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Promotional graphic for The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie, featuring the book cover over a vintage painting of an English country house and grounds, with a horse-drawn carriage and figures in the foreground.
Books & LiteratureLiterary Essays

How Agatha Christie Changed Detective Fiction With The Mysterious Affair at Styles

Daniel

When Agatha Christie debuted with The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1920, she may not have known she was going to influence the next century of popular culture. So many pieces and details and characteristics of her oeuvre have been incorporated into how we’ve been telling stories for the past hundred years. 

Even her settings has been blueprinted for future classic murder mysteries. Styles Court itself was a large country house occupied by a wealthy family with their servants, and the site of a gathering where someone mysteriously dies. Secret relationships between family members are slowly revealed, and it seems like everyone has something to hide. We’ve seen that replicated to the point of parody in Clue, both the board game and the movie. 

The technology Agatha uses in her stories is certainly dated and the social circles she talked about don’t exist anymore. But little has changed about the murder mystery genre: a murder has been committed and the audience has all the same information as the detective, and small details can matter a whole lot. 

Meanwhile, while she’s giving you clues, she’s also distracting you and encouraging incorrect assumptions and hiding important information underneath seemingly insignificant details to divert you from the truth. But you can out-smart the detective and figure it out before they do, if you’re clever enough. You’re not just watching the detective solve the crime, you’re competing with them. That’s been the standard for detective fiction ever since, from the Golden Age to today’s books and movies and television shows, and that’s what makes reading mysteries and whodunits so enjoyable. 

The Mysterious Affair at Styles was first published well over 100 years ago in 1920, and we can still see Agatha Christie’s fingerprints all over popular culture. You can see it in popular movies like Knives Out and popular television series like Only Murders in the Building. Escape rooms are a thing, and so are social murder mystery games that require taking on a persona and talking to other people in character. More than a century later, we’re still playing her game. 

Click on the book cover to buy The Mysterious Affair at Styles!

Cover for The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie, featuring a colorized portrait of Christie wearing glasses and a floral hat, with bold cutout-style title and author text.

Cover Image Credit: Background painting is in the public domain per Wikimedia Commons. Image of Agatha Christie is part of the public domain per Wikimedia Commons.


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