The Mysterious Affair At Styles, by Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie's first mystery.

I finished this book and immediately went on wikipedia to read plot-spoilers for all the other famous Christie novels, in a kind of "throw out all the ice-cream to stop yourself eating it" move.

People talk about how phones are addictive and our kids should spend less time on them, and someone else always retorts that DID YOU KNOW that in the old days they said the same about NOVELS???, and I just think no, absolutely, novels are super addictive, when I'm in the middle of a good novel it's hard for me to concentrate on anything else. And mystery novels are especially like this, they're designed to hook your brain in that loop.

I will never stop linking to this Lee Child blogpost about how to create suspense: https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/08/a-simple-way-to-create-suspense/

Readers are human, and humans seem programmed to wait for answers to questions they witness being asked. I learned that fact in my first job. I worked in television production from 1977 until 1995, and the business changed radically during that time, mainly because of one particular invention. It was something that almost no one had in 1980, and that almost everyone had in 1990, and it changed the game forever. We had to cope with it. We had to invent a solution to the serious problem it posed.

(You notice I haven’t told you what the invention was yet? I implied a question, and didn’t answer it. You’re waiting. You’re wondering, what did almost no one have in 1980 that almost everyone had in 1990? You’re definitely going to read the next paragraph, aren’t you? Thus the principle works in a micro sense, as well as in a macro one. Page to page, paragraph to paragraph, line to line — even within single sentences — imply a question first, and then answer it second. The reader learns to chase, and the momentum becomes unstoppable.)

Unrelated: Agatha Christie is probably the bestselling novelist of all time -- her only competition among fiction writers is Shakespeare -- and her 85 books have together sold 2-4bn copies. We don't know the exact distribution of course but that's an average of 20million+ copies of each book.

She got paid £25.