Sat 27 Jun 2020
A 1001 Midnights Review: AGATHA CHRISTIE – The ABC Murders.
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Reviews[12] Comments
by Susan Dunlap & Marcia Muller
AGATHA CHRISTIE – The ABC Murders. Dodd Mead, US, hardcover, 1936. First published in the UK by Collins, hardcover, 1936. Reprinted many many times, in both hardcover and soft, including an edition published by Pocket in paperback entitled The Alphabet Murders in 1966. Film: MGM, 1966, also as The Alphabet Murders, with Tony Randall as Poirot. TV adaptions: (1) An episode of Agatha Christie’s Poirot, ITV, UK, 5 January 1992., with David Suchet as Poirot (2) A three part mini-series on BBC One, UK, 2018, as The ABC Murders with John Malkovich as Poirot.
Agatha Christie has long been acknowledged as the grande dame of the Golden Age detective-story writers, Beginning with her moderately successful The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), Christie built a huge following both in her native England and abroad, and eventually became a household name throughout the literate world. When a reader – be he in London or Buenos Aires – picks up a Christie novel, he knows exactly what he is getting and has full confidence that he is sitting down to a tricky, entertaining, and satisfying mystery.
This enormous reader confidence stems from an effective combination of intricate, ingenious plots and typical, familiar characters and settings. Christie’s plots always follow the rules of detective fiction; she plays completely fair with the reader. But Christie was a master al planting clues in unlikely places, dragging red herrings thither and yon, and, like a magician, misdirecting the reader’s attention at the exact crucial moment. Her murderers – for all the Christie novels deal with nothing less important than this cardinal sin – are the Least Likely Suspect, the Second Least Likely Suspect, the Person with the Perfect Alibi. the Person with No Apparent Motive. And they are unmasked in marvelous gathering-of-all-suspects scenes where each clue is explained, all loose ends are tied up.
As a counterpoint to these plots, Christie’s style is simple (even undistinguished). She relies heavily upon dialogue, and has a good ear for it when dealing with the “upstairs” people who are generally the main characters in her stories: the “downstairs” people fare less well a1 her hands, and their speech is often stilted or stereotyped.
Christie, however, seldom ventures into the “downstairs” world. Her milieu is the drawing room, the country manor house, the book-lined study, the cozy parlor with a log blazing on the hearth. Like these settings, her characters arc refined and tame, comfortable as the slippers in front of the fire – until violent passion rears its ugly head. Not that violence is ever messy or repugnant. though; when murder intrudes, it does so in as bloodless a manner as possible, and its investigation is always conducted as coolly and rationally as circumstances permit. One reason that Christie’s works are so immensely satisfying is that we know we will be confronted by nothing really disturbing, frightening, or grim. In short, her books arc the ultimate escape reading with a guaranteed surprise at the end.
Christie’s best-known sleuths are Hercule Poirot. the Belgian detective who relies on his “little grey cells” to solve the most intricate of crimes; and Miss .lane Marple, the old lady who receives her greatest inspiration while knitting. However, she created a number of other notable characters, among them Tuppence and Tommy Beresford, an amusing pair of detective-agency owners, who appear in such titles as The Secret Adversary ( 1922) and Postern of Fate (1973); Superintendent Battle of Scotland Yard, who is featured in The Secret of Chimneys ( 1925), The Seven Dials Murder ( 1929), and others; and the mysterious Harley Quin.
The member of this distinguished cast who stars in The ABC Murders is Hercule Poirot. Poirot is considered by many to be Christie’s most versatile and appealing detective. The dapper Belgian confesses gleefully to dying his hair, but sees no humor in banter about his prized “pair of moustaches.” And yet he has the ability to see himself as others see him and use their misconceptions to make them reveal themselves and their crimes.
A series of alphabetically linked letters are sent to Poirot, taunting him with information about where and when murders will be committed unless he is clever enough to stop them. The aging detective comes out of retirement, he admits, “like a prima donna who makes positively the farewell performance … an infinite number of times.” Is the murderer a madman who randomly chooses the victim’s town by the letter of the alphabet, or is he an extremely clever killer with a master plan? And why has he chosen to force Poirot out of retirement?
These questions plague Poirot’s “little grey cells” as the plot thrusts forward and then winds back on itself time and time again. Well into the novel, Christie teases the horrified reader by introducing a coincidence that looks as if it will solve the cases, then snatches it back, dangles another possibility, snatches that one back, too. And so on, until the innovative and surprising conclusion is reached. Poirot is at his most appealing here, and Christie’s plotting is at its finest.
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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust
June 27th, 2020 at 10:23 pm
Of the film adaptations of this, the Suchet is obviously the one to catch. It captures something of the suspense and the edge of this outing.
Like most Christie adaptations this sticks close to a rule about her work I won’t reveal here and spoil things, but once you know it you will never have quite as much difficulty spotting the killer,
The Tony Randall version was an attempt to match the success of the Miss Marple films with Margaret Rutherford and too campy for its own good plus tacking on an absurd ending.
Even worse is the John Malkovich version which kills off Inspector Japp for no real reason, gives us Poirot as a phony who solves “murder mystery weekends” rather than country house murders, and has a twist so absolutely absurd regarding Poirot’s past that I had to restrain myself from throwing something at the television.
There are a couple of other contemporary Christie adaptations on Amazon Prime and Hulu, and they are all just as bad. In fact God awful.
June 27th, 2020 at 10:37 pm
David
Yes to all you have written.
