#Agatha christie abc murders series#
(The adaptation of "The ABC Murders" was one of the strongest of the early David Suchet Poirot movies, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was one of the strongest impetuses for doing the series in the first place.)Īs the killer openly taunts Poirot, and the ‘A’ and ‘B’ murders give way to a ‘C’, and then a ‘D’, a genuine sense of terror is built up: anyone in England could be next, safe only once their initials have been passed.
#Agatha christie abc murders serial#
Reunited with both Hastings and Japp, Poirot is part of a dynamic trio of investigators this time around, and – fighting a serial killer who moves across the country, against the clock – all three of them are put to great use. "The ABC Murders" is Poirot’s best mystery-cum-thriller. Poirot, Hastings and Japp hunt a sadistic serial killer.
And obviously an influential crime story, since it launched a major plot convention re-used by many other writers since. But the seriousness of the discussions is a little undermined by the way characters seem to keep saying "homicidal murderer" when they presumably mean "homicidal maniac".Fun, even if not without a few big flaws, and I'm glad to have read it at last. (And a few passing references along the way to past and future Poirot books.) There's also a lot of interesting discussion calling into question our preconceptions about crime and madness - you can't help wondering if there's some biographical significance to the way the main suspect himself has a genuine doubt in his mind about whether or not he committed the crimes, bearing in mind Christie's high-profile fugue ten years earlier. He pours particular scorn on the importance of the Clue, in particular the "curiously-twisted dagger" or the "little-known oriental poison". And of course has plenty of opportunities along the way for chaffing his sidekick, Captain Hastings, about the conventions of detective fiction. The police steadily plough through the process of amassing clues, whilst Poirot focusses on what today's crime novelists would call the forensic psychology aspect of the case, trying to work out what it could be that motivates the killer.
So Christie has to play a few tricks here to finagle Poirot into investigating a set-up that rapidly turns into a template for so many later serial-killer stories - victims widely separated in location, social class and personal situation, but linked by a bizarre "signature" element - in this case Alice Asscher in Andover, Betty Barnard in Bexhill, and so on, are all found with an "ABC Railway Guide" next to them. Serial-killer stories and golden-age private detectives don't often intersect, for obvious reasons - tracking down a serial killer normally requires the kind of large-scale teamwork that makes police-procedurals so interesting.
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