient is still alive, barely, and does a very specific piece of first aid.
Caroline: And also, isn’t one of the doctors, Dr Bauerstein he’s an expert in poisons, right? So it’s almost as if you’ve summoned the exact person who would be able to give the initial clue to your crime.
Kathryn: Exactly, and he is on the spot and the poor dying woman sees him. And this expert in poisons is standing next to a GP, and at no point says to him, Stop with that. What you need is the antidote. Have you got it? And everything could have been resolved, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t interrupt the process because again, it’s all too late.
Caroline: Yes, I suppose one non medical function of having her be witnessed alive is that she gets to do the dying, not confession, but the The dying accusation.
Kathryn: Yeah, is it an accusation or is it, she’s delirious. She’s dying. She doesn’t know what she’s saying. Christie put in a few of those moments, so you could read it as a true clue or a red herring. And again, as with many of her clues, it’s up to you how you interpret them, and if you interpret them correctly without the, amazing foresight of Poirot and Marple.
Caroline: Yes. Something else that I was very struck by in this book is that it is very much a wartime novel. Even though it’s published in 1920, Christie was writing it during the First World War and that’s when she sets it too. Lots of little details all bring that together that I hadn’t remembered.
Hastings is home on leave from the front, having been injured. Cynthia, one of the other characters who lives in the house, she is in fact doing the job Agatha Christie had during the First World War. She’s working in a hospital dispensary. Mrs Inglethorp, the victim, the lady of the manor, is on a million committees raising money for all kinds of war efforts. And very important, as it turns out, there are all of these household economies that the big house is demonstrating that are supposed to be helping the war effort.
That came across to me much more strongly than I remember it doing in the past, maybe because I’ve been doing this podcast for half a decade and paying attention to these things now, but just this feeling that, oh, there’s a war on. That’s very much the situation we’re in here. We’re not having fun in the sun on a long weekend in the 1920s.
Kathryn: It is amazing how Agatha Christie’s works they always feel very dated. And I mean that in a good way, they are set in a specific time. There is never reference to real life world events. They always happen vaguely in the 30s or the 40s or whenever they’re set.
But there is very rarely mention of the Second World War and the fact that half of London is being bombed to smithereens. But there is repeated specific references to the war, and it is important to the plot of Styles, because there’s a clue actually that doesn’t date at all well.
It’s the green thread that’s trapped in a bolt, and this green thread comes from an armband for a uniform that was only relevant during the First World War. It became obscure as soon as that war was over and that memory had gone. So people wondering about this green thread in the bolt, unless you’re well versed on the uniforms of the First World War, good luck to you because you’re not going to get anywhere with that clue.
So it is unusual in that sense that it is so specific and so rooted in real world activities. She seems to have distanced herself in subsequent novels and made almost a fictitious world where murders just happen in a kind of safe way, away from other horrible realities of the real world.
Caroline: I, like you, really enjoy that specific datedness because I like learning about these things and I also like experiencing through these novels what was popular and what was common knowledge at the time and exactly that kind of detail, like the uniforms, that would have been probably very obvious or quite obvious to people reading in 1920.
It’s not obvious at all in 2024, but it does tell us something about where the people who were reading it fresh, who were buying it as a brand new book, where they were mentally. And yeah, I find that so interesting.
Kathryn: Certainly from a, science point of view, it’s also interesting what people do in a hospital dispensary that would not be allowed today. Sitting around and just having tea in a hospital dispensary. No, this is a professional place of work. Especially given that they are mixing potentially lethal compounds, in that very space. You don’t serve up tea and cakes. So the accepted levels of health and safety in the practice of dispensing and science is, again, very different from my point of view and my experience in that world. limited as it is.
Caroline: Let us now enter the spoiler zone and talk about all plot details in full. So if you don’t want to hear them, please pause now and come back when you’ve finished reading the book. I wanted to ask you about the dispensary and the acquisition of poisons generally that we see in this book because it does seem very relaxed and lackadaisical and oh you can just pop into the pharmacy and buy a incredibly lethal dose of a substance and just write your name in this book that’s all that’s required. Is this accurate to the time?
Kathryn: It is unfortunately accurate to the time. It is horrifying reading from a modern perspective, because we would expect these incredibly dangerous substances to be under some kind of regulation, and they were, but it was extremely haphazard. The fact that you had to fill in a poison register, so this is a physical book that is kept in shops and pharmacies, and you have to fill it in.
