“As soon as I heard you were coming over, I said to myself: Something will arise. As in former days, we will hunt together, we two. But if so, it must be no common affair. It must be something – something recherche – delicate – fine . . .”

No fictional detective had a more extraordinary ten-year run than Hercule Poirot did between 1932 and 1942. The five novels from the 1920’s that featured Agatha Christie’s Belgian sleuth included a solid debut, a few titles that divide readers, including what many consider the “worst” Poirot, and a stone cold classic. 1932’s Peril at End House began a shift into high gear, and the fourteen Poirot novels that followed included most of his greatest cases and culminated in, arguably, the best: Five Little Pigs. And let’s not forget to include  Murder in the Mews (1937), a collection of four long stories,  and 1934’s Black Coffee, Christie’s first produced play and the only one in which she included Poirot. 

The A.B.C. Murders fits right into the middle of this spree: it was the first of three Poirot books to appear in 1936 and, along with Murder on the Orient Express (1934) and Death on the Nile (1937), can arguably be considered one of the three Poirot masterpieces of the 1930’s. Dr. John Curran concurs with this opinion and, in Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks, expresses his disappointment that he could find only fifteen pages of notes about A.B.C., surmising that rougher notes may have existed but did not survive. Nevertheless, what does exist is fascinating because, for once, we learn Christie’s actual start date on a project (Tuesday, November 6^th, 1934), and because the notes contain an alternate plotline that Christie considered. (I urge you to pick up your copy of Secret Notebooks to discover it.) 

The A.B.C. Murders missed my own Top Ten Christie list, which is crowded with Poirots (seven out of ten), but it might just be #11 – if I ever get around to expanding that list. It’s not hyperbole to say that A.B.C. is unlike any other Poirot novel in the canon. (Of course, several others are unique for their own reasons.) What separates A.B.C. from all but, say, 1927’s The Big Four is that, for most of the novel, readers are led to believe that this is not a whodunnit so much a thrilling manhunt for a serial killer who, for some reason, has targeted Poirot as his nemesis. The reason for this targeting constitutes a more satisfying twist than even the identity of the killer but the fact that although we blithely accept A.B.C.’s letters to Poirot as the communication.

When the novel debuted, the phrase “serial killer” didn’t exist, but this is far from the first serial killer mystery: just for example, both Philip MacDonald’s Murder Gone Mad and Francis Beeding’s Death Walks in Eastrepps appeared in 1931. Christie’s take here is quite different, but if we go back as far as 1911, to G.K. Chesterton’s extraordinary Father Brown story, “The Sign of the Broken Sword,” we find an exchange between the priest and his friend Flambeau that could easily provide the genesis for Christie’s novel. To sum that passage up: “Where does a wise man hide a pebble? On the beach. Where does a wise man hide a leaf? In the forest. But what does he do if there is no forest? He grows a forest to hide it in.”

A.B.C. also stands out for having an interesting, if problematic, narrative structure. Captain Arthur Hastings reappears after a three-year hiatus to narrate most of the book, but his writing is interspersed with eight chapters simply titled “Not from Captain Hastings’ Personal Narrative.” (More about this below.) It’s the penultimate time we meet Hastings, who will slink back to Argentina and not reappear until 1975, although an examination of Curtain indicates that it probably takes place quite a bit earlier – say, the mid-1950’s. 

Re-reading The A.B.C. Murders right after The Mystery of the Blue Train was an experience. They are linked in the most tenuous of ways by that sinister A.B.C. train guide, but one is an erratic affair, made so by the author’s emotional difficulties at the time of writing. The other shows Christie at the height of her powers – a height that I am glad to say did not show obvious signs of waning for nearly twenty years. 

So . . . let’s begin. 

*     *     *     *     *

The Hook

“I know what you say – I am like the Prima Donna who makes positively the farewell performance! That farewell performance, it repeats itself an indefinite number of times! . . . each time I say: This is the end. But no, something else arises! And I will admit it, my friend, the retirement I care for it not at all. If the little grey cells are not exercised, they grow the rust.”

