33 pages • 1 hour read

The Mysterious Affair at Styles

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1920

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-4

Chapters 5-8

Chapters 9-13

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Themes

The Golden Age of Detective Fiction

Before the First World War, crime fiction was popular, but often associated with lurid and chaotic events far removed from the experience of the average reader. By contrast, a new and highly formulaic genre of crime writing became popular in the 1920s and 1930s. These cozy mysteries, or “whodunits,” presented the facts of the crime like tidy puzzle boxes, and often took place in remote, enclosed locations uncontaminated by the chaos of the outside world. In his “Ten Commandments” for crime writing, written in 1929, the essayist Ronald Knox wrote that a good crime story “must have as its main interest the unraveling of a mystery; a mystery whose elements are clearly presented to the reader at an early stage in the proceedings, and whose nature is such as to arouse curiosity, a curiosity which is gratified at the end.” Agatha Christie’s novels were the genre’s exemplars.

The meticulously crafted mysteries of this era run on a strict narrative path, each stop of which must be visited before their characters or themes are considered seriously. Each must present at least the illusion of clarity in presentation of the facts so that the reader can have the fun of attempting to guess the criminal before they are revealed at the end. In this sense, the whodunit is akin to a board game in book form, which explains why mysteries like this avoid creating deeply sympathetic characters, building immersive suspense, or forcing the reader to confront uncomfortable truths. Instead, the goal is for readers to feel slightly superior to the bumbling, often unlikable characters, any of whom could be a murderer, while not feeling bad about being intellectually inferior to the brilliant detective—who is typically so riddled with quirks and oddness that no reader would want to trade places with them.

The Great War and the English Middle Class

Arthur Hastings has seen the death and destruction of the World War I raging in Europe: His leave, after all, is based on an unnamed injury suffered in the field. As for Poirot, he has become a refugee in England, having been displaced from his Belgian home along with many of his friends and associates. Though he betrays very little of himself (and that only involuntarily) the reader gets the sense of Poirot’s bitter loss at having been thus made homeless. Still, both characters bring very little of the war to their detective work with them, and except for some voluntary services and fundraising done by the other characters in the narrative, the war might as well be happening on a different planet. Nevertheless, The Mysterious Affair at Styles is a book indelibly marked by the time in which it was written.

Unlike WWII, when technological advances in the locating and aerial bombardment of targets meant that English cities became a target for the Germans, during WWI, though mechanized death and destruction were delivered in inexplicable numbers, they stayed on the local level of a battlefield, as in the horrible killing fields of the Somme and Verdun. As a result, English soldiers returned home unable to describe what they had seen to friends and family who still pictured war as a 19th-century affair, with orderly troops lined up against each other, and who were immersed in propaganda that minimized trench warfare realities to avoid highlighting the fact that the purpose of the war was cloudy.

Get access to this full Study Guide and much more!

8,800+ In-Depth Study Guides
4,700+ Quick-Read Plot Summaries
Downloadable PDFs

The cozy but morally grey murder at the heart of The Mysterious Affair at Styles can be interpreted as a way for English civilians to process the war at a remove. The death described is horrible, but, unlike the Great War, it has a definite and satisfactory solution, with a trustworthy authority willing to explain matters. That they are guided by two veterans of the war who do not speak directly of their war experience helps this thesis.

The Power of Professionalism

Though Arthur arguably has more physical prowess—he is an actual soldier—he stands by in confusion and is of no help in hunting down killers. Instead, it is Poirot who makes sure that justice is served by discovering the murderer. Small and portly, Poirot relies on his brain, knowledge of laws, understanding of human biology, and sense of psychology to combat a villain who is similarly gifted. This is because, in keeping with the rise of the professional classes in 19th- and 20th-century England, Poirot represents a new archetype: the hero as professional expert.

For centuries, English class society ran along feudal lines, with titled landowners setting the rules and peasant workers abiding by those rules. In the 19th century, this ancient regime crumbled in the face of a complex industrial economy, and a large middle class swelled English cities and suburbs. It is not surprising that literature immediately picked up on this new trend by anointing the professional expert as a new kind of hero. Literary experts perform wondrous deeds of mental work, their weapons—facts and technical loopholes, their obstacles—the literal-minded oafs who muddle and delay their projects, and their villains—nearly a match for them in technical acumen. These expert heroes flatter the highly literate reader, who can imagine defeating the same evils using the same tools.