Christie Catchup: The ABC Murders

The ABC Murders by Agatha Christie

 

published 1936

 

 

As I look at the Agatha Christie books that I haven’t yet covered on the blog (and there are not many) some of them surprise me: but the absence of this one does not. It is a favourite of many of my fellow-Christie fans, and makes it into a lot of top 5 lists, but I have never liked it much – while ready to say that it is cleverly done.

In my recent post on Murder on the Orient Express, I mentioned this one in my list of Christies with the memorable solutions. Most of those books can be re-read for interest, for the details, to see how she plants her clues. But I don’t find that with The ABC Murders – for me, it only works once. And, as with others of her books, aspects of the plot were original and surprising when she wrote it – they seem more routine now, but that’s because she was at the forefront of crime-writing, full of new ideas.

The story concerns an apparent serial killer: he (we are assuming it’s a man) murders Alice Ascher in Andover, Betty Barnard in Bexhill, Carmichael Clarke in Churston (very close to where Agatha was about to buy her holiday home, Greenway, as a matter of fact). A copy of the widely-used ABC railway guide is found next to each body. Doncaster is the next location – the killer is sending boastful warning letters to Hercule Poirot -  and the police and the public are deeply worried. Will the killer go through the whole alphabet? (Good luck with Z). Poirot and Hastings investigate.

We are also privy to the thoughts of a rather sad man, a travelling salesman living in lodgings, to whom worrying things are happening.

I recently wrote about motives in golden Age crime stories, and although I didn’t mention this book directly, there are relevant words there. How is the serial killer choosing his victims, what is the connection among these people? Those who survived the victims get together, helped by Poirot, to try to find out what is going on.

At the end of the book, Poirot says

 ‘I consider your crime not an English crime at all – not above-board – not sporting –' 

Captain Hastings laughs hysterically when he hears this, but I am very  much on Poirot’s side. Without spoilering: the horrible crimes are bad enough, the reason for them even worse, but the attempt to blame someone else is a seriously upsetting plotline: ever since first reading this book it has made me sad to contemplate the heinousness, I find that thread very melancholy. There is a grim meanness about it.

Right, got that off my chest – I don’t like the book and will probably never read it again, though had forgotten that actually Poirot agrees with me – a slight point in its favour.

Stockings feature in the book – always a favourite of mine: see this Guadian article for my Theory of Stockings which has now been quoted elsewhere (thank you blogfriend Susanna Tayler for finding it on the  website of the Otago Museum in Dunedin NZ )…. as well as featured in my Agatha Christie Festival talk. People are surprisingly unclear about the history of hosiery – I note that in Zadie Smith’s otherwise excellent new book, Fraud, she has 19^th century Belgian nuns wearing ‘worsted tights’, which would most certainly have been stockings.

As I say elsewhere – you may think of stockings as a weapon of death, but it comes up very rarely in Christie (A Pocket Full of Rye) – the stockings play a quite different role here.

There is a very odd scene where Poirot and Hastings stop off at Pevensey Castle (a nice spot on the south coast, I went to the town for a holiday last year).

As we were returning towards the car, we paused a moment to watch a ring of children – Brownies, I guessed, by their get-up – who were singing a ditty in shrill, untuneful voices.

“What is it that they say Hastings? I cannot catch the words”

I listened - till I caught one refrain.

And catch a fox

and put him in a box

and never let him go

His face had gone suddenly grave and stern.

“It is very terrible that, Hastings.”

Now, he is not talking about how untuneful the poor little girls are.

I think this is a vey strange scene – why Pevensey, why Brownies? Is it something that happened to Christie? It’s not like her (at this date) to put in such an unexplained and inexplicable scene. The song Poirot takes to refer to the unhappy section of the book that I mention above, but we cannot believe that he needed Brownies singing this song to tell him something was wrong… it doesn’t make any sense. 

(Brownies – what junior Girl Scouts/Guides are called in the UK – are not mentioned much in Agatha’s oeuvre, though Elaine in Pocket Full of Rye, again, helps run them in the village.)

The scene reminds me of One Two Buckle my Shoe, where Poirot hears something in church which supposedly helps him solve the crime – I never understood for a moment why this constituted a clue, how it helped, and what it meant. It is on my list to re-read soon, and I look forward to trying to make sense of it.  

In this book it’s just a lost, strange moment.

Top picture from Sam Hood, 1937, at the races, to represent the St Leger, which is a key event at Doncaster and relevant to the fourth murder.

I’m always alert for a tea-room (I think my PhD thesis on Golden Age crime would deal with teashops, knitting, or stockings – I haven’t decided yet) and there’s a good one here:

The Ginger Cat, situated on the seafront, was the usual type of small tearoom. It had little tables covered with orange-checked cloths and basketwork chairs of exceeding discomfort with orange cushions on them. It was the kind of place that specialised in morning coffee, five different kinds of tea (Devonshire, Farmhouse, Fruit, Carlton and Plain) and a few sparing lunch dishes for females such as scrambled eggs and shrimps and macaroni au gratin.

(Picture shows, of all things, a cafe on the Titanic...)

There is not much in the way of clothes in the book – one victim is dressed in white for a summer’s evening. The secretary to another victim wears what Poirot says are lovely clothes: ‘That crepe marocain and the silver fox fur collar- dernier cri!’

(Hastings says he doesn’t notice such things, and Poirot says he should join a nudist colony. But Hastings knew a lot more about clothes in Lord Edgware Dies, three years earlier).

Another young woman is neatly dressed in a black coat and skirt - she’s coming up in the world because she is a housemaid when we first meet her, but has now left the job.

Again I am struck by how short Christie books are – she could certainly tell a story. This is a complicated plot with a complex solution, but she gets it into shape in fewer than 200 pages in my edition.