In the Library
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
Agatha Christie, 1920
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 4 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 13
- Length
- Length 56k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
In the public domain in the United States only: this edition is sold and read there and nowhere else.
"Every murderer is probably somebody's old friend," observed Poirot philosophically. "You cannot mix up sentiment and reason."
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
The Hound of the Baskervilles
Arthur Conan Doyle
Another genial narrator trails a brilliant, theatrical detective across the English countryside to a crime the locals cannot explain, and the narrator misses the point until the end.
£1.99
The Woman in White
Wilkie Collins
The Woman in White does the same thing with a country house, a household of secrets and a patient investigator, but spreads the telling across several voices over a long, swirling book.
£1.99
About the book
Agatha Christie spent the war counting out poisons in a Torquay hospital dispensary, and she learned exactly how strychnine kills. That knowledge runs through her first novel like a cold vein. At Styles Court, a country house in Essex, wealthy old Emily Inglethorp dies in convulsions behind bolted bedroom doors, and nearly everyone under her roof has a reason to want her money, or her silence. Into this stifling household walks a small Belgian refugee with an egg-shaped head and a serene faith in his little grey cells. Hercule Poirot is born here fully formed, straightening the ornaments on a mantelpiece while everyone else panics, and the pleasure of watching him is the pleasure of watching a mind that refuses to be hurried. Christie lays the clues in plain sight: a burnt scrap of paper, a coffee cup ground to powder, a will written that very afternoon. Read slowly and she will still fool you, and you will adore being fooled, which is the spell she went on casting for half a century.