The book’s opening will especially please fans of Captain Hastings, of which I am admittedly not one, but even I can enjoy their obvious excitement at seeing each other. Hastings is newly returned to England from his happy but dull domestic life in South America and anxious to share with his old friend Poirot the thrill of the chase again. And while the detective may not care for retirement, he has actually been rather busy; in fact, Poirot hasn’t been able to avoid bodies to the right or left of him, on trains and planes, even at posh parties. 

Unfortunately, the detection well seems a bit dry at the moment, and so our friends indulge themselves by sharing their dream cases with each other. What Hastings comes up with is, as Poirot drolly suggests,” . . . a very pretty resume of nearly all the detective stories that have ever been written!” There’s the body in the library, the curiously twisted dagger or carved stone idol that serves as a weapon, and the typical list of suspects, which must include one or two beautiful young women with auburn hair who are wrongly accused and are eternally grateful to the detective’s right-hand man for always believing in their innocence. As for Poirot, all he wants is “a very simple crime. A crime with no complications. A crime of quiet domestic life . . . “ As we’ve discussed before, the scenario he comes up with will provide fodder for the third Poirot novel of 1936, Cards on the Table. 

Still, there is a matter to which Poirot draws Hastings’ attention, and this provides a hook unique in the collected annals of his cases, which have up till now been evenly split between those where Poirot is asked to consult and those where a dead body drops in front of him – or down the hall, or in the next carriage, and so on. This time, an entity who calls himself A.B.C. taunts the sleuth with a challenging letter that Poirot frankly doesn’t know whether or not to take seriously. 

“MR. HERCULE POIROT – You fancy yourself, don’t you, at solving mysteries that are too difficult for our poor thick-headed British police? Let us see, Mr. Clever Poirot, just how clever you can be. Perhaps you’ll find this nut too hard to crack. Look out for Andover on the 21^st of the month. Yours, etc., A.B.C.

Poirot is no fool, and he has taken the letter to Scotland Yard. This elevates our pleasure at the sense of reunion with the return of Inspector Japp, who teases Hastings about signs of advancing age (“just a little bit thin on top”) and Poirot about the lack of any such signs:
“Quite a good advertisement for a hair tonic, he’d be. Face fungus sprouting finer than ever. Coming out into the limelight, too, in his old age. Mixed up in all the celebrated cases of the day. Train mysteries, air mysteries, high society deaths – oh, he’s here, there and everywhere. Never been so celebrated as since he retired.”

Christie’s knack for humor abounds in these first few chapters, and it makes me wonder if any other literary Watson ever stood for such a ribbing (albeit a good-natured one) as Captain Hastings does. We know the author’s own enthusiasm for the character ebbed and flowed, but it’s undeniable that she knew just how and when to use him. And there’s no denying that his denseness is funny:

• “’I believe in luck – in destiny, if you will. It is your destiny to stand beside me and prevent me from committing the unforgivable error.’
• “’What do you call the unforgivable error?’
• “’Overlooking the obvious.’
• “I turned this over in my mind without quite seeing the point.”

But what perfects this opening hook is how Christie interweaves into these enjoyable proceedings with a dawning tension regarding the case our two friends are about to tackle. Early relief that nothing has occurred in Andover on the 21^st is shortlived with the discovery in her tobacco shop of poor Alice Ascher. For Hastings, the details of the crime are too sordid to be particularly interesting, and so in the moment he hardly takes in the prescient comment that Poirot makes: “This is the beginning.”

Score: 10/10

The Closed Circle: Who, What, When, Where, Why?

Who? 

In The A.B.C. Murders, the requisite “closed circle” of suspects gives way to a large cast of characters comprised of victims, their families, witnesses and professional investigators. Most of these people appear only briefly, as is the pattern in a police procedural, and John Curran suggests: “Due to the elaborate plot and large cast of characters, the characterization is slighter than usual. Dealing as it does with three separate murder investigations involving three sets of suspects, the attention to character drawing has to be somewhat perfunctory. The only people who are delineated in any detail are those who form part of Poirot’s band of investigators.” 

