Now to change genres! I’d never read any mystery, other than a heap of Sherlock Holmes in my youth, but I was curious to check out the work of Agatha Christie. For those of you who don’t know, and this included me, she is the best-selling novelist of all time.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles was the first of her books to feature the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. A wealthy old British lady is fatally poisoned in her country estate, and the suspects include her husband, her two stepsons, various women in her house, and a doctor who is an expert on poisons. During Poirot’s investigation, a great number of clues and unusual details crop up, for which the explanations only come much later.

Back in 1921, The Times Literary Supplement had advertised this short novel as “the result of a bet about the possibility of writing a detective story in which the reader would not be able to spot the criminal.” I for one was unable to solve it, although the first night after I started reading, I did lie awake pondering the eerie circumstances (thereafter, I switched to only visiting this book by daylight). However, once Poirot spelled everything out at the end, I didn’t experience the frisson of satisfaction that I expected. It seems to me that the mystery cannot indeed be solved by the reader ahead of time, partly because its solution requires some arcane knowledge, and partly because some of the reasoning is a little unreasonable.

Still, it’s a quick and riveting read. I had actually wanted to start with And Then There Were None but chickened out when I read about how it gives people the creeps. What are your Christie recs?