A review of The ABC Murders by Agatha Christie – 240323
The thirteenth novel in Christie’s Hercule Poirot series, originally published in 1936, is generally regarded as being one of her best and it is so well known and has been so well analysed by critics and reviewers that it is difficult to find anything original about it. It does contain some unusual features which keep those he feel that she too easily slips into a tried and tested formula on their toes.
In format it starts out as an inverted murder mystery where the reader is given advance warning of who the killer is and we can smuggly watch the sleuths grapple their way through a morass of clues to reach the conclusion that we knew from the start. However, Christie knocks any smug complacency out of the park with a ferocious twist in the tale that upsets all preconceptions. Inspector Crome’s case against the prime suspect seems so convincing but there are a few little details that do not quite fit into the overall picture he has painted, enough to worry Poirot and set his little grey cells whirring.
There is more than a little humour in the book, perhaps more than I would normally expect from Christie’s pen. She enjoys through Poirot pointing out the differences in approach between her sleuth and Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, evidenced when Poirot pulls Hastings’ leg by plucking a description of the murderer out of the air from little or no evidence like the occupant of 221b Baker Street. She also references poetry, or at least a nursery rhyme, “and catch a fox/ and put him in a box/ and never let him go”, which gives a telling insight into the psychology of the culprit and alerts the reader that the inversion is going to be inverted.
Hastings makes a return, narrating the mystery, although he adds a few chapters here and there which are not from his journal but which, he hastens to assure us in the preface, he has verified with the best possible sources including Poirot. Always a man to state the bleedin’ obvious Hastings earns his spurs by making a banal observation that is so perceptive that it causes Poirot to reconsider his theories and come up with an alternative and radical solution to the problem at hand.
Unusually for Christie, she has a serial killer on her hands who seems to strike at random albeit with an overarching scheme. First Alice Ascher is murdered in Andover, Betty Barnard in Bexhill, and Sir Carmichael Clarke in Churton – you get the sequence. The murder leaves their calling card, a copy of the ABC Railway Guide placed under or by the victim, and each attack is preannounced by a letter addressed to Poirot himself issuing him with a challenge to apprehend the culprit if he can. The fourth murder, in Doncaster, seems to follow the same pattern but the victim is George Earlsfield.
There are aspects of the second murder that worry Poirot and he wonders why the letter announcing the third murder was misaddressed so that he and the police had no opportunity to prevent it. Indeed, why send the letter to him and not to the police or the press? Convinced that there is a causal link between the first three murders, Poirot pulls together a working party made up of relatives of the victims and through that discovers that a travelling salesman, selling stockings, had been in the vicinity of each murder at the relevant time.
However, Poirot cannot believe that the individual languishing in the police cells, having collapsed and given himself up in Andover, has either the intellectual capacity to challenge Poirot as an equal nor the personality needed to sweep a flighty young girl off her feet and arrange a nocturnal assignation on a beach. The true culprit, although superficially charming and eager to help, is a thoroughly nasty piece of work who has manipulated a psychologically damaged character to act as their fall guy. As is often the case, the plot is an enormously risky and unnecessarily complicated way of getting your hands on an inheritance.
The characters may be unrounded and the dialogue wooden, but you do not read Christie for a polished piece of literature as you would a Nicholas Blake, Gladys Mitchell or Josephine Tey. You pick up her books to be royally entertained, forget your cares for a few hours, and exclaim “did that really just happen?”. She achieves this in spades with The ABC Murders.
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