The Mysterious Affair at Styles

Arthur, our narrator and the associate of the novel’s detective, Hercule Poirot, is a veteran of WWI who visits Styles Court to recuperate from battle wounds. Though we see the novel’s events through his eyes, we understand little of the mystery through his perspective. He is in every way an unreliable narrator. Nevertheless, he makes a good audience surrogate, frequently as flummoxed, or more so, than readers who are also trying to follow Poirot’s deft detective work. Arthur compensates for his lack of raw intellect with an overactive imagination, ineffectual flirting with the women at Styles Court, and sometimes the good luck to be in the right place at the right time.

Hercule Poirot is among the most famous fictional detectives ever created, a man committed to using the “little grey cells” of his brain to clear away fiendishly complex chains of false and misleading evidence. Everyone he meets tends to underestimate him, partly due to his strange and unassuming appearance (a small man, with a head “exactly the shape of an egg” (16)). He is also greeted with careless indulgence by the English he meets, due to the gentle strangeness of his manner and his strong Belgian accent.