June 27th, 2020 at 10:48 pm
I have decided to pass on all movie/TV adaptations of Christie’s books. Just this past week my brother watched the Suchet version of ROGER ACKROYD, which he told me the basic approach was cleverly done, but the episode ended with a shootout in in a warehouse in which Hastings (I think) knew the villain was done by counting the number of shots he’d fired.
June 28th, 2020 at 10:14 am
I have always believed if you are going to give a novel ‘original spin’ in its dramatization, that AndThen There Were None (1945) tops them all. Cast, direction, score and a wholly satisfying conclusion.
June 28th, 2020 at 2:47 pm
The Miss Marple shows,s starting with Joan Hickson, and that production team is apart. After Joan, some of the shows encourage interest, but no performance is definitive. Prior to Hickson, Margaret Rutherford is fun, but not Marple and Angela Lansbury a flat out turn off.
June 28th, 2020 at 5:36 pm
I never watched any of the Rutherford movies. I regarded them as comedies only, perhaps wrongly. I have heard OK things about Hickson, but little about the Geraldine McEwan versions.
I bought several of the Suchet box sets, but haven’t gotten around to watching any yet. My brother’s report on Ackroyd was very discouraging, however.
I suppose that everyone who’s had a chance to see the new Perry Mason series now on HBO has already decided whether they will watch another episode or not. Most of what I’ve heard has been very negative, but I also have been told that ratings have been very high.
The reboot of HAWAII FIVE-O has gone well, and while I think ratings and reviews of the new MAGNUM and MacGUYVER series have only been so-so, they have each been renewed for more the one season, a statement that cannot be made about the new IRONSIDE, which was pulled after only, what, three episodes?
June 28th, 2020 at 6:05 pm
Ackroyd is the worst of the Suchet Poirot’s by a mile. Only THE BIG FOUR, an unfilmable book, and CURTAIN are worse, but generally the series is well written and faithful and Suchet a delight as Poirot, though sometimes it makes all too obvious a trout in the milk in Christie’s plotting — like not knowing how ventriloquism actually works in one short story.
Even Christie wrote some books that can’t be adapted to the screen easily.
There is some decent detection in the first two Rutherford films, which then deteriorated into comedy alone, but the chance to see Rutherford with Robert Morley, James Robertson Justice, and even Arthur Kennedy is hard for me to pass. In fact the chance to see Rutherford in anything is hard for me to miss.
Hickson is the best of the Marples followed by McEwen, but too often they shoehorn Miss Marple into non Christie books like ENDLESS NIGHT, and it doesn’t work at all or they get cute as in THE CARIBBEAN MYSTERY and Ian Fleming shows up for no reason at all to listen to James Bond lecture on birds (it was done so flat footed any charm was lost).
Barry,
The brilliant Rene Clair version of AND THEN THERE WERE NONE is based on Christie’s own play of her book, which features the happy ending. I’m not sure when the first adaptation was done to tack on the books ending, but I’m fairly sure it was a television adaptation. Even the Russians did a good one.
June 28th, 2020 at 6:25 pm
David, you are correct that Christie lead the way with a happy ending, but in the play version, which I have here, Lombard really does get shot and wounded by Vera, while in Clair and Dudley Nichols, he is essentially the detective hero.
June 28th, 2020 at 7:21 pm
Getting back to the book at hand, I read THE ABC MURDERS back when I was maybe 15 or 16, and it really knocked my socks off. Devilishly clever, I though, and I was disappointed for a while when mysteries by other writers didn’t measure up. Luckily, though, I soon discovered Erle Stanley Gardner, Rex Stout and John Dickson Carr, and all was good with the world again.
June 28th, 2020 at 7:22 pm
Sorry to be garrulous on this subject but the Clair version is close to my heart, and part of its brilliance is the offbeat casting from top to bottom, starting with Mischa Auer, totally unlike the book, followed by Hayward, one of the few leading men willing to portray weak if not outright villainous characters, My Son, My Son and Ladies In Retirement come immediately to mind and the piece de resistance, Barry Fitzgerald, having just won an Academy Award as an adorable old priest, playing off that performance.
June 28th, 2020 at 8:15 pm
Didn’t mean to short ABC, but it is almost impossible to talk about without giving too much away. It’s much closer to a Philip MacDonald plot than what you expect from Christie, and I admit now I admire how she orchestrated the police element of the chase since that isn’t really normal Christie country, though when I read it first I didn’t realize it was a bit off the usual Christie path.
It is not my favorite Christie or Poirot, but it is well within the top ten list.
I’ve long held Christie is a better writer than she is given credit for. If her style was any more intrusive it would get in the way of the story, something that can be said of her characters as well. As it is she offers a perfect balance between story, plot, character, and style.
Considering how long she wrote and how many books the clunkers tend to be few and far between, though what she thought she was doing with books like THE BIG FOUR and PASSENGR TO FRANKFORT you have to wonder. Everybody has a bad day.
Barry,
Lombard gets shot in at least one of the film versions, the one set in Africa with Donald Pleasance, Herbert Lom, and Brenda Vaccaro, Lombard played by Frank Stallone …
I agree about Hayward, who I know you knew. He was always better than the material, and one of the few equally comfortable as a swashbuckler, a charmer, or a snake. One of my favorite of his roles is in RUTHLESS as best friend to Zachary Scott, a role that would have disappeared between Scott and Greenstreet with any other actor in it.
Sorry Steve, off of ABC again.
June 28th, 2020 at 8:19 pm
Barry and David
Not a problem at all!