Anne Beddingfeld is an adventuress. After caring for her genius but hopelessly impractical father for many years at home in their sleepy English village, his untimely death means Anne is now free to experience life.
Managing to avoid the marriage proposals of some local and very respectable men, she runs off to London to look for an adventure and sees a man killed at the railway station which sets a train of events into place.
This is an enjoyable read - along the same lines as the Tommy and Tuppence series. I especially liked the travel in this story, setting off from England on a ship and then to South Africa. Agatha sets the scenes very well.
Anne finds a mystery in England that all starts with a man dying at the railway station, a phony doctor, a mysterious piece of paper that needs deciphering, and a murder. It's very light-hearted and a nice, cosy read with plenty of excitement.
Agatha Christie originally titled this, 'Anna the Adventuress' but for whatever reason, her editors changed it.
I have heard the word 'adventuress' a few times recently on various media outlets and commentary and it peaks my interest in what that word means. I first heard it listening to the YouTube channel of Lady Colin Campbell, a royal commentator and member of the British aristocracy. She uses it to describe Meghan Markle, but I thought it an interesting word.
The definition according to Merriam-Webster is:
Anne Beddingfeld certainly fits this description, seeking excitement and change. Adventuress is an old fashioned word and an old-fashioned term, but does conjure up images of excitement and danger, a thrill seeker, a fortune hunter who throws caution to the wind and sees where their gamble at life lands them.
It would be interesting to explore women in history who might have been adventuresses. Do any spring to your mind? I'd be interested to know.
For Anne, she has all her wishes granted for adventure, danger, friendship, experiences, new scenes and romance granted to her. Her gamble pays off - in the end.
I do recommend this book if you are in the mood for some light reading, an old-fashioned thriller that will keep you guessing to the end.
Agatha Christie's second Poirot book is the one that made Poirot become more noticeable to the general reading public. People began comparing him to Sherlock Holmes.
Typical to Christie's style, the plot was inspired by the true crime story of Marguerite Steinheil of Paris, 1899. She is said to have murdered her husband and step-mother in an elaborate plot of burglary, but in trying to throw suspicion off herself onto a member of her staff, made the detectives become suspicious of her. You can read more about this fascinating true crime story here.
The original British cover.
What I do love about this book is the side story of Arthur Hastings, Poirot's sidekick and hapless wannabe detective. Hastings meets his future wife in this book, and Poirot refers to himself as 'Papa Poirot.' This becomes a regular saying whenever Poirot is feeling sentimental or nurturing towards someone in all the future books. Even though this is the second Poirot book, the story about Hastings and 'Cinders' has continuity with the last Poirot book, 'Curtain, Poirot's Last Case' when we meet Hastings' daughter and learn that he is recently become a widower.
The quote of Poirot's that I loved the most in this book is one that has stuck with me ever since I first read it as a young teenager. "Man is an unoriginal animal. Unoriginal within the law in his daily respectable life and unoriginal outside the law." I think what Agatha tries to convey in this story is that people, no matter what they do, no matter what their status in life or whether they are blessed with beauty or not remain predictable in their behaviour, their vices, their desires; ordinary and yes, unoriginal. Nothing new under the sun, you might say.
This is something I am learning about in my criminology classes also. According to my professor, her students' most remarked comment after meeting with some of this country's most heinous criminals is how surprised they are at how 'ordinary' they look and are.
I read this book on Audible, narrated by Hugh Fraser who plays Hastings in the adaptations.
You can also watch an adaptation (David Suchet) here on Youtube....
There's something about Tommy and Tuppence that makes you want to be in their company time and time again. Agatha Christie must have loved them too because she wrote quite a few books with them.
We are introduced to them right at the beginning in Book #2, The Secret Adversary and are given a hint at what the content is going to be like with Agatha's dedication:
"To all those who lead monotonous lives in the hope that they experience at second hand the delights and dangers of adventure".
The Secret Adversary is a classic adventure mystery story with intrigue, spies, conspiracy theories, abductions, koshings on the head and mysterious notes, all wrapped up into one book. I feel as though it is an indulgent book by Agatha Christie, not so serious as her Hercule Poirot books or Miss Marple books, but one that she has had fun with, while also exploring some more serious themes, such as the sinking of the Lusitania, which in it's day was as cataclysmic as the sinking of the Titanic, except it happened in wartime and was torpedoed by a German submarine, but many innocent lives were lost.
