Reading Poirot Out of Sequence
Most people meet Agatha Christie the way she seems to have imagined it: in order. InThe Mysterious Affair at Styles, the reader is quickly introduced to Hercule Poirot with his neat little egg-shaped head and his sartorial fussiness, this recently displaced Belgian who has somehow (how?) washed up in an English country house, and soon enough Poirot is engaged in solving some crime or another. I started with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd instead, which is a bit like being handed the magician’s written confession before you’ve ever seen the trick.
Ackroyd really is one of the wild experiments of the genre. Christie does solve a murder, of course, but that’s almost incidental to what the book is doing formally. She turns the structure of detective fiction back on the reader, making us rely on the very conventions she quietly dismantles. When I finished it, I more or less assumed this was just how she wrote: that she had always operated at that level of control, a little sharpness toward the audience, and an almost serene confidence in the possibilities of the form.
And then I went back to Styles.
Because it appeared first, in 1920, you can see her still teaching herself what kind of writer she’s going to be. Poirot is recognizably Poirot, but the fully crystallized version we know from the later novels hasn’t quite arrived yet. He leans harder on Hastings, slides around a bit in his mannerisms, feels less like a fixed figure and more like someone in the process of being auditioned. You can feel Christie trying him out, watching to see how much fussiness and eccentricity a reader will accept before they start treating him as a comic turn.
The plot is classic in its outline: a wealthy woman poisoned behind a door that shouldn’t be penetrable, a household full of people with plausible reasons to wish her gone, clues scattered and then recalled with meticulous care. Christie supposedly wrote it on a dare, determined to produce a puzzle nobody could beat her to. She pulled that off. But the kind of cleverness at work in Styles isn’t yet the kind at work in Ackroyd. Styles keeps its secret by hiding what matters; Ackroyd keeps its secret by telling you the thing you don’t recognize as important, right in front of you.
Coming to Styles after Ackroyd produces a strange double vision. You watch her assemble the toolkit she’ll later use much more aggressively. Hastings as the narrating companion, the closed circle of suspects, that final drawing-room explanation delivered as a sort of social performance: all of it is in place already. In Styles these are handled straight. In Ackroyd, they look back at you.
That’s part of why Styles ends up being oddly moving. First books are often revealing in ways later ones are not, simply because the writer hasn’t figured out how to hide quite yet. When Poirot works his way to a conclusion here, you can almost sense Christie arriving there alongside him, discovering what kind of ending the book wants as she writes it out. By Ackroyd, she knows exactly where she’s headed and she’s relying on the reader’s habits to keep them from seeing it. The pleasure of the puzzle has, quite deliberately, shaded into something more like a set-up.
Reading them “wrong,” I don’t feel that I spoiled Styles for myself. If anything, it made the book stranger and sharper. When you know what a writer is going to become, an early work takes on a kind of retroactive tension, the way an old recording by a great musician sounds different once the later work exists in your ears. You start listening for the future in the past. You can hear it, but only in flashes, and really only because you know what you’re listening for.
Christie published Styles at twenty-nine. Roger Ackroyd appeared six years later. Six years isn’t an enormous span (nearly 30 years separate Dickens’s Oliver Twist from his Our Mutual Friend), but in that interval something shifts: an already capable mystery writer becomes someone who has realized that the rules of the genre are best used when they’re quietly turned against the reader. Styles feels like the work of someone honouring the form. Ackroyd feels like the work of someone who has learned how to play with it.
So I’ll probably keep reading Poirot out of sequence. Christie spent much of her career wrong-footing the people who came to her books. Reading her the “wrong” way around seems a bit like returning the favor.