The Mysterious Affair at Styles

Summary

Captain Arthur Hastings, invalided home from the Western Front in 1916, meets his old friend John Cavendish and is invited to Styles Court, the Cavendish family's country house in Essex. The house belongs for her lifetime to John's stepmother, the generous and domineering Emily Inglethorp, who has recently married Alfred Inglethorp, a bearded man about twenty years younger whom the family suspect of wanting her money. The household includes John's reserved wife Mary, his brother Lawrence, the orphaned Cynthia Murdoch, who works in the dispensary of the Red Cross hospital at Tadminster, and Mrs. Inglethorp's blunt companion Evelyn Howard, who leaves after a quarrel, warning Hastings to watch Alfred. In the nearby village Hastings meets Hercule Poirot, a retired Belgian detective whom Mrs. Inglethorp has sheltered with other refugees. On 17 July a violent quarrel is heard from her boudoir, and that afternoon she makes a new will. Early the next morning the household is roused: Mrs. Inglethorp, behind bolted doors, dies in convulsions, crying out her husband's name. The doctors find strychnine poisoning. Poirot examines the room, collecting a coffee stain, candle grease, a forced despatch-case, a fragment of green cloth and the charred remains of a will in the grate on a hot July night. At the inquest a chemist's assistant testifies that Alfred Inglethorp bought strychnine, but Inglethorp refuses to say where he was; Poirot surprises Hastings by preventing his arrest, producing proof that he was elsewhere. Suspicion moves to Dr. Bauerstein, a toxicologist who turns out to be under watch as a spy, and then to John Cavendish, who is arrested and tried. At the trial, defended by Sir Ernest Heavywether, John is in danger of conviction when Poirot finds the last link: torn strips of a letter that Inglethorp had rolled into spills in the vase on the mantelpiece, which Poirot himself had straightened in a moment of nervous tidiness. Poirot explains that Alfred Inglethorp and Evelyn Howard, secretly lovers and cousins, plotted together: Evelyn, disguised as Alfred, bought the poison to give him a deliberate, provable alibi, and bromide powders added to Mrs. Inglethorp's strychnine tonic made the last dose deadly. Mary had drugged the cocoa with a harmless narcotic for her own reasons, which delayed the symptoms. Inglethorp and Miss Howard are arrested, John and Mary are reconciled, and Lawrence and Cynthia are engaged. Written during the war, the novel was published in the United States by John Lane in 1920 and in Britain in 1921.

Top Lessons

• Let the theory go

  Poirot scolds Hastings for ignoring a fact that does not fit his idea. The whole novel trains the reader in this discipline: every clue, from the candle grease to the spill-vase, must be accounted for, and the obvious suspect is cleared precisely because the evidence against him is too neat.

• Gratitude as a debt

  Poirot came to Styles St. Mary as a refugee helped by Mrs. Inglethorp, and he speaks of paying his debts to her. His work is an act of gratitude and justice for a benefactress, not a game, even though he enjoys the puzzle.

• Masks within a family

  Nearly everyone at Styles hides something: Mary her drugging of the cocoa and her friendship with Bauerstein, John his visits to Mrs. Raikes, Lawrence his fear for Cynthia. These smaller secrets almost hang an innocent man and shelter the guilty. Christie shows how ordinary concealments can obstruct justice.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The novel is built on accurate pharmacology. Mrs. Inglethorp takes a tonic containing strychnine, then a common stimulant ingredient; the solution turns on the chemical fact that adding a bromide to such a mixture precipitates the strychnine, so that the last dose in the bottle becomes lethal. Her death, with convulsions, rigidity and a delayed onset explained by a narcotic in her cocoa, follows the textbook course of strychnine poisoning, and the Pharmaceutical Journal praised the book's accuracy. Christie drew on her own war work in the dispensary of the Red Cross hospital in Torquay, which also lies behind Cynthia's poison cupboard at Tadminster and its rules for scheduled drugs. The inquest shows the period's machinery of medical evidence: the general practitioner Dr. Wilkins, the toxicologist Dr. Bauerstein, the post-mortem and the analyst's report, and the poison register that purchasers had to sign at the chemist's. Hastings's convalescence from a war wound frames the story, and Mary's use of a sleeping draught on Mrs. Inglethorp and Cynthia shows how freely hypnotics were kept in households.

• Chapter III

  Mrs. Inglethorp's convulsions behind the bolted doors, Dr. Bauerstein's artificial respiration and her death.

• Chapter VI

  The inquest: medical evidence of strychnine, the chemist's poison register and the question of when the dose was taken.

• Chapters II and IX

  Hastings visits Cynthia's dispensary at the Tadminster hospital with its poison cupboard, and later arranges for Poirot to see it.

• Chapter XIII

  Poirot explains the bromide precipitation of strychnine in the tonic and the narcotic in the cocoa that delayed the symptoms.