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Agatha Christie is the best selling author of all time, we’re told. Sure, Shakespeare. Sure, The Holy Bible. But literally billions of books sold, without question. Mainly Hercule Poirot and Miss (Jane) Marple mysteries, but short story collections and many plays, too. This is the way this gets started: Her sister challenges her to write a mystery. During WWI she is working in a hospital, gets interested in toxicology, and thinks: okay, poisons, you could kill someone with those. But let's just imagine how, hmm. It takes Dame Christie (yes, the [British, quite right] Queen honors her at the age of 81, finally) about five years to get published, and right way this first novel gets pretty rave reviews.

I have over my lifetime read a few of her books and seen acclaimed movies and some of the acclaimed tv series based on her books, but I am not particularly interested in mystery as a genre. Okay, well, I admit I am a willing part of the current Sherlockization [I hereby patent this word, friends] [because no one else wants it!] of the planet, I’ll admit it. And twenty years ago in a production of her longest running play [in English?] of all time, The Mousetrap, I actually played Christopher Wren, so there’s that. But I would not have picked this up except I passed it at a library display and on a whim thought: This is her very first Poirot mystery. Maybe I will just read this one and then the next 32 of them. I am in a decade of my life when I seem to recall people do such things. . . We’ll see.

So: It’s pretty good. I have read better from her (and maybe will again). And at times you see flashes of what is to come, the brilliance. The less than good part features an idiot of a narrator and sidekick character, Hastings, who never understands anything, who never gets it, who never outguesses or comes up with any good ideas. But why would Poirot realistically want to spend any time with him? He barely does, and when he does, he barely lets him in on anything, but who would?

Okay, you need a foil in these things, like the bumbling Watson, the everyman smart-enough guy who is US, the reader, who gets blinded by the dazzling insights of the Brilliant Savant. We and Watson are the spectators. The chorus. We are not smart enough or good enough or logical enough to be Sherlock or Poirot. But like watching chess matches or football games, we fancy we can maybe get a little smarter if we listen and watch The Master. But this idiot Hastings seems at this point TOO dumb, and is an unfortunate narrator most of the time. He’s stuffy and dull and not observant, almost never. I guess Hastings is written for laughs, but why would anyone like Poirot really want to spend any time with hm? I don't like him at this early point.

And then, and then! after several dull pages she would have cut years later, she has Hastings admire Poirot, and in this very first book, where almost no character is interesting or fully realized, Dame Christie does this brilliant thing, this Dedalus thing, this Pygmalion thing, she creates this fully realized amazing guy and breathes him into life. In the FIRST book he is already there, in her very first description:

"Poirot was an extraordinary-looking little man. He was hardly more than five feet four inches, but carried himself with great dignity. His head was exactly the shape of an egg. And he always perched it a little on one side. His moustache was very stiff and military. The neatness of his attire was almost incredible: I believe a speck of dust would have caused him more pain than a bullet wound. Yet this quaint dandified little man, who I was sorry to see, limped badly, had once been in his time one of the most celebrated members of the Belgian police."

Poirot is a Belgian transplanted to England. He’s parodied in Peter Falk’s Colombo, who is an opposite Poirot, a slob. And Inspector Clouseau, of course! Every time Poirot arrives on the scene, every time he speaks, in this first book, he is great!

Christie has this nice idea to have Poirot, when he is really cooking on a problem, make houses of cards: “No, mon ami, I am not in my second childhood! I steady my nerves, that is all. This employment requires precision of the fingers. With precision of the fingers goes precision of the brain.� Things like that are rare in this first volume, but when they appear they are little gems.

Some weird things that may have been a function of the time and her early career:

--What is there about “foreigners� (like Russians and Germans) that get configured as darkly exotic? One character may be a German spy; it’s WWI, okay, but still, in many of her mysteries foreigners create a certain mysteriously criminal atmosphere.

--The German guy is also Jewish, and there might be a tad bit of anti-Semitism in her conception of said character.

--Mr. (the idiot, yes totally clueless) Hastings at one point actually asks a woman, Cynthia Murdoch, the beautiful, orphaned daughter of a friend of the family, whom he hardly knows, it seems, to marry him. �'Cynthia, will you marry me?� ‘Don’t be silly.’� She laughs and turns him down and runs away, to her credit. But when you read it, you say loud: Whuuuuut?! (Too) dumb.

--The characterizations of almost any other characters than Poirot are almost absent. There’re almost no descriptions of anyone or anything. It is almost all dialogue, as good as that dialogue might be. Is. She can write, already in her early twenties (!), but it’s not a whole book. Better than most mysteries ever, don’t get me wrong, but not as good as she gets.

Christie says it herself: "I was still writing in the Sherlock Holmes tradition � eccentric detective, stooge assistant, with a Lestrade-type Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Japp." So she knows, looking back, that while it’s good, it's not yet great. But Poirot is great from the first; she must have known this, as all the critics already did. And the tight and inspired plotting too is there, right from the first. Oh, but she makes another mistake she could not have anticipated, exactly: She makes Poirot well-retired, in his sixties! How will she be able to write him for decades without aging him?! Oops. You should have anticipated becoming internationally famous, Agatha.