The Mysterious Affair at Styles Study Guide

Agatha Christie was born into an upper-middle-class family in 1890. Although her father died in 1901, she had a happy childhood. Educated both at home and at school in Paris, she grew into a voracious reader. She also displayed an early talent for writing and finished her first novel in 1911, though she was unable to find a publisher for it. At the beginning of World War I, she married an army officer named Archibald Christie, but her husband’s infidelity eventually led to their divorce. She published her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, in 1920. The novel features the iconic detective Hercule Poirot, whom Christie based in part on Belgian soldiers she treated as a nurse in Torquay. In 1930, she traveled to Istanbul where she met her second husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan. The Middle East would become a setting for and influence on her mid-career novels. After returning to England, Christie wrote continuously for the rest of her life, interrupted only by a stint assisting in the pharmacy of University College Hospital in London during World War II. Christie wrote more than 60 detective novels—many featuring Poirot or Miss Marple, another recurring detective—and became the best-selling novelist of all time. She also wrote several more personal and conventional novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. In recognition of her long and brilliant literary career, she was honored as Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1971. She died in Wallingford, England in 1976.

Although The Mysterious Affair at Styles is by no means a war novel, it takes place in England during the First World War. The characters are very aware of the war’s influence on their lives, especially since Hastings himself goes to Styles because he has been injured in battle and is on leave. Indeed, even the people living at Styles Court, who are very wealthy, are concerned about contributing to the country’s war effort by rationing food. In the first years of the war, rationing wasn’t enforced in England, but in early 1917 Germany started using submarine warfare to attack merchant ships arriving in England—a strategy aimed at diminishing England’s food sources in the hopes of making it difficult for the country to continue fighting. By 1918, the government had introduced ration books, which were used to ensure that everyone received their allotment of food and nothing more. The exact year in which The Mysterious Affair at Styles takes place is never specified, but various comments throughout the book (about, say, giving up sugar to contribute to the war effort) suggest that it’s set in the early years of the war, when rationing was still voluntary—after all, the characters tend to make a point of highlighting their willingness to ration supplies, implying that they have a choice. There is, then, a slight sense of overinflated nationalism at play in the novel, as the characters living in the idyllic and opulent environment of Styles Court try to make themselves seem selfless and patriotic. 

The Mysterious Affair at Styles isn’t just Agatha Christie’s debut novel—it’s also the first of many books that revolve around the cunning Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. All in all, Poirot appears in 33 of Christie’s novels, including Death on the Nile, Murder on the Orient Express, and Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case, in which both Poirot and Arthur Hastings (the narrator of The Mysterious Affair at Styles) return to Styles Court to investigate a new case. In terms of Agatha Christie’s personal influences, she once described her sister and herself as “connoisseurs of the detective story” when they were growing up, citing The Mystery of the Yellow Room by Gaston Leroux as a major inspiration to her as a writer. Furthermore, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novels and stories about the famous detective Sherlock Holmes were vastly influential on Christie, especially when she was creating Hercule Poirot. Although she didn’t purposely model Poirot on Sherlock Holmes, she later realized that the Hercule Poirot mysteries she wrote were often quite similar to Sherlock Holmes stories, considering that both Poirot and Sherlock Holmes are highly intelligent, quirky detectives who solve cases alongside rather bumbling, affable sidekicks (Hastings and Dr. Watson, respectively).