If you’re of a mind to kill someone, then you probably don’t have many qualms about faking your name and writing a wrong address, it just seems very inadequate and haphazard. But I think it was unfortunately normal for the time and for many years afterwards there are horrifying cases from the 1960s and 70s when people acquired really dangerous stuff from pharmacies and they should never have been able to buy them. So it is unfortunately plausible.
Caroline: Yes, because we have, in some ways, too much poison in this book, don’t we?
Kathryn: Oh, it’s everywhere.
Caroline: There are so many potential places where it can be, and people are giving each other narcotics for reasons other than murder, which, when I’ve done episodes looking at real life cases from this period and immediately before, that’s often a characteristic of the poisoning ones. I’m thinking of the Florence Maybrick case in particular. There was so much arsenic in that house, you just can’t imagine how more people didn’t die of it.
Kathryn: Poor Florence Maybrick, if she was a real life poisoner, she did a terrible job because she should have been able to kill her husband a lot quicker and easier than that.
Caroline: Exactly, and I feel shades of that a little bit in The Mysterious Affair at Styles. So Mrs Inglethorp dies of a fatal dose of strychnine. There’s strychnine in a medicine she is openly taking, which I would love to know more about, then she also has sleeping powders available to her.
Other people also have access to sleeping tablets or powders of some other kind. Mrs Inglethorp’s ward, Cynthia, works in a hospital dispensary where she seems to be allowed to just make up medicines for friends and family off the books however she likes.
Kathryn: I know. Can you imagine? You can take a pen home, maybe, or a ream of paper from work and not many people notice, but you start taking drugs out of a dispensary, people get upset. People want to track that stuff down, but it seems to be allowed.
Caroline: And Cynthia is also having guests, as you say, to tea in the dispensary and there’s a vague suggestion when I think it’s Hastings and Lawrence Cavendish go to tea with her there and at one point she says, oh Lawrence come in here, don’t stay in there on your own, you’re not supposed to. But she’s not really making a big effort on security.
Kathryn: No, none of this stuff, even if there is good practice, it doesn’t seem to be very stringently enforced. It’s, oh, it’s okay, we know this person, we’ll just let them wander around. Like I say, it’s very haphazard, the way the rules are applied, or it seems to be.
Caroline: And because Agatha Christie had this experience of dispensing and working in a hospital dispensary herself, I’m forced to conclude that there is at least a kernel of truth in this, that she either did this or witnessed this in some way herself.
Kathryn: I suspect, given how accurate her details are in other respects, that this would be an accurate portrayal of life in a dispensary in a hospital during the First World War.
Caroline: Which is kind of horrifying to think about.
Kathryn: It is mind blowing. Yeah.
Caroline: So we have all of these, potentially lethal substances, legally or openly in the house. Then we also have different potential ways, Poirot has different ways in which they could have been administered to Mrs Inglethorp. He’s looking at coffee and cocoa and medicine and also food, I think are the four main ways.
And without much actual chemical analysis, he’s able to eliminate different ones because of various circumstances and so on. And in the end he’s able to show that it is the medicine that she took, or rather it is the interaction of three different drugs that ultimately brings about her death.
Can you talk us through that and explain how it would have worked?
Kathryn: In terms of using three poisons to kill one person may seem excessive, but actually it’s, I think, an example, an early example of Christie’s brilliant use of chemicals for very specific purposes. She didn’t just pick poisons at random. So we have the strychnine medicine that is prescribed to Mrs Inglethorp and she is taking this because it’s a tonic, it’s a pick me up. So the idea is that the strychnine, first of all, it has a very bitter taste, an extraordinarily bitter taste. And the thinking at the time was that this bitter taste would increase your appetite. It’s nonsense, but that was the thinking at the time.
It also means that it’s very difficult to just sprinkle on the evening meal and expect people to eat it, because, roast potatoes are getting spat out straight away, because it’s just going to taste horrible. So you have to look at bitter tasting stuff that she might have or drank. So that’s why they look at the coffee, because coffee is quite bitter.
Is it bitter enough to mask the strychnine? Possibly not. So you can eliminate a lot of stuff from a very basic understanding of strychnine. I think it would have been well understood that strychnine tasted bitter. So that’s explanatory.
The second idea behind giving strychnine tonic to people was that it would invigorate their nerves. Because strychnine is a nerve poison, and strychnine does invigorate your nerves, but not in a good way. So it’s no longer used as a medicine, and I have had people come up to me after I’ve given talks and things, and said, oh I was given strychnine when I was a child with double pneumonia, so it was still just about in living memory that this stuff was in medical use.
