The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie (1916)

Agatha Christie's first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1916) was my latest read on dailylit.com, and a tight mystery novel like this really lends itself to the serialized format.

So much of what Agatha Christie writes has become the standard for detective fiction, and it is hard to imagine that her cast of scheming relatives and family friends (who all have something to gain from a murder), the location of a large English manor house in the countryside, and the mysterious poisoning of the matriarch of the family was a rather fresh set-up at the time. Even today, after almost a century of similar mysteries, Christie's clues and characters, and particularly her beloved Belgian detective Hercule Poirot and his friend and "Watson," Hastings, are fresh and engaging.

I always thought that Agatha Christie novels would be stuffy and old fashioned, but even as far back as 1916 she was writing clever, suspenseful, and often funny crime fiction that still entertains.