Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Logic and Deduction
Love and Passion
Suspense, Intrigue, and Secrecy
Wealth, Inheritance, and Power
Summary
Analysis
Sitting with Hastings several days after Evelyn Howard and Alfred Inglethorp have been arrested, Poirot says that he didn’t tell his friend what he was thinking because Hastings isn’t very good at hiding his thoughts and emotions. Poirot needed Alfred Inglethorp to think he wasn’t on to him.
Poirot confirms that Hastings isn’t cut out for detective work, which often requires a person to be discreet. Whereas Poirot is quite skilled at hiding his suspicions, Hastings tends to blurt things out or behave in ways that make his thoughts obvious to anyone paying attention.
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Literary Devices
Going on, Poirot explains that he never thought John Cavendish was guilty. He also notes that he didn’t want Alfred to be arrested in the beginning—not because he thought he was innocent, but because he thought he was guilty. Under British law, a person can’t be tried for a crime of which they’ve already been arrested and acquitted. Alfred’s terrible excuses at the inquest indicated to Poirot that the man wanted to be arrested. The evidence at that point in the case wouldn’t have been enough to convict him, and then he’d be safe for the rest of his life.
Alfred’s scheme to get arrested was certainly clever, but it tipped Poirot off. After all, most innocent people would take any chance available to them to prove their innocence, but Alfred didn’t do this. Instead, he provided vague answers at the inquest, essentially saying the worst possible things for a person to say while trying to defend themselves. In turn, Poirot realized that Alfred wanted to be arrested, ultimately picking up on this fact because there was no other way of explaining Alfred’s behavior. Yet again, then, a discrepancy in the case led to important information.
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Literary Devices
Poirot also explains that he discovered that Alfred Inglethorp never had a romantic relationship with Mrs. Raikes. Rather, John Cavendish was the one having an affair with Mrs. Raikes. The fact that Alfred let everyone think he and Mrs. Raikes were having an affair made Poirot suspicious, ultimately indicating that he was hiding something much bigger. Poirot continues by explaining that Evelyn Howard dressed up as Alfred when she went to buy the strychnine. Poirot thinks Evelyn and Alfred would have gotten away with their plan if they’d simply added bromide to Emily’s tonic and waited for her to take the last dose. Instead, they tried to stir up suspicion by buying extra strychnine and signing Alfred’s name in handwriting that looked like John Cavendish’s, thus making it look like John was guilty.
Alfred and Evelyn’s plan to kill Emily Inglethorp was ingenious because it was simple. To that end, Poirot implies that simplicity makes a case much more difficult to crack, since discrepancies and complications are what lead to the most revelatory clues. But Alfred and Evelyn ruined their chances of escaping by trying too hard to cast suspicion on other people. In doing so, they created confusion, but they also created more clues for Poirot to work with.
Themes
The plan, Poirot explains, was for Emily to take her final—fatal—dose of medicine on Monday evening. Therefore, Alfred purposefully went to a public space far from Styles Court on that day, and the fake story about him having an affair with Mrs. Raikes was supposed to account for his hesitancy to talk about his whereabouts. Meanwhile, Evelyn staged an argument with Emily and left the house, removing herself from the crime scene. But then Emily didn’t take the final dose until Tuesday evening. All might have still worked out, but then Alfred made the mistake of writing to Evelyn. But Emily must have entered while he was writing, since the letter was unfinished. He therefore locked it in his writing desk and left, assuming Emily wouldn’t break into the desk.
The murderers might not have been discovered by Poirot if Alfred hadn’t tried to write Evelyn a letter updating her on why Emily was still alive. Indeed, Alfred let his emotions override his rationality, deciding to write to his lover instead of playing it safe by staying quiet. In the same way that detective work requires a person to be restrained and logical, then, getting away with a terrible crime also seems to demand a certain detachment from intense emotions. The problem that Alfred encountered, though, is that his passion was simply too much to handle, which is why he made the mistake of writing the letter.
Themes
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When Emily Inglethorp realized she didn’t have any stamps, Poirot says, she opened Alfred’s writing desk using a mismatched key. She thus found the letter to Evelyn and realized that she and Alfred were lovers and that they were planning something behind her back, though she unfortunately didn’t realize they were planning to murder her. Seeing that she’d been duped, she wrote a letter to Mr. Wells asking him to come the following the day, clearly wanting to make sure her eventual death wouldn’t benefit Alfred. She also destroyed the will she had just made in Alfred’s favor. Lastly, she put the letter—which Dorcas saw her holding—in her dispatch case.
If Emily Inglethorp had lived through the night, she would have met with her lawyer, Mr. Wells, the following day. In doing so, she would have learned that the will she’d just destroyed—the one benefitting Alfred—didn’t change anything about her affairs; by marrying Alfred, she unknowingly overrode her previous will, which benefitted John Cavendish. However, Emily didn’t live through the night, so her inheritance was, at the time of her death, slated to go to Alfred, though Poirot’s discovery will certainly ensure that this doesn’t happen.
