Andrew's Wiki
Mysterious Affair

Folks

Emily Cavendish, an old rich lady, is played by her good friend Evelyn, who loves her cousin Alfred. Alfred is brought to Emily, and they marry, so the cousins end up killing her. In the midst of this we have the love stories of Emily’s stepsons, John with his unhappy marriage to the fascinating Mary (half Russian), and Lawrence with his hidden anguished love for a new ward of Emily’s, the healthy sweet Cynthia. A German spy, a faithful servant (a vehicle for nostalgia), and “dandy” Poirot and Hastings mostly fill the rest.

Themes

• War
  • It’s wartime that gives Hastings the leisure and Poirot the new locale
• Love
  • Hidden, confounded, all brought aright in the end through the offices of Poirot, showing that ALL will be right with fabric of England through the detection of crime.
  • Compulsory heterosexuality: two marriages at end; Poirot says the most important thing is “one man and one woman”
• Contingency
  • Poirot has method, which is totally anti-chance, and his method is quite anti-chance; he focuses his mind on the accidents, the things that don’t seem to fit, and makes them fit. Everything must fit for Poirot: this is a reaction against contingency.
  • Yet the ultimate PROOF (evidence) is brought in by Hastings’ chance remarks, so that while truth is all about eliminating contingency, the human-filled, legally necessary world of Empirical Evidence is permeable to chance. It’s an ideal/real relationship (truth/evidence).
• Evidence
  • Real evidence is vague, Poirot tells us, never cut-and-dried.
  • “Manufactured clues” given by criminals are misleading (implicit comparison with “natural” evidence)
• Detective work
  • Poirot’s method often associated with the fantastic
  • “mathematical precision” he demands
  • Also needs instinct
  • 112: Facts are a given, and everyone has them equally, but deductions are personal: you make your own
    • hermeneutic
  • 132: “there is method in his madness”
    • perhaps there is a dialectic: method/madness, science/intuition
• Papers
  • Similar to fingerprints: Poirot uses magnifications of fingerprints, like a text
  • Included narratives and maps
  • Materiality of the word: the fake letter found out by letters being too close together
  • Fragments are often pieced together
  • One of the papers has “possession” written all over it, in different forms: shows how it’s all about property; and Hastings thinks it means they have been possessed demoniacally: how is it the same? metaphor for alienation?
  • Handwriting is evidence
• Evie’s telegraphic speech: leaves out the subject (no agency: alienation)

Country House

• War makes it take in refugees of all sorts
• Outsiders do come in, but it’s a special case
  • Movement much more restricted than in leisure space
• Easier to know: maps and personalities are known better
  • Like a laboratory situation, all controlled
• Entrances and exits are policed easily
• Servants are all well-known
• Money: money used to keep house up, so money issues more personal