Wed 10 Feb 2021
A 1001 Midnights Review: AGATHA CHRISTIE – The ABC Murders.
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Reviews[10] Comments
by Susan Dunlap & Marcia Muller
AGATHA CHRISTIE – The ABC Murders. Hercule Poirot #13. Dodd Mead, US, 1936. First published in the UK by Collins, hardcover, 1936. Reprinted many time, in both hardcover and paperback. Film: MGM, 1966, as The Alphabet Murders, with Tony Randall as Hercule Poirot. TV adaptations: (1) As an episode of ITV’s Agatha Christie’s Poirot (1992) with David Suchet as Poirot. (2) BBC, three part mini-series, 2018, with John Malkovich as Hercule 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 at 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 at 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 are 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 are 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 Jane 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 Postrn 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 al 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.
February 10th, 2021 at 6:28 pm
There is one very key element to who the killer is in most Christie novels (most, but not all), but I won’t spoil anyone’s fun by pointing it out save to say it applies in this one too.
To me that doesn’t destroy the fun, because Christie is still fun to read once you know the tricks and the killers identity. She plays the game so masterfully, so competently lays the traps, and spreads the clues that even knowing what she is doing and where she is going you can return to her work and enjoy it from a different perspective than just “who dunnit.”
Christie indeed is less a “who dunnit” writer than a “how in the Hell did she do that?” writer.
I’ve said before I don’t consider Christie to be comfort food. She is much darker and much more serious than she may seem when first seen from the outside. Poirot and Miss Marple are not merely detectives, they are moralists and fairly tough minded ones.
There are moments in the books with both Poirot and Miss Marple where they are as tough emotionally as Sam Spade, scenes where they see tragedy coming, try to warn of it without interfering, and then ruthlessly peel away the layers of lies the murderer has created regardless of what the truth reveals.
Christie is about as cozy as an evening spent with a nervous cobra. The only “comforting” element of her mystery novels is that order is generally restored at the end, no matter what the cost.
February 10th, 2021 at 6:59 pm
Whenever I read anything by someone calling Christie a cozy writer, I know immediately that that person has never read anything by Christie.
February 10th, 2021 at 8:13 pm
‘The Big Four’ –in which Poirot and Hastings battle an international cartel in the style of Sax Rohmer –should alert anyone to the fact that Christie can sometimes go wildly off the rails. I can only speak to my own experience when I make the following remark: I admire Christie, but in very limited measure. ‘Big Four’ should indicate the depth of her single-minded determination to crank out novel after novel.
February 10th, 2021 at 8:26 pm
THE BIG FOUR is the one Christie novel that I have started and never finished. As a story of high level espionage and international intrigue, it is a total anomaly in terms of the rest of her work. Off the rails, yes, without a doubt. Even though Poirot is in it, it’s as atypical a Poirot story as you can imagine.
February 10th, 2021 at 8:57 pm
Yes, Christie could misfire, PASSENGER TO FRANKFURT is another example, but the total misfires are few and far between, and the hits are some of the best the sub genre has to offer, and the entire genre as well.
Obviously I think Chandler and Hammett were wrong and wrong headed about the Classical Detective novel, and read Christie rather shallowly for men I admired otherwise. I find their appraisal of the classic detective novel to be a defensive gesture rather than genuine criticism.
It’s easy to attack any book for not doing something it never intended to do in the first place.
She is not likely the bestselling writer of all time only because she contrives a good puzzle, she grew and changed as a writer over time. There is a depth to her later work only suggested at the start.
Granted her characters are mostly only as in depth as the needs of the story and that her style is simple (deceptively I would suggest), but try reading her dialogue compared to others mining the same genre in the period, note how well she sketches in characters with as little business as needed, and again look for the strong and steely moral strain in her work.
She’s not the Queen for no reason. She isn’t as romantic as Sayers, as playful as Allingham, as sharp as Marsh, but she does all of it well within the needs of her books and even at the end there are surprises.
I’ve followed her down many a rabbit hole, and would not hesitate to do so again.
February 11th, 2021 at 8:57 am
Yes, but…THE BIG FOUR was one of her earliest (and silliest) books, as she was finding her footing, and FRANKFURT was written when she was old and tired. The classic books of the 1930s and 1940s (including ABC, one of her best) can all be read with immense enjoyment.
February 11th, 2021 at 8:58 am
I think of all genres, mystery novels must be the singularly most difficult kind of writing there is. Sometime last year I talked to an aspiring mystery writer (even more grave, they were a newcomer to authorship completely, in that they had never written any kind of book ever) and they wanted to make their first novel a classic drawing-room mystery. They were breezy about it, as if it would be no great hurdle. They were embarking on the project because they thought it made good marketing sense; based on what’s selling lately. I couldn’t believe my ears. Tried to impress upon them how preposterous the scheme was (without discouraging them from their ambition, of course). For not only is it extraordinary to construct a baffling mystery but to embed that sub-structure in an enjoyable page-turning read, with compelling characters and lively dialogue? And suspenseful too? Ridiculously difficult.
Among mystery fans I’ve talked in reader’s groups and book clubs; Christie seems to have a cult-following more so than any of her peers except perhaps maybe, du Maurier. Even single titles of hers, (such as ‘Ten Little Indians’ seem to have specific cult-following devoted to them alone; and seem to haunt female readers particularly, down through the decades the way ‘Rebecca’ has.
It’s no small deed to write even one good mystery; and these Golden Age writers wrote dozens. I certainly acknowledge this.
February 11th, 2021 at 12:53 pm
“…I think of all genres, mystery novels must be the singularly most difficult kind of writing there is.”
Writing a science fiction novel would be equally tough, I should think, in that you also have to create the setting (space, the future, whether future Earth or future galaxies), and so maybe even tougher.
But your point is well-taken, Lazy. After reading detective all my life (well since I was nine, starting with The Hardy Boys), I have no illusions about ever trying to write a mystery story myself. I know better, and for all the reasons you state.
February 11th, 2021 at 10:55 am
Speaking of THE BIG FOUR, I kind of liked it, although it’s certainly different.
https://jamesreasoner.blogspot.com/2009/01/big-four-agatha-christie.html
February 11th, 2021 at 12:48 pm
I probably would have gotten farther into it before putting it down if Christie had used someone other than Poirot in the leading role. But what this discussion has done is to convince me to give it another try, should I come across a copy I already own again.