The “band” to which Curran refers constitutes the policeman d’histoire, Inspector Crome, and – spoilers! – the closed circle we thought had eluded us. Crome, Mary Drower, Donald Fraser, Megan Barnard, Franklin Clarke, and Thora Grey are the most thoroughly developed here, and to that list we must add A.B.C. himself, Mr. Alexander Bonaparte Cust. Crome is one of the better policemen in the canon: capable and intelligent and subtly resentful of Poirot’s involvement in his case. And Cust is a wonder! Christie takes this sad, damaged man and makes him the perfect scapegoat, both for the real murderer and the reader. As for the others – since we are not meant to think of any of them but Cust as a “suspect”, Christie allows us to view them as people, caught in the range of emotions that accompany the violent death of a loved one. 

There’s a powerful moment when the “legion” meets, and their planning gives way to shared grief, to the planned celebrations that won’t occur and the everyday events that will be missed. Of course, Christie manages to stick an important clue in the middle of this conversation (Betty Barnard will never enjoy the stockings her mum bought her on the very day of her death!), but the scene humanizes the characters and transforms them into a circle unlike most that we find in Christie’s work. Poirot explains it to his friend: 

“Realize, Hastings, that in the ordinary course of events those three separate dramas would never have touched each other. They would have pursued their course uninfluenced by each other.”

The novel teems with life through a series of marvelous character sketches of neighbors lodgers, tradespeople, and cinema custormers. It’s something out of a Dickens novel. Even the names of some of them sound Dickensian: Mr. Partridge, the bank clerk who looks at Poirot “as though he were a doubtful check;” Millie Higley, the buxom waitress too excited to feel any grief over a co-worker’s brutal murder; the soft-hearted Lily Marbury, excited about getting her picture in the papers for helping to catch the killer and yet intuiting Mr. Cust’s essential goodness well enough to give him fair warning; the dying Lady Charlotte Clarke, who rallies out of her morphine haze to give vent to her feelings of jealousy.  

And I can’t resist commenting on how Sarah Phelps, in her misguided adaptation of the book, claimed to be channeling Christie as she “wished” to write. What Phelps leaves out is the affection the author had for her country and its citizens. The people here are good and bad, affectionate and venal, charming and cunning. In her attempt to provide “hard-hitting” entertainment, Phelps veered on the ugly side of humanity for the duration. This is unfair to Christie, not just for how much it misrepresents the original text, but also in its implication that Christie herself did not represent, when necessary, the foul aspects of human nature. Think about what happens to Mr. Cust, and you know what nothing could be further from the truth. 

What? 

This review is one of two dropping on the same day: I post my Poirot Projects on the 21^st of each one, and today is the due date for my second nominee for the ROY Awards – the Reprint of the Year. By happy coincidence, that nominee is another favorite serial killer mystery: Ellery Queen’s Cat of Many Tails from 1949. 

Ultimately, these are two very different approaches to the sub-genre, but Queen does us the  courtesy of referencing the Queen of Crime (although not by name) by applying “the ABC theory” of serial killing to the wave of murders terrorizing New York City. And why not, for there are surface similarities within the plots of both novels. I refer specifically to the offer made by the relations of several victims to actively assist the police (and private detective) in their inquiries in order to exact justice for the deaths of their loved ones. 

It might surprise us that the fictional authorities go along with the idea of rank amateurs butting their noses into such dangerous business, but Poirot and Ellery both accept the idea of a “legion” of helpers – albeit for different reasons. I’ll leave you to discover Ellery’s reason, but I suggest you read Christie’s novel first. 

Poirot tells his group that he believes each of them possesses knowledge that will help him solve the case.
“Sooner or later, by reason of your association with one another, something will come to light, will take on a significance as yet undreamed of. It is like the jigsaw puzzle – each of you may have a piece apparently without meaning, but which when reunited may show a definite portion of the picture as a whole.”

