Auden, Aydelotte, and Christie: The Mysterious Affair At Styles Criticism Essay Anonymous 12th Grade

The Mysterious Affair at Styles, by Agatha Christie, is a detective novel that is centered around the murder of a wealthy, estate owning woman. In this novel, as in all detective fiction novels, the innocence at the Styles manor is soiled by a despicable murder and, unsurprisingly, the community at Styles vows to help Detective Hercule Poirot solve the murder. Critics W.H. Auden and William Aydelotte have conflicting views of the idea of community in detective novels. Although both critics agree that detective novels establish a certain sense of community and the guilty other, Auden’s view point is more credible because it states that the detective novel’s appeal revolves around reestablishing a state of grace, while Aydelotte’s states that the genre’s appeal revolves around the idea that the reader loves to hate the criminal and only reads to find who and how the evidence stacks against the criminal.

Auden’s view is more accurate than Aydelotte's view, about false communities and how they are defined by the excluded party, when applied to The Mysterious Affair at Styles, because all of the characters at Styles genuinely either care for each other or for the case to be solved. For Auden, the detective novel is an occasion for...