I read that the passengers were warned before buying tickets for the voyage that sailing during wartime was an extremely dangerous thing to do and there was always the chance they could get hit. The Captain was warned about German submarine activity in the area that day and advised to take evasive action, such as zig-zagging, but the captain chose to ignore the warning. 1,198 people died.
This is the first book of Christie's that used a real-life event to form her plot. She does this a few more times throughout her writing career.
What I love about The Secret Adversary is the introduction to Mr Carter and to Albert who are both recurring characters in the Tommy and Tuppence books.
The Secret Adversary was published in 1922. This was the original cover;
raw by Ernest Akers, published by The Bodley Head
You can watch the full 1983 adaptation of the movie version (which is very close to the original story) on YouTube for free. I do not recommend the modern version, it is a travesty!
Agatha Christie's 1st book in the series of 66 murder mysteries that she wrote.
I've chosen a sampling of some of my favourite covers from over the decades of this book. My favourite is the middle one on the bottom row. Which is yours?
The Mysterious Affair at Styles was published in 1920. The first of the 66 murder mysteries that would make Agatha Christie famous and give her the title of the Queen of Crime. The original cover wasn't, in my opinion, terribly inspiring. I'm not even sure what scene from the book inspired the art.
The cover of the first UK edition by Alfred James Dewey
The latest edition, celebrating 100 years of Agatha Christie.
This is also the first Hercule Poirot book, and (spoiler alert) Styles is the chosen setting for not just her first HP book, but also her last when Curtain: Poirot's Last Case is published very shortly before her own death.
Agatha Christie's signature really is stately old homes, posh people and English villages and The Mysterious Affair at Styles sets the scene nicely with this theme, harking back to a time when well-to-do families had live-in, loyal servants. It's the golden age of modern society, when the world thought they'd seen the war to end all wars and had come through the depression. There is reference to this in The Mysterious Affair at Styles when we first meet Captain Arthur Hastings who happens to mention to his old friend John Cavendish about this amazing little Belgian policeman he once met.
So we come to Styles, a stately home set in the village of Styles St. Mary, in Sussex, UK. Hastings has come to stay with his old friend John Cavendish and his family, whom he has known all his life. They were at school together. John and his brother Lawrence were adopted by the now Mrs Inglethorpe, the matriarch of the family and full of wealth and influence. She has recently married Alfred Inglethorpe, who nobody seems to like, including Evelyn Howard, the brusque but loyal member of the household.
Agatha Christie wrote the book during the First World War, and Hercule Poirot is said to be inspired by the Belgian refugee soldiers that she helped to nurse. It is said that she was dared by her sister Madge to write a book where nobody would guess the killer. Her first manuscript was rejected by Hodder and Stougton (wow, that just shows you how publishers often get it wrong)! It was finally accepted by the publisher Bodley Head on the condition that she changed the last scene from the court room to the library at Styles Court. What a brilliant suggestion, because this becomes a signature of Poirot - his grand reveals in the private houses of the people he is investigating.
The book is dedicated "to my mother." It was first published as a serial in The Times newspaper and became quite popular with its readers. It made Agatha Christie £25, but it launched her career and she and her husband named their own house 'Styles.'
Agatha Christie named her own house 'Styles'
Personal Opinion
The Mysterious Affair at Styles is not my most favourite Agatha Christie. I find it quite boring actually. I think, as she continued to write, she got better and better and Hercule Poirot and Hastings are developed well over the course of her career. She introduces these two characters to us nicely in this book and in my opinion they overshadow the story, but that could be because I am very familiar with her stories now, and have read most of them multiple times (huge fan since a child)! I still remember the shock of learning who the murderer(s) were when I first read it, and the murderer in this first book even gets a mention in the last book Curtain: Poirot's Last Case. But, for my taste, there are too many 'red herring' clues in this book, too much running around by Poirot instead of using his 'little grey cells' that we will become so fond of over the course of these books.
What I found quite a cool addition to the book, is the plan of the house and where all the characters slept and then the plan of the bedroom of Mrs Inglethorpe. It draws the reader in to have an attempt at being an armchair sleuth. It allows your own brain to join Poirot and help solve the crime. This is a genius streak on the part of the publisher/author and is characteristic of all her books, never revealing the killer until the very end, but as Poirot says to Hastings in this book, giving all the same clues that he has. But can anyone beat the brain of the masterful Hercule Poirot? He would say it is 'impossible.'
For a movie adaptation that is fairly faithful to the original story, you can see it here.
