Excerpt from The Mysterious Affair at Styles

I hope you are enjoying April, Autism Awareness month. Hop on over to have a look at my blog about autism awareness and acceptance if you haven’t seen it yet.

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme. Read the rules and more teasers at The Purple Booker. Anyone can play along.

I am currently re-reading Dame Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles, the first Hercule Poirot mystery. This was Agatha’s first published novel, and received good critical acclaim. She made £25 on the book for the serial rights and wondered whether pursuing writing was worthwhile. (It turned out it was.) It’s a long time since I read this book, and I am enjoying it all over again.

If the fact will not fit the theory – let the theory go.

Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles

The Mysterious Affair at Styles is a detective novel by British writer Agatha Christie. It was her first published novel, written in 1916, and published in the US and in the UK a few years later. It introduced Hercule Poirot, Inspector (later, Chief Inspector) Japp, and Arthur Hastings.

This first mystery novel by Agatha Christie was well received by reviewers. An analysis in 1990 was positive about the plot, considered the novel one of the few by Christie that is well-anchored in time and place, a story that knows it describes the end of an era, and mentions that the plot is clever. Christie had not mastered cleverness in her first novel, as “too many clues tend to cancel each other out”; this was judged a difficulty “which Conan Doyle never satisfactorily overcame, but which Christie would.”