So the idea is it invigorates your nerves and of course if you have too much of it, it invigorates those nerves to a point that all of the muscles in your body become contracted in an absolutely agonising fashion. You are arched backwards because the muscles on your back are stronger than the muscles on your front.
So all of this is accurately described with Mrs Inglethorp resting on her heels and her head and her back not touching the bed underneath her. And she has periods of convulsions and then periods where her nerves are overwhelmed and she collapses. So all of it absolutely spot on. Now obviously if you’ve got strychnine in a tonic it’s not supposed to do that in the dosage that is recommended.
So the first question is has the pharmacist made it up wrong? No, they haven’t. It’s the interaction of a second drug that is important and these are the sleeping powders that you were talking about. There were several options available in terms of sleeping powders at the time, but the one that Mrs Inglethorp has gone for are bromide powders. And this is very simply potassium bromide, a very simple salt, and you mixed it with water, swallowed it down, an hour or so later you would feel sleepy and you would sleep better. The problem is if you mix the bromide with the strychnine, you get a little chemical reaction and the strychnine crystallises out as little solid.
So you get little crystals forming and they sink to the bottom of your strychnine tonic bottle. And if you’re very careful not to shake the bottle when you’re pouring out your daily medicine, you can take an entire lethal dose with the last spoonful, which is precisely how Mrs Inglethorp dies. So this is how the lethal component is administered.
The third chemical that is involved is to do with delaying symptoms. So I always warn people, if you are reading an Agatha Christie and there’s a very specific time frame, doubt it immediately, because she can manipulate those time frames at will. And the way she does it in Styles is that she gives Mrs Inglethorp a third drug which is described as a narcotic, but actually what Christie means is it’s an opiate.
So opiates, well known for pain relief, inducing sleep, they also as a side effect, slow the muscles of your gut. So you slow the movement of the strychnine through the digestive system, and it’s held in the stomach where it can’t be absorbed into the body and it can’t take effect. So you delay the onset of symptoms, and it means you have a rock solid alibi somewhere else entirely when the fatal symptoms start to appear. This is how brilliant she is, the combination of the three work together to set up this particular puzzle.
Caroline: And from what you’re saying, it sounds like it’s all perfectly accurate. No literary liberties have been taken. This would work.
Kathryn: Certainly I believe some literary liberties have been taken because the description of how the strychnine and the potassium bromide interact is lifted almost word for word out of a certain book. And it’s a book called The Art of Dispensing, which Christie probably studied as part of her exams.
So maybe when she was leafing through this book, looking something up, she stumbled across this and thought, aha, this is the perfect way to kill off a little old lady, we’ll mix two drugs together. And it’s also how a murderer might come across this information, because these books, as well as the medicines and the poisons being freely available, this kind of information is just scattered all over the place.
And it’s within the accessible range of many characters within this book, which keeps the field of suspects nice and wide open, because this would appear to be very specialist knowledge. But of course, she has set it up so that it isn’t as specialist as you might think.
Caroline: Yes, because Cynthia is studying to be a dispenser or has studied to be a dispenser. The books have been all around the house. Since all the suspects live in the house with her anyway, any of them could quite naturally pick up one of her books and go, I wonder what Cynthia’s on at the moment and encounter…
Kathryn: Absolutely. You also have another member of the family who studied to be a doctor. Even though they gave up those studies, you have a poison expert in residence, you have other people who are related to medical people, so there are an awful lot of ways of finding out this information.
Caroline: The idea of using the bromide to precipitate the strychnine is such an interesting one I think from a narrative point of view, because by taking the entire poison contents of the tonic and making it into one dose rather than the intended, I don’t know how many doses were in the bottle, 30 or something, you are removing the requirement to acquire more poison, you’re just concentrating what’s already there into one dose, which seems a very good way to kill undetected.
Kathryn: Absolutely. It’s a method that she used more than once, when you think about it, the misuse of too much or too little of a medicine. It’s a repeated theme in her books. She has people who should be taking heart medicine, but for whatever reason it’s withheld from them. Or they deliberately give an excess of that heart medicine. Medicines are switched around. Someone’s taking two things and bottles get swapped over or labels get swapped over. So it is a common way that she used to dispose of her characters, even though the poison or medicine in question changes all the time.
Caroline: Something that I really was struck by rereading this book this time is something that Poirot says quite late on, that if the pair of criminals who were responsible for this plan, if they’d just done it and let it be, they almost certainly would have got away with it. It was their elaboration, it was their attempt to throw suspicion onto someone else and create extra alibis and clues that gave him the purchase to unravel the whole thing. But if they’d just done the business with the medicine and nothing else, then it would have been a successful crime.
