Agathon 1. The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920)

[cassiphone]

Originally published at tansyrr.com. You can comment here or there.

Kathryn and I have taken the challenge to read every book written by Agatha Christie, in order of publication and we’re blogging as we go along. We’re calling it the Agathon! You can find Kathryn’s post over here if you’d like to read the conversation going on in the comments. As a

Comments

[godiyeva]

It is much more common in older murder mysteries to have a longer, slower time frame, and not uncommon at all to see a trial at the end, with moralising or reconciliation occurring in the wake of it... or a hiatus of several months as the case comes to trial before the detective has supplied a resolution... this is much less common now as readers, or at any rate publishers, seem to require a fairly hectic breakneck plot, where you are surprised to realise at the end that the whole thing is supposed to have unfolded over about 36 hours, and wonder how they managed it without sleeping, eating, or going to the bathroom. Or in the case of Kay Scarpetta, despite spending approximately 27 of those hours eating, sleeping and going to the bathroom.

From memory, Poirot displays very little backstory and very little character development over his literary career, other than having a few of his more glaringly annoying linguistic mistakes corrected gently by glamorous females - I think he stops apologising for deranging people in the end, although it's a running joke to begin with. Interesting to see if you come up with anything deeper in the course of the Agathon...