Megan Barnard dismisses Poirot’s admonition as mere “words!” And Poirot admits to Hastings that Megan has seen through his rigmarole: he wants to fire up the group in order to get them talking. This celebration of the power of “idle” conversation has been a useful tactic for every one of Christie’s detectives, and it works here: during a shared discussion about grief, Megan mentions the purchase of stockings. 

Usually, however, Poirot encourages this talk in order to give the killer a chance to incriminate himself. This, too, is what Ellery Queen attempts in Cat of Many Tails by bringing his own group of victims’ relations together, although that turns out to be a wholly different sort of case. But almost until the end, Hercule Poirot has no reason to suspect that one of his assistants is the real A.B.C.; rather, like the police, he completely buys into the theory that the killer is a deranged madman. 

For the sake of our enjoyment, this turns out to be a good thing. The main part of the novel (Chapters 1 – 23) contains a series of murders that form four distinct parts of the whole. This is followed by the Revelation of the Stockings, which leads to an extended manhunt for Mr. Cust and ends with his capture and interrogation. While the first section contains only three short chapters not related by Hastings, the second part is pretty evenly divided between Hastings’ narrative and chapters containing different points of view, including both Mr. Cust and Inspector Crome. The pace is quick, and the division of narrative labor allows us to look at the case both from the aspect of an adventure/procedural and as a psychological thriller. 

And then, at the end of Chapter 31, we are treated to one of those favored moments that tend to occur between Poirot and Hastings quite late in the proceedings:

• “I woke to find Poirot’s hand on my shoulder. 
• “’Mon cher, Hastings,’ he said affectionately. ‘My good genius.’ I was quite confused by this sudden mark of esteem. 
• “’It is true’, Poirot insisted. ‘Always – always – you help me – you bring me luck. You inspire me.’ 
• “’How have I inspired you this time?’ I asked.”

Hastings would do well to ask this question, but we should be prepared for one of his off-the-cuff statements that, without his realizing it, blows the case wide open. We’ll get to that in a minute. 

When and where? 

Those who complain about Christie’s supposed lack of characterization often add a few negative words about her descriptions of setting. This latter might be a more valid criticism, and I would take John Curran’s comments about character above and apply them instead to the wealth of settings in which the novel takes place. From cityscapes to countryside, and through a plethora of interiors, things move too quickly for Christie to allow us more than a moment to take in the sights in any great detail. 

Until this year, I had never been to any of these places, and so I had no real feelings one way or another about them other to think that they serve their purpose to the plot and no more. However, my circumstances have changed, and I actually have a positive thing to say on this subject for once. In September, I went to the Agatha Christie Festival in Torquay. On Saturday afternoon, my friend John Harrison and I drove through Paignton to see Greenway, Christie’s beloved summer home. As we were passing through one town after another, I noticed a sign that said “Churston.” I turned to John and remarked, “That Churston?” and he nodded. 

Thus, when we got to the murder of Sir Carmichael Clarke, I read the whole section with a deeper pleasure. Much is made of the crowds of tourists who make their way to the beaches of Torbay and Torquay, as well as the hordes of swimmers who pass by the Clarke estate and annoy the residents – much as gawkers must have annoyed Agatha and Max. There is a lovely moment when Hastings takes a break from the investigation and walks with Franklin Clarke along the path his late brother walked every evening.

“We went on down the lane. At the foot of it a path led between brambles and bracken down to the sea. Suddenly we came out on the grassy ridge overlooking the sea and a beach of glistening white stones. All round dark green trees ran down to the sea. It was an enchanting spot – white, deep green – and sapphire blue.

• “’How beautiful!’ I exclaimed. Clarke turned to me eagerly. 
• “‘Isn’t it? Why people want to go abroad to the Riviera when they’ve got this! I’ve wandered all over the world in my time and, honest to God, I’ve never seen anything as beautiful.’”

