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STYLES_OF_CARDBOARD

                                     April 20, 2006

Agatha Christie - "The Mysterious Affair at Styles" (1920)

                                     SPOILERS

More or less readable, but only just. The setup for the
mystery involves multiple people with potential marital
scandals, all coming to head at the same time.  The
resolution has different people skulking around acting
independantly at cross-purposes, all on the same night,
with no reason given for the coincidence.

                  It's also perhaps a
                  disappointment that the            It's a problem with
                  guilty party is a                  the mystery genre:
                  conspiracy: two characters         conspiracies have
                  acting in concert,                 certainly been known
                  concealing their alliance.         to happen, but as a
                                                     solution to a murder
                                                     mystery, they seem
Probably the most interesting thing is               inelegant, on the
Poriot and his absence of character.  He's           verge of cheating.
a collection of funny ticks: a dandy who
straightens vases compulsively, and emits            Just as it would be
frenchisms (he's Belgian) every other                cheating if the
sentence.                                            murderer were some
                                                     stranger you'd never
But compare this to John Dickson Carr's              seen on stage.
"Gideon Fell" or "Sir H.M. Merrivale",
who are similar collections of funny
ticks, and yet they add up to something
that registers a little more like
character.

And still further along that axis, consider
Nero Wolfe: formulaic quirk-upon-quirk, and
yet that cantankerous bellowing, that streak
of infantile laziness, it all adds up to a
remarkably believeable portrait.

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