Kathryn: Oh, absolutely. And again, that is another theme that crops up again and again in Agatha Christie and other murder mysteries. If you’ve just done the obvious, the very simple, don’t overcomplicate it. Don’t kill people, obviously, but if you’re gonna you have to make it as simple as possible and cover your tracks cleanly and efficiently.
Don’t try and divert suspicion on someone else because it never works. I don’t know that it never works. We wouldn’t know if it, anyway. No, don’t kill people.
Caroline: Yes, I have that thought a lot . We hear about the unsuccessful murderers, not the successful ones, but yes, I absolutely know what you mean. That it is all of their shenanigans with false beards, and signing registers in other people’s handwritings, and so on. And pretending to hate each other when they don’t, and those are the things that give Poirot enough anomalies to start stringing together the real picture of what happened and none of them were actually essential to the central crime.
Kathryn: No, and I think this is actually an example of Christie learning her trade, as it were, with her first book. She absolutely stuffs this novel full of clues and red herrings, and wading through all of them is hard work. It works in her favour because it’s hard work for the detective, but it’s also hard work for us as a reader to keep track of all these little details that may link up to each other, might not be relevant etc.
And it is interesting to see how when you know whodunit, when you reread the book, you can see how heavy handed she is in some of the clueing and how she emphasises some things and not others. And I have to say, she is remarkably fair in Styles, I think. She lays emphasis where she needs to, and she makes light of other stuff that is relatively unimportant. It’s not like she’s trying to cheat us or pull the wool, well she is, but, in a fair way.
Caroline: I agree. I think this book plays very fair. It’s all there. And one thing that helps with it, I think, is actually the first person narration by Hastings, because he’s supposed to be quite dim and have an exaggerated idea of his own abilities as a detective. The one clue that comes to mind in relation to that is the one of Mrs Inglethorp having a fire on a hot day to burn a will she’s just made because she’s just found out something terrible probably about her husband and she wants to revoke a will she’s made in his favour. We are told by a servant very early on that she has been asked by Mrs Inglethorp to make this fire. We’ve also been told that it’s a hot day, because Hastings has been going on for pages before about how beautiful the weather is and how nice it is to not be in France fighting and all of this kind of stuff. He never makes the connection between
Kathryn: No, but then nobody else in the household does either, to be fair, there’s a servant going around saying, oh, the mistress wants a fire, and no one’s going, really? It’s sweltering.
Caroline: Why? Yes.
Kathryn: Is she feeling okay? There’s no concern about this. It’s only Poirot who spots it. But it is very heavily emphasised.
Caroline: But yeah so I think she is helped in some ways by Hastings’ happy go lucky personality and his just general ability to let things flow past him without being overly suspicious and questioning. And I think also, part of it is that he, at various times, forms his own very decided ideas about what the solution to the mystery is and thus he’s discarding anything that doesn’t fit those theories.
He’s not keeping an open mind because he does have a very high opinion of his own abilities. I remember at the very beginning on his first afternoon at Styles and they’re sitting under the tree having tea and someone asks him, Oh, what do you think you might like to do after the war?
Would you stay a soldier? And he’s no, I’ve always fancied being a detective. I met this man in Belgium who was a great detective. Obviously I’ve taken his method rather further, he had some good ideas, which obviously becomes ridiculous within 50 pages.
Kathryn: There’s a wonderful bit, about two thirds of the way through maybe, where Hastings fixes on a particular suspect, the poison expert. It seems obvious, he’s a poison expert. He would use this very complicated method to kill someone. And it’s repeatedly pointed out to him that it’s a ridiculous idea several times, no, this, it doesn’t work because of this. It doesn’t work because of this. It doesn’t work because of this, but he absolutely will not listen. He is fixated and it’s extraordinary how yeah, obtuse he can be at times.
Caroline: What did you make of Poirot as a detective in this book? Is he already at the height of his powers, do you think? Or does he mature into that role of great detective?
Kathryn: He’s obviously a great detective because he spots all the things that everybody else misses no matter how obvious they were. He is still very much the active detective. He’s running all over the place despite being retired, having a limp, apparently, which was a surprise to me. I didn’t remember that.
And yeah, he’s darting all over the place, actively looking for clues, taking samples, getting them analysed running about all over the place. And that is not the very sedentary detective I remember from the later novels, who will just sit in his very square armchair with his fingertips pressed together, thinking and just listening and talking to people.
