Agatha Christie's Poirot: The Mysterious Affair at Styles

November 3, 2021 8:52 AM - Season 3, Episode 1

Hastings renews his friendship with Poirot and involves him in the mysterious poisoning of the mistress of a manor house married to a man twenty years her junior.
posted by Carillon (3 comments total)

A good one I thought. Poirot's compulsions coming in handy and helping solve the case! Also very much an instance of the past being a foreign country. Inglethorp saying he bought strychnine to poison a dog as if that were entirely a normal thing and everyone just accepting that is always a trip. In the book I remember getting a diagram which was helpful, but I thought here they did a great job of making the space feel real. Also Christie gets to really show off her chemistry knowledge with the poisoning method!
posted by Carillon at 9:05 AM on November 3, 2021

I actually read this book -- it's the only one of Christie's books I ever read. I didn't enjoy it and never read another, and I didn't remember it. The only thing that rang a bell was the death scene.

It's funny -- I actually assumed the series had moved forward in time, to the forties, and that Hastings had served in WWII, but then I couldn't understand why the fashions and everything else looked so dated. It must have taken me seven or eight minutes to clue in.

Hilarious moment when Poirot tells Hastings they must convince the murderer that they are not intelligent and that he's just the man for that task, and after a beat, it dawns on Hastings that he's been insulted.
posted by orange swan at 11:23 PM on November 4, 2021

I read this long ago and always get it confused with her final book which is set at the same house. Now I wonder why the series didn’t start with this case. At any rate, it was pretty neat that Poirot foiled the murderer’s double jeopardy plan by finding the witnesses before they were needed.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 4:29 PM on November 5, 2021 [1 favorite]