Themes
After the murder, Alfred must have realized that Emily had taken the incriminating letter he wrote to Evelyn. He therefore risked breaking into her bedroom the morning after her death and forcing open the case. But once he’d done this, he heard people approaching the room, so he ripped the letter into three strips, balled them up, and stuffed them into a vase on the mantelpiece. Poirot says that Hastings helped him solve this by pointing out that Poirot’s own hands shook when he straightened the items on the mantelpiece. Poirot realized that he had already straightened these items the first time he’d entered the room, so there should have been no need to do it again. This realization led him to the vase, which in turn yielded the incriminating letter.
Poirot solved the case by revisiting a detail he had overlooked—namely, the fact that the vase on the mantelpiece was crooked even though he’d already straightened it. The fact that Hastings, of all people, was the one to help him realize this is rather ironic, since Hastings himself tends to overlook small details because he fails to recognize their importance. In this case, though, he unknowingly helped Poirot revisit a crucial aspect of the case, suggesting that sometimes a sense of open-minded naivety and objectivity can help solve a case.
Themes
While everyone suspected Alfred, Poirot says, Evelyn went around planting false evidence. For example, she slipped the vial of strychnine into John Cavendish’s drawer. Hastings wonders about Lawrence, assuming that the evidence against him was all manufactured by Evelyn and Alfred. But Poirot disagrees—the evidence against Lawrence had more to do with something else: namely, the fact that he thought Cynthia was the murderer. Poirot then reveals that Lawrence loves Cynthia and wanted to protect her. The reason Lawrence went so pale while looking over Hastings’s shoulder on the night of the murder was that he saw Cynthia’s door unbolted.
When Poirot reveals that Lawrence is in love with Cynthia, he touches on how love and passion can drive people to behave in suspicious ways. Throughout the investigation, Lawrence has often seemed like an obvious culprit. In reality, though, he was just trying to protect Cynthia from harm, thus demonstrating how romantic feelings can distort judgment and encourage people to do risky things.
Themes
As soon as Lawrence saw the unbolted door, he crushed the coffee cup in Emily Inglethorp’s room because he remembered that Cynthia had gone upstairs with Emily that night. He hoped that crushing the cup would make it impossible to test its contents, and then he tried to convince everyone that Emily had died of natural causes. But then Poirot suggested to him—through the message delivered by Hastings—that there was a missing coffee cup that could exonerate Cynthia once and for all, since it would prove that Cynthia herself had been drugged with a drowsy narcotic.
Poirot finally helps Hastings make sense of the cryptic message he had him deliver to Lawrence about the missing coffee cup. All Lawrence had to do, Poirot had implied, was find the coffee cup that Mary Cavendish had hidden after drugging Cynthia. In doing so, he would be able to prove that Cynthia wasn’t guilty of murdering Emily—after all, Cynthia was fast asleep. Slowly but surely, then, the many discrepancies in the case begin to make sense.
Themes
As for John and Mary Cavendish, the trial seems to have revived their affection for one another. Poirot has always recognized that, despite the friction in their relationship, they’re both quite fond of each other. The problem, though, was that they both thought the other one didn’t care about them; until, that is, the trial, which revealed their affections. Poirot could have proved John’s innocence before he went to trial, but he decided not to say anything because he knew it would benefit a “woman’s happiness”—namely, Mary’s happiness, since the trial brought her closer to her husband once more.
Although the novel suggests that love can drive people to behave in ill-advised ways, the book itself isn’t necessarily cynical when it comes to romance in general. Rather, Poirot appears to have a keen understanding of romantic affection and the things that tie people together, which is why he didn’t step in before John was put on trial—he knew the trial would bring Mary and John back together, and he recognized that this is something they would both want. He therefore used his cunning skills as a detective to not only solve the case, but also to reunite two lovers.
Themes
As Poirot talks about bringing Mary and John back together, Cynthia enters and thanks both him and Hastings with a kiss on the cheek. Hastings has no idea what this means, but Poirot patiently explains that Cynthia must have found out that, contrary to her belief, Lawrence is in love with her. Sure enough, Lawrence passes at that moment, and when Poirot congratulates him on his newfound happiness with Cynthia, he blushes. But all of this talk of love makes Hastings sigh with disappointment. When Poirot asks what’s wrong, he simply says that both Cynthia and Mary are “delightful women,” prompting his friend to tell him not to despair—“We may hunt together again, who knows?” he says.
Having finally grasped what happened in the case of Emily Inglethorp’s murder, Hastings is left with little more than a sense of disappointment; he hoped, it seems, that he would develop a romantic bond with somebody over the course of the investigation. Instead, he has simply played the role of a kind and affable houseguest and—to a certain extent—a detective’s assistant. Although Hastings’s experience at Styles Court didn’t result in romantic happiness, Poirot cheers his friend up by implying that he will perhaps find love during a future investigation—a comment that hints at the six other Hercule Poirot Mystery novels in which Hastings will later appear.
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