Retro Reviews: The ABC Murders

In The ABC Murders, Poirot receives as a warning letter, because none of these villains can just do their murders, they have to tell the world-famous detective first. The mysterious ABC writes a taunting letter threatening the murder, and then kills Alice Ascher of Andover, leaving a railroad timetable (called an ABC guide) at the scene. 

The whole concept of the ABC murders seems more like something the Joker would pull in Gotham City than an Agatha Christie mystery.  But somehow the taunting letters feel ominous, not goofy, and it’s scarier  than her other mysteries because the randomness feels like a serial killer  all over the country, not an inheritance drama in a country house. 

Hercule Poirot, with his little grey cells and loyal pal Hastings, pieces together clues the and makes deductions. As always, he knows the answer much earlier than he reveals this to readers,  or to poor Hastings. This is not my favorite aspect of Poirot novels, but I did like his zany questions coming around to the real answer. 

There’s an interesting style choice in The ABC Murders that I don’t see in most other Poirot novels, with some scenes told outside Poirot’s experience. I mean, they’re still third-person stories, but usually we readers only get to see what Hastings has seen. Here, we visit other scenes in places without our usual characters, revealing information that Poirot and Hastings don’t know. It was fun for me because while I knew that suspect described in those non-Poirot sections was a misdirection, I didn’t know why or how, and I definitely didn’t know how Poirot would uncover it.

Unfortunately, there are some unpleasantly dated attitudes here, like our poor waitress Betty. The fact that she was flirty and is now dead means that Betty sealed her own fate, and that no one is much moved by her death. Too flirty here means more that she took walks with multiple gentlemen, but sometimes we see this expectation today, so maybe blaming a girl for her own murder isn’t all that dated.

There’s also an odd forced romance, you know the kind, when two people of opposite genders spend a little time together pleasantly and then decide to get married. It’s not awful, it’s just dated. 

Overall, The ABC Murders is an unusual Poirot because the whole ABC serial-killer thing was so far from what I expected, and because those scenes that Poirot and Hastings aren’t aware of really add a different feel to the msytery.