The Mysterious Affair at Styles
The first Hercule Poirot mystery
A rich woman dies behind a locked bedroom door at a country house in Essex, and the Belgian refugee billeted in the village turns out to have been a police detective at home. Christie wrote it on a bet with her sister, published it in 1920, and set the shape every fair-play mystery has used since: the house party, the closed circle, and the clue laid in front of you on page forty and explained on page two hundred.
This edition is set for reading rather than for scanning — a working table of contents, one chapter per section, and the plan of the bedroom floor kept legible instead of dropped as a broken image.
“CHAPTER I. I GO TO STYLES The intense interest aroused in the public by what was known at the time as “The Styles Case” has now somewhat subsided. Nevertheless, in view of the world-wide notoriety which attended it, I have been asked, both by my friend Poirot and the family themselves, to write an account of the whole story. This, we trust, will effectually silence the sensational rumours which still persist. I will therefore briefly set down the circumstances which led to my being connected with the affair. I had been invalided home from the Front; and, after spending some months in a rather depressing Convalescent Home, was given a month’s sick leave. Having no near relations or friends, I was trying to make up my mind what to do, when I ran across John Cavendish. I had seen very little of him for some years. Indeed, I had never known him particularly well. He was a good fifteen years”
- Genre
- Mystery
- Length
- 189 pages
- Reading time
- 4 to 5 hours
- Language
- English
- Format
- EPUB · DRM-free
- File size
- 216 kB
- Released
- 1997
What you get
- A DRM-free EPUB, emailed the moment your payment confirms. No account, no app, no expiry.
- Read it in the browser, download it, or send it straight to a Kindle.
- $6.99, by card or in bitcoin, straight to Chris Nohall's own account. No middleman ever holds it.
About Chris Nohall
Mystery, sensation and faerie romance from the years before any of it had a genre label. I take texts nobody owns and make editions worth paying for: clean typography, working contents pages, no scanner noise, and sets that belong together. Everything here is DRM-free — the file is yours once you have it.