The ABC Murders

Let’s start with a word game. Think of a list of authors who have written books about serial killers. Thomas Harris. Check. James Ellroy, Bret Easton Ellis. Check. And not forgetting the pioneering Jim Thompson. Even the most comprehensive list might reasonably omit literally hundreds of writers. The serial killer exerts such a hold on the public imagination that its sub-genre, the “serial killer novel” continues to thrive. The list grows virtually every day.

One name perhaps not on your list is Agatha Christie but the Queen of Crime/best-selling-novelist-of-all-time should be included because The ABC Murders focuses on a serial killer. As such the novel broke new ground and represented a departure when it was first published in 1936. Think of Agatha Christie and a specific world comes into being. Murder is on the menu but of the variety of the butler in the drawing room by means of blunt instrument or poison unknown.

At least that’s what I thought when opening this book, knowing a fair bit about Christie’s life but decidedly less about her fiction. With The ABC Murders I plunged straight in and almost immediately realised I had made the fatal mistake of judging a book by its cover and its title.  As easy as ABC?  Definitely not.  Here was a different world from my preconceived notions of what to expect.

Christie used an unusual experimental technique in The ABC Murders. In addition to the stuffy, slightly pompous retelling of the case by Poirot’s sidekick Captain Hastings, we are given a few chapters entitled “Not from Captain Hastings’ Personal Narrative.” These chapters are from the perspective of the chief suspect in the story, or rather they are Hastings’ re-imagining what the thoughts and movements of the suspect might have been. As such Hastings becomes a conduit for Christie herself.

Hastings divulges in the novel’s first lines that he has taken a poetic licence. This almost seems like a foreword by the author, stating that she is experimenting and the reasons for using these techniques. For a different kind of novel, a different kind of writing was required. Disposing of narrative convention to a degree, Christie is giving the reader prior notice, to be prepared when the difference comes.

The novel commences with the reunion of Hastings and Hercule Poirot. The great Belgian detective has moved into a geometric apartment where everything is just so. Christie, through the observations of Hastings, affectionately takes the proverbial out of Poirot’s fastidiousness and attention to detail. Christie cannot resist poking fun at the vanity of middle-aged men and their fussiness over appearances. Poirot (with comically precise moustaches and bottle of hair dye) is on the receiving end. So, too is Hastings, when easily offended by remarks about his receding hairline which he has tried in vain to conceal.

Given the dark subject matter, there is a surprising amount of comedy in the novel. Poirot, as expected has his fair share of delicious one-liners but is also prone to muddle up proverbs. The story begins properly when the great Belgian is coaxed out of semi-retirement (Poirot likens himself to the primadonna who cannot stop making one last farewell performance.) He has received a letter, warning of a crime and a challenge for him to solve it.

Inspector Japp of Scotland Yard regards the letter as a hoax, a prank of the same kind the police receive on a daily basis. But when the crime takes place, Poirot’s worst fears are confirmed and a deadly chain of events unravels.

The reader is then introduced to Mr Alexander Bonaparte Cust, the chief suspect in the story.  Cust is fragile and ordinary.  The main narrative is punctuated with these brief episodes.  They function to give the reader an impression of him, not too much to know his general character, enough to make the reader suspicious.  Later in the story these episodes are more frequent and there is more detail of Cust’s thoughts and actions.  They play an important role in Christie’s grand scheme, in a narrative littered with red herrings and banana skins, designed to wrong-foot the reader at every turn.

In Andover (the third chapter) there is an intriguing dialogue between Hastings and Poirot about what would constitute “the perfect murder.” Hastings has a fanciful notion, favouring the murder of someone famous, in the library, with a “curiously twisted dagger.” There should be plenty of suspects, some of them suspected wrongfully. Agatha Christie almost seems to be mocking the formula she perfected in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, a formula that has become forever associated with her name. Is she intentionally mocking her own success?

Hastings admits “that a second murder in a book often cheers things up. If the murder happens in the first chapter and you have to follow up everyone’s alibi until the last page but one – well, it does get a bit tedious.” Christie was acutely aware that one solitary murder was not sufficient to satiate the morbid fascination of readers.

I did not expect this degree of playfulness in Christie’s novel. There is an awareness of form, an element of intertextuality and a degree of genre subversion. Poirot’s reply in this dialogue suggests a wish to break from the mould and blaze a bold new direction. The perfect murder he attests is very simple but undetectable. The extravagant, sensational expectations of crime novel readers were thus likely to be confounded.

It is in the everyday, commonplace world that crimes are committed.  Of course, this being a mystery novel, it is not as clear-cut as that but it is in the commonplace that Christie excels, particularly in the inventive premise of the novel (the sinister arising from the ordinariness of a railway timetable guide.)  People stand and gape at the crime scene in Andover.  This morbid curiosity is stoked and sensationalised later in the story by the press, exploiting the fears of a killer in the midst, a face in the crowd able to blend in and strike at will without being detected.

