C-SPL Online Book Club Reads The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie

The C-SPL Online Book Club will start discussing The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie on Monday, May 18, 2020. You can use your Facebook account to join the C-SPL Online Book Club found on Carnegie-Stout Public Library's Facebook page.

Until then, here are some spoiler-free background notes about the book and author from www.agathachristie.com and various Wikipedia articles:

The Mysterious Affair at Styles is a detective novel by British mystery writer Agatha Christie. Christie (1890-1976) is thought to be the best selling fiction writer of all time. Her 66 mystery novels and 14 short-story collections have sold over two billion copies, and she is one of the world's most translated authors.

Known as the "Queen of Mystery," Christie won the first Mystery Writers of America's Grand Master Award in 1955, and was voted "best crime writer" by the Crime Writers’ Association in 2013.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles was Christie's first published novel. Her sister Madge dared Christie to try to write a mystery that readers could not solve even though they had all of the same clues as the detective.

Christie wrote the novel in 1916, but it was rejected by 6 publishers before it was finally released in the U.S. in 1920 and the U.K. in 1921. It was also serialized in 18 parts in The Times of London in 1920.

When The Mysterious Affair at Styles was published in 1920, The New York Times Book Review said, "Though this may be the first published book of Miss Agatha Christie, she betrays the cunning of an old hand . . . you will be kept guessing at its solution and will most certainly never lay down this most entertaining book."

Besides being Christie's first published novel, this was also the first appearance of the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, who would become one of the most famous characters in mystery fiction.

Hercule Poirot (pronounced er-cule pwa-roh) appeared in 33 novels, 2 plays, and more than 50 short stories published between 1920 and 1975. He was the only fictional character to have an obituary published on the front page of The New York Times.

The character of Poirot was inspired by the Belgian refugees who settled in Christie's hometown of Torquay in Devon, England during World War I, where Christie worked at a hospital dispensary while writing her novel, a setting which also appears in the story.

Christie was also influenced by the English novelist Wilkie Collins, and by the popular Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, with Poirot as the eccentric detective, his clueless friend Arthur Hastings as narrator, and a case that even Scotland Yard cannot solve.

An image from "The Mysterious Affair at Styles" from
the Project Gutenberg eBook at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/863/863-h/863-h.htm

The Mysterious Affair at Styles is an early example of a closed circle mystery which features a limited number of suspects who could have credibly committed a crime. The British country house was a classic setting of such mysteries in the 1920s and 1930s, an era known as "The Golden Age of Detective Fiction."

The Mysterious Affair at Styles is always available to check out as an eBook from Overdrive/Libby collection with your City of Dubuque library card. The eBook is also available for free without a library card at Project Gutenberg.

Carnegie-Stout Public Library’s discussion of The Mysterious Affair at Styles will start on May 18 on Facebook. We hope you will join us for the discussion!

~Mike, Adult Services