The language is simple, but the authorial opinion couldn’t be clearer. And now I know what the lady is talking about!

Score: 8/10

The Solution and How He Gets There (10 points)

“When I know what the murderer is like I shall be able to find out who he is. I begin to see – not what you would like to see – the outlines of a face and form but the outlines of a mind . . . Crime is terribly revealing. Try and vary your methods as you will, your tastes, your habits, your attitude of mind, and your soul is revealed by your actions.”

As I’ve stated, for most of its length the novel functions as a manhunt, and only in the end does it revert to a closed circle mystery. Making this switch constitutes one of the most interesting final summations Poirot ever made. He opens with a psychological evaluation of the killer as he appears to be, applies this to the facts of the case, and comes to the realization that 1) Alexander Bonaparte Cust is not the killer; and 2) the concept of a serial killer as a man driven by some obsession to take lives does not apply here. From here springs the “forest for the trees” theory that leads Poirot to the truth. Thus, our closed circle isn’t defined by geography – only these five people were at the scene of the crime – but by relationship to each individual crime.

For the most part, Poirot combines psychological acumen and analysis of physical and situational clues in a satisfying way. The downside, however, is that in order to spring her big surprise upon the reader, Christie doesn’t allow Poirot to do much actual “detecting” until the end. For most of the novel, we are treated to two major false clues: the silk stockings and the A.B.C. guides found next to each body. The the presence of silk stockings gives the legion its first crack at trailing Mr. Cust. Christie weaves this clue very nicely through the novel: we are with Hastings and Poirot when they casually spot the stockings in Mrs. Ascher’s flat and the Barnard home, and we hear Megan mention them in her heartfelt reminiscence of Betty’s last day. This is a real stroke of luck for Franklin Clarke, who wants those stockings to be noticed! It’s a nice ironic touch that if we happen to spot the significance of the stockings before Poirot mentions it to Hastings, we have actually beat the detective at the murderer’s game of tricking us with false evidence.

The A.B.C. guide is a false clue in that we are meant to interpret it as the killer’s signature, and indeed it conforms to the initials of the man they ultimately capture and arrest. And yet, there is an element of truth here, too, as Poirot explains in his summation: “The choice of the A.B.C. suggested to me what I may call a railway-minded man. This is more common in men than women. Small boys love trains better than small girls do. It might be the sign, too, of an in some ways undeveloped mind. The ‘boy’ motif still predominated.”

As Poirot points out, Franklin Clarke conforms to this sense of arrested development: 
“The adventurous character, the roving life, . . . the boyish mind – mentioned by Lady Clarke, and even shown by his taste in fiction (E. Nesbit).” And if we put aside the false premise of a random killer – which Poirot does a great job of discounting as few people, even those who murder strangers, kill randomly – Franklin is the most likely suspect with the strongest motive. This is exactly the sort of childishly creative man who would put forth such a fantastical scheme. And the matter is clinched by the late arrival of the third letter, which has a purpose, as Hastings innocently suggested. This, for me, is the most clever aspect of the solution: Poirot has one of the greatest egos in all of detective fiction, but even he can’t figure out why A.B.C. would reach out personally – unless there was a greater purpose, like the delay of a letter’s arrival, which could not be accomplished if Clarke had dealt with the police or the newspapers.

What knocks the solution down for me a little bit is a pair of whopping coincidences. The first is that a woman would name her child Alexander Bonaparte Cust, that this child would grow up to be a war-damaged, easily malleable nebbish, and that Mr. Cust would meet Franklin Clarke, a greedy bastard in search of a murder plan. 

