More Teeth, more mystery

Got a temporary crown, and I can't even chew on the right side of my mouth. It's been over a week, and I am pretty sure that I should say something to the dentist before I get the permacrown. But there is a part of me that thinks, "Gosh, maybe he'll want to do a root canal, and wouldn't it just be best to chew on the left side of your mouth forever instead?" Logic fail, I know.

Okay, so I have taken on a new project. I'm reading Agatha Christie. Because I need the escapism, and because her books are basically the very first parlor mysteries and are the first to incorporate the reader knowing all the clues the detective knows. Allegedly. And also because I'm a prospective genre author (two chapters and ... not counting at the moment) and why not take a page from one of the greats? Two billion books in print, she must know something, right?

And so, the first Agatha Christie mystery, "The Mysterious Affair at Styles." Which sounds less like a mystery than a creaky noise from the attic that only can be heard when one is alone at the full moon ... yeah. No, it's a mystery.

Here's how Agatha gets right down to business: In Chapter One you not only get a full exposition of how the woman who is about to lose her life has gone and married some much younger weirdo and alienated her stepchildren, you get her "factotem" storming off in a huff warning that the husband will be the death of the dead woman, a somewhat dependent and annoying child of a family friend who works in a medical dispensary and the full-on bearded poison expert from Germany. I know, a likelier crowd of killers could not be assembled if you tried.

You also get Hastings for the first time. Hastings! He's so dumb! Even you, on the ride of detection with him, are like, "Dude, you are so dumb!" Possibly for his time ("Styles" was written in 1916 and published in 1920) he was not so dumb, because Hastings makes a lot of assumptions based on gender, ethnicity, social class and it's not like he's alone in old-timey land there. The n-word makes an appearance in this book, which I presume was anachronistically preserved, as though in amber, for readers who will be like, "Wow, times sure have changed." Readers will say the same thing when learning Christie used the word "ejaculate" as something men do verbally. Tee hee hee and all that, right?

So, Hastings is dumb. But enter Hercule Poirot! The brilliant Belgian! He's so deviously clever you'll never guess what he's thinking, and frankly, he rather likes to lay down misdirection and I don't see why because honestly, Hastings may be too dumb to understand his direction. Okay, so Hastings might give away the game inadvertently, I see. This is, in all probability, to be a pattern in future Poirot novels (at least as I recall from childhood readings of Christie).

I suppose that a true critique of the novel would be to say that it doesn't really have much of say about the greater say. It really is all about the parlor, and not even Hastings' military service, which was apparently somewhat traumatic, can change that. The drama of a cougar marrying a younger man is only important in its relation to the property that is at stake, for example. Heck, the suspects' (and Hastings') relationships don't extend out beyond the folds of the lawn. Hastings makes eyes both at Mary Cavendish, the stepdaughter-in-law to the victim, and Cynthia Murdoch, the "sister" (a term British hospitals stopped using recently) at the hospital who is attractive enough to get the other Cavendish brother (who has some cash coming his way and won't give her a semi-pity-proposal like Hastings does. Oh, dumb, dumb Hastings!)

In all, the structure is pretty complicated but solid. Nice twist at the end. And the only clue we readers do not see is the one where the murderer basically confesses the entire plan in a written attempt to make sure an accomplice knows where everything stands. No code words, even. Come on, murderers. Step it up a notch, will you? That was possibly the clunkiest part of the whole book. Who is that dumb?

Not even Hastings. Not even Hastings.

Up next: "Murder on the Links."