In the questioning of the first victim’s neighbour, Mrs Fowler, Christie displays a gift for capturing the colloquial speech patterns of the working class that belies the snobbery and contempt Hastings exhibits towards “the lower classes.”  Mrs Fowler’s way of speaking curiously reminds me of the pub section in T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land.

Poirot shares some techniques with his illustrious predecessor and supreme sleuth, Sherlock Holmes.  “If I had “simply asked”, as you put it, I should have got no answer at all to my questions,” he tells Hastings.  There is a remarkable similarity here to the methods of Holmes in The Sign of the Four.

“The main thing with people of that sort,” said Holmes, as we sat in the sheets of the wherry, “is never to let them think that their information can be of the slightest importance to you.  If you do, they will instantly shut up like an oyster.  If you listen to them under protest, as it were, you are very likely to get what you want.”

Yet in Chapter Eight, Poirot satirises the almost superhuman abilities of Holmes to detect a crime from the most infinitesimal of clues.  The solution for Poirot lies not in the active pursuit of the criminal or the art of disguise.  Poirot prefers the use of psychological analysis and mental reflection.  Useful clues naturally come to light but by exploring the psychology of motive Poirot is able to catch the murderer.

In Chapter Eight, the reader is also introduced to Dr Thompson “the famous alienist.” The police consult Thompson on the likely psychological profile of the killer, how much information to reveal to the press and how to respond to the killer’s boastful letters to Poirot. Christie includes elements of the modern police procedural format we recognise from television programmes today, as Hastings touches on the bureaucracy of conferences and the co-operation between different regional police forces.

Poirot brings up that other infamous precedent, Jack the Ripper while Dr Thompson explains all the scientific terms, speculating on the killer’s possible persecution mania and with gallows humour how far he will progress through the alphabet before being caught.

Accusations of xenophobia have often been levelled against Christie’s novels (a number of her murderers are not English). But in this novel Christie also highlights the stereotypical English reactions often displayed towards foreigners. When Poirot repeatedly asks if the second victim was a pretty girl, he receives a number of odd, disdainful looks, implying that foreigners are perverts with sex on the brain (this is ironic given Poirot’s evidently effeminate nature.)

In Conference (Chapter Thirteen), during another discussion about the possible psychology of the murderer, Poirot remarks, “if you are a sufficiently great and important person, it is necessary that you should be spared small annoyances.  If a fly settles on your forehead again and again, maddening you by its tickling – what do you do?  You endeavour to kill that fly...”

Later in the book there is the same repeated emphasis, only this time it is stated that ______ would not hurt a fly.  Is it possible that Hitchcock read the novel and it had a profound influence on Psycho?  The expression is echoed in Hitchcock’s film (or should that be inverted?) by the insane mind of Norman Bates:

“I’m not even going to swat that fly.  I hope they are watching, they’ll see.  They’ll see and they’ll know and they’ll say “why she wouldn’t even hurt a fly.””

If there is a direct influence, then in the 1992 ITV Poirot adaptation of the story, the complement is returned.  In the scene inside a cinema, Hitchcock’s Number Seventeen (a little seen pre-Hollywood work from 1932) is playing on the screen.

A Torquay girl by upbringing, Christie knew the county of Devon well.  There are a litany of Devonian place names inserted into her novels.  Sometimes the names are reproduced, at others they are changed slightly.  So in The ABC Murders, Churston Railway Station appears and the recent development and the impact of tourism upon the area is mentioned while the local inspector mispronounces Hastings as Captain Hayter (an obvious reference to Haytor on Dartmoor, another popular spot for tourists during summertime.)

As Alexander Bonaparte Cust sits on a park bench in Torquay and becomes increasingly nervous, it almost seems for a moment that the novel might head in the direction of Septimus Smith in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, in its depiction of a shell-shock victim traumatised by the First World War.

But there are a still a good many twists and turns to come: the psychosexual motif, the send-up of the cheapness and sentimentality of the popular melodramas of the day in the film Not a Sparrow.  The ABC Murders is not without its faults.  The basic descriptions of the “bright blue eyes with fair hair” are not very sophisticated but then these are Hastings’ observations, after all and not directly Christie’s.    

The trouble with Christie is that she takes you down a definitive track and then derails you when you least suspect it.  There is possibly one twist too many and the conclusion is a bit on the absurd side.  Or perhaps I am just a bit peeved because I didn’t guess the ending.  Whatever the reason, there is plenty of merit in The ABC Murders to warrant further investigation.  Based on this evidence, there is more to Agatha Christie’s books than her detractors would have you believe.