I can embrace all of this as a matter of course, given that we are working within the confines of Golden Age crime fiction and Christie-land, in particular. The other coincidence sits less well with me: in Doncaster, Clarke follows Cust into a cinema, stabs a man sitting nearby, and slips the knife into Cust’s coat as he leaves. Clarke does this figuring that the odds are great that the man he stabbed would have a last name beginning with a “D”. This is a ridiculous surmise! Then, to double down on the nonsense, the actual victim is named “Earle,” which gives him an out as the police suppose that A.B.C. might have skipped a letter for some reason. Finally, to triple down unforgivably, the man seated next to the victim has a surname beginning with “D.” This pile-up is way too convenient, at least for me, and it’s hard to swallow how easily Poirot puts all of this together, especially since the reasoning up to then is particularly good.

Score: 8/10

The Poirot Factor

Early in the proceedings, the joyful reunion of Poirot and Hastings is increased with the inclusion of Inspector Japp. The fun they have with each other here will please fans of the Suchet series, such as when Japp teases Hastings for getting “just a little bit thin on top.” The disgruntled Captain admits that none of them are getting any younger, and Japp agrees – with one exception:
“Except Monsieur Poirot here . . . Quite a good advertisement for a hair tonic, he’d be. Face fungus sprouting finer than ever. Coming out into the limelight, too, in his old age. Mixed up in all the celebrated cases of the day. Train mysteries, air mysteries, high society deaths – oh, he’s here, there and everywhere. Never been so celebrated as since he retired.”

It’s true: Poirot is on fire in this case – not just intellectually, which is a given. Here, his limbs are as active as his little grey cells, propelling him across the country, investigating crime scenes in Andover, Bexhill-on-Sea and Churston, and dashing among the horse-racing throngs at Doncaster in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent a fourth murder from happening. The plot is a race, and Poirot is a sprinter. 

But he is also Papa Poirot, and it is fascinating to see how he treats the other characters, particularly the women. With Mary Drower he is “Papa” Poirot, kindness itself. He is tough on Thora Grey because he sees through her. And he holds special regard for an intelligent young woman like Megan Barnard and ultimately plays matchmaker with her and Donald Fraser. He knows how to deal with every witness, pretending to be a journalist offering a reward to loosen a neighbor’s tight lips or appealing to the sexual vanity of a plump, silly waitress.

And, for the last time until Curtain, he is Poirot the friend. The fact that he sees something in Hastings makes that nincompoop more palatable to me. As he says in the final line – 

“So, Hastings – we went hunting once more, did we not? Vive le sport!”

Score: 10/10

The Wow Factor

I would imagine that those who do not rate A.B.C. among Christie’s finest book are the sort to whom the reviewer from The Observer was referring in 1936 when they said, “The reader adopts two quite different mental attitudes as he reads. At first, and for a great many pages, he is asking himself: “Is Agatha Christie going to let me down? Does she think she can give us this kind of tale as a detective story and get away with it?” Then the conviction comes to him that he has been wronging the authoress, and that he alone is beginning to see through her artifice.”

It’s interesting to wonder if this book would have gone over so well if it did not revert in the end to a traditional whodunnit. What does this say about how readers have reacted to her thrillers as opposed to her detective stories through the years? Suffice it to say, the book was well reviewed. The New York Times went so far as to suggest it was even better than The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which up till then had been viewed as Christie’s gold standard! 

I have to say that the book wows me for how brilliantly Christie accomplishes her task. But then I am one of those fans who believes that the author had a certain gift with the serial killer sub-genre. Murder Is Easy has its problems, but the killer’s plot (and identity) are top-notch. The Pale Horse is another sensational one-of-its-kind Christie novels, and Curtain has a one of Christie’s most clever ideas behind it. And, of course, And Then There Were None is probably the greatest mystery novel ever written. 

The A.B.C. Murders fits perfectly in this illustrious company. So . . . wow!!!

Score: 10/10

FINAL SCORE FOR THE A.B.C. MURDERS:  46/50

THE POIROT PROJECT RANKINGS SO FAR . . . 

1. The A.B.C. Murders (46 points)
2. Cards on the Table (36 points)
3. The Mystery of the Blue Train (26 points)

Next time . . . 

We begin a New Year of Poirots with a game – a Murder Hunt! See you in a month.