So I think as a character, he wasn’t quite there. I think Christie was very much mimicking the Sherlock Holmes style of analysing the 30 different types of cigarette ash and all the rest of it. So it was very much in that vein, and she moved on from that.
She didn’t need to rely on those tropes in later novels, but it serves its purpose in this one. So no, I don’t think as a character he is fully developed, obviously his powers of deduction, I think, are fully there. He is clearly well respected by other law enforcement agencies and other detectives.
The extraordinary thing is he allows certain traumatic events to play out, even though he knows that he could put a stop to them. The ego of the man seems to be fully developed at this point.
Caroline: Yes.
Kathryn: Even if he gets rather lazier physically in later books, his ego is already the size of a planet. It’s incredible.
Caroline: I’d forgotten about that until this reread, the fact that he lets an innocent man go to trial for murder on the basis that he thinks it will help his marriage.
Kathryn: And this is a time when being found guilty of murder had the death penalty. There are significant and irrevocable consequences of being found guilty of murder. But he’s just so self assured, he’s oh no, he won’t get convicted. And even if it does look like he’s going to get convicted, he’ll just appear at the right moment and just dismiss all of this evidence with a twirl of his moustache.
Why would you do that to a person? But again, this is the ego. If you read the Sherlock Holmes or some of the other detective stories of the time, the extraordinary ego of these men, being said, Oh, yes, I could tell you right now who did it. But, let me play it out my way.
Are you serious? This family is under extraordinary stress. They’ve just lost a family member in the most horrific circumstances. And you’re like no, I do it my way. You absolute so and so. Yeah, he’s very much in that vein. And I’m glad to say that he is, I think, more sympathetic in later novels to his victims.
Caroline: Yes, I think that’s right. But he does, the theatricality remains. It’s always at this incredibly high level. I’m thinking of the denouement of Peril at End House, for instance, which has a similarly unnecessarily hurtful and showman like ending.
Kathryn: Yeah. I just, the brutality of some of these detectives and how they reveal who done it in front of people who are really suffering. It’s yeah. I don’t think you could do it today.
Caroline: No, nor should you. But it is entertaining on the page, for sure. The meeting at the end that he convenes with all or most of the principal characters in which he rehearses everything that he’s found out. And then the classic, the culprit leaps up and demands to know, how did you find that out? And thus gives himself away. Yeah, it makes for great reading. Even if you think about it for more than two seconds, you think, no, absolutely not.
Kathryn: And this is why I think the artificiality of Christie really helps her stories because these are horrific things that are going on. If you think about it from a human perspective for even a second, what is going on is horrible, but because it’s an artificial world, it’s somehow okay that people behave this way. And perhaps that’s why she didn’t make it so real world in subsequent stories. Because then you do become uneasy about how these people are being treated.
Caroline: Yes, I think that’s a good point. And I think as detective fiction of this type accelerated in popularity as well through the 1920s, the sheer volume of stuff that people were reading. I don’t think it, you could bear it. I think it would be too awful if you were reading a detective novel a week and they were all absolutely realist. Yeah, the genre is very much built on a foundation of an alternate reality, where all of this is really fine.
Kathryn: I think it was Raymond Chandler who said, if these stories were in any way realistic, they would only be read by psychopaths. Because the reality is too awful. You wouldn’t sit down and just, for a bit of light entertainment, delve into this world.
Caroline: Yeah, and that’s why I do think The Mysterious Affair at Styles is such an interesting artefact coming at the beginning of this Golden Age Detective fiction and also at the beginning of Christie’s career because it does feel like she lets some things through that wouldn’t get through if she didn’t five years later.
Mrs Inglethorp’s death, the description of her deathbed is one that comes to mind. As you’ve said, very accurate portrayal of what strychnine does to someone and the agony involved in how you can’t save them and all of this sort of thing. That feels too upsetting, in a way, to be in a murder mystery novel.
Kathryn: Absolutely. You mentioned the fact that this is set very much during the First World War. There is absolutely no mention of the horrific human toll that is going on in that particular conflict. It’s all off somewhere else. The fact that this particular murder case is reported in the papers at all is because there’s not much going on in the war at the moment, and it all seems very jolly and very, not real.
I can’t imagine it was the reality of anyone who worked in a hospital, who saw the people coming back from the front. They knew what was going on. They must have had some insight. I don’t know, maybe the rest of the world shielded from that slightly, didn’t really want to know. Maybe it is one of those things that is too awful you don’t include.
