The ABC Murders – Agatha Christie
‘The ABC Murders’, first published in 1936, was the 17th crime novel written by Agatha Christie and the 10th to feature the London-based Belgian private detective Hercule Poirot, arguably Christie’s most popular fictional sleuth.
I was browsing through my parents’ library when I found a small treasure trove of Christie novels. ‘The ABC Murders’ attracted me because it seemed different from the early Christie canon. Agatha Christie published 66 crime novels and 14 short stories between 1920 and 1976, the year she died, and ‘The ABC Murders’ stands out because it features a very unusual villain – for period crime fiction – a serial killer who chose victims apparently at random, though in strict alphabetical order! The first victim was called Ascher and lived in Andover, the next Barnard and was killed in Bexhill, and so on in a savage spree in which sex, age, social status and killing method were all different. The only crazy link among them was the identical initial of the victim’s name and the town where the murder was committed. And the fact that the killer left a copy of a train timetable called ‘the ABC’ on the crime scene.
After the second death had taken place and the connection with the first was established, Hercule Poirot remarks ruefully to his Watson-like friend and chronicler, Captain Hastings, that the crimes they were witnessing were unlike any they had ‘worked’ on before. It wasn’t the case of a crime intime, a crime committed in the privacy and intimacy of a family, usually wealthy and notable, the culprit eventually being exposed and nailed by Poirot from within a small circle of friends or relatives, all of whom were apparently above suspicion.
Much to the chagrin of the retired Belgian detective, as idiosyncratic in manners as he is astute, they were now faced with a senseless series of murders of wholly unrelated victims, gruesomely splashed across the front pages of the newspapers. A crime which would never have fallen within Poirot’s remit but for the fact that each murder was heralded by an anonymous letter sent to Poirot himself, in which the killer challenged him and anticipated the date and location of his/her handiwork.
My curiosity at the departure from the crime intime formula was amply rewarded. Christie plunged Poirot in the middle of a police procedural story, juxtaposing his original and unconventional investigative methods with the powerful but plodding machinery of the Metropolitan Police. In most of the early Christie novels, the police is stuck to the sidelines, investigating the crimes as a matter of course and hardly ever failing to make any headway. After all, very few of the Met’s well-meaning officers belonged to the same class of the majority of the victims. Poirot, himself not an aristocrat but endowed with a Continental je ne sais quoi and smart ‘little grey cells’ in his head, could blend with ease in the type of society which more often than not held Christie’s killers in its bosom.
In ‘The ABC Murders’, Poirot and the Met’s Inspector Crome – whom Christie describes as more sophisticated than other officers, but disdainful and not very perceptive with it – share an uneasy relationship in trying to get to the bottom of the affair, with Crome grudgingly condescending to the Belgian’s involvement and Poirot actually hiding potential evidence from the police in one instance.
The sparring match between Poirot and Crome, as reported by the faithful Hastings, is a joy to read and offers a new dimension to the Poirot stories. And the plot, by 1930s standards at least, is pacy and very devious, in fact it’s vintage Agatha Christie. Poirot will prove more adept then the police at coaxing the victim’s relatives – ganged together in a ‘special legion’ to carry out their own parallel investigation – into revealing a series of seemingly casual clues that will enable him to discover the truly surprising truth. And the quirky Belgian detective will get to act out his traditional conference of all involved parties at the end, leading to the stunning denouement.
‘The ABC Murders’ is well worth a new reading for its blend of classic Christie sharpness and unusual plotting. I’d label it as ‘modern’ if not for the fact that Agatha Christie defies time and is purely and simply a classic, and always a pleasure for the crime fiction enthusiast. Talking of modernity though, I wasn’t too surprised to discover that ‘The ABC Murders’ was made into a film in 1965 and even into a Nintendo videogame in 2009!
