One of Christie’s most admired mysteries and a fine example of mystery and detective fiction, The A. B. C. Murders pits Hercule Poirot against someone who kills by the alphabet and who also sends Poirot an ominous letter before each murder. Christie constructs her puzzle by having the murderer commit decoy murders; in a further level of distraction, the murderer also anonymously hires a patsy (Alexander Bonaparte Cust) and employs him on bogus sales trips to the towns where the murders are to be committed.
In addition to having the murderer distract Poirot through misdirection, Christie works the same angle on the reader by allowing the telling of her story to switch from one narrator to another. Usually, Captain Hastings relates the entire story from a first-person point of view. In The A. B. C. Murders, however, the story is amplified by means of mysterious asides from a third-person narrator limited to Cust’s thoughts and behaviors. Initially, these passages are extremely short, but as Cust is more firmly fixed in the reader’s mind as a suspect, they become more detailed. The coincidence of his work taking him to all the murder locations eventually persuades even Cust that he must be guilty of at least some of these crimes.
As the story opens, Poirot no longer takes routine cases, but the killer’s taunting letter summons him to a duel of wits. The story unfolds according to the usual detective formula: after each crime, everyone connected to the victim is questioned to discover the motive and establish the opportunity for murder. But as the crimes multiply, so does the pool of potential suspects. There seems to be no connection between the victims. Even the murders themselves bear little resemblance to one another, and the fourth murder in Doncaster seems to miss the mark entirely, since the victim’s name doesn’t even start with the letter D!
Only after this fourth murder does a smidgen of evidence begin to link poor A. B. Cust to the murder scenes. Already suspecting himself, Cust flees in a panic. He knows he has an alibi for the second murder—but could he have committed the other ones in a deranged state? Dejected, he turns himself in at the police station. Although Cust is tried and convicted, when Hercule Poirot interviews the man, he establishes to his satisfaction that Cust could not have committed the crimes. He continues his own investigation.
Although Scotland Yard always suspected a homicidal maniac, Poirot remains convinced that the murderer was quite rational and highly clever. The sensational media circus that attached itself to the investigation suggests to Poirot that the murderer intended to create a smoke screen out of many murders to hide the one murder that he or she would benefit from. But which murder is the catalyst, and which are the distracters?
In a detailed exposition, Poirot assembles the suspects and carries them through the deductive process that has led him to the truth about The A. B. C. Murders. He flushes his quarry and secures a panicked confession in front of the other witnesses. The case is solved in an unexpected way that demonstrates Poirot’s powerful insight into the criminal mind.
In The A. B. C. Murders, Christie is at her best. She repeatedly places the guilty party in view, but in such a way that the reader does not draw the right conclusions. Her puzzle is tightly and believably constructed, and through the use of a suspenseful second narrator with a carefully controlled point of view, she keeps attention on the decoy rather than the murderer.
Bibliography
Bargainnier, Earl F. The Gentle Art of Murder: The Detective Fiction of Agatha Christie. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Press, 1981.
Maida, Patricia D., and Nicholas B. Spornick. Murder She Wrote: A Study of Agatha Christie’s Detective Fiction. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University, 1982.
Sova, Dawn B. Agatha Christie A to Z: The Essential Reference to Her Life and Writings. New York: Facts On File, 1996.
Categories: British Literature, Crime Fiction, Literature, Mystery Fiction, Novel Analysis
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