Caroline: Yes, I do think about all of Mrs Inglethorp’s charitable activities and there’s a description right before the murder takes place, I think the night before, where they take part in a fundraising benefit for the war effort and Mrs Inglethorp recites a poem and Cynthia’s in some tableau scenes, but I presume she’s, I don’t know, dressed up as a Greek goddess or something like that, wearing a sheet.
Everyone agrees that it’s been wonderful and incredibly worthwhile and very helpful and yet you think if you were to actually compare that with the reality, just lying in the hospital in your own town or just a few short miles away. But the novel does not invite that comparison or want you to think about it.
Kathryn: No, and it probably didn’t need to because the readers at the time knew those comparisons and they didn’t need it underlined to them. It is a very different experience reading it a hundred years later.
Caroline: Yes. I definitely have come out of this rereading and our discussion with a more nuanced appreciation for this book. I think I’d previously thought of it as very much, oh, it’s just the first one and it introduces Poirot and it’s good in some ways, but it’s clunky in others. Actually, I think it, it bears near endless rereading. There’s always something new to find in it.
How would you rate your experience of rereading it now? How many Green Penguins out of five would you give it?
Kathryn: I’m gonna give it four out of five green penguins simply because it is as you say, so accomplished for a debut novel and a debut detective story, but it is not Christie at her finest. Christie at her finest is superb and it is a little clunky, a little reliant on existing tropes and conventions in detective story drama, and she was better than that, but she was learning her trade. So it is interesting, but it’s not quite top notch Christie for me.
Caroline: That’s wonderful. Thank you very much for joining me for Green Penguin Book Club, Kathryn.
Kathryn: Thank you.
Music
And now, we have reached the postbag section, where I catch you up on the correspondence I’ve received since our last Green Penguin Book Club episode. Lots of you seemed to really enjoy my last instalment, looking at Penguin 58, The Poisoned Chocolates Case with Martin Edwards. One member of the Shedunnit Book Club even described this as their favourite guest episode ever, which given that I’ve now done 149 episodes of this podcast is high praise indeed. I heard from plenty of people that they were reading or rereading the book after hearing our discussion, which really is the whole point of this thing. As you might remember, Martin rated that book five green penguins out of five, and several listeners reported back that they wholeheartedly concurred with giving this book full marks. Martin’s new additional ending to The Poisoned Chocolates Case also came in for some praise, with one person saying that it was hard to spot the difference between his style and that of Anthony Berkeley.
Of course, the most famous thing about The Poisoned Chocolates Case is its multiple solutions, each offered by a different member of the “Crimes Circle” that have gathered to solve a case together. Listener Sarah wrote in to offer a different perspective on this. She said: “To me, the numerous different solutions eventually felt less like reading the contributions of separate characters and more like reading the evolving deductive process of a single detective. Not a bad thing either way though.” I found this intriguing, that even though the deductions come from different characters, they do all have the flavour of a single underlying intelligence, ie the author, Anthony Berkeley.
Thanks very much to everyone who got in touch — please do email caroline@shedunnitshow.com if you have a comment you’d like to submit for inclusion in a future episode. This is not the last Shedunnit episode of the year, but it is the last Green Penguin Book Club episode in 2024, so we’ll be back next year with the next crime title in the Penguin series, Penguin number 62, The Missing Moneylender by W. Stanley Sykes. This is part of what I love about this series — we go from a book like The Mysterious Affair at Styles that is still incredibly famous, to this one that I had never heard of before I began this project. Best of luck to everyone trying to track a copy down, and I look forward to talking about it with you in 2025.
Music
This episode of Shedunnit was produced and hosted by me, Caroline Crampton. My guest was Dr Kathryn Harkup. You can find out more about her and her books at her website, harkup.co.uk.
If you’d like more from the podcast, including extra interviews, behind the scenes commentaries and the chance to read a book each month with a community of other mystery lovers, join the Shedunnit Book Club now at shedunnitbookclub.com.
It’s an especially good time to join, because we are currently in the middle of the Shedunnit Pledge Drive, the annual event where I ask the podcast’s community to help me fund it for another year. If you’d like to be part of that and get an excellent free audiobook of pre golden age detective stories read by me, join now at shedunnitshow.com/pledgedrive.
You can find a full list of the books we mentioned in this episode at shedunnitshow.com/themysteriousaffairatstyles. I publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.
Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece. Production assistance from Leandra Griffith. Member support for the Shedunnit Book Club from CC McLoughlin.
Thanks for listening.
Sorry, comments are closed for this post.