I admire the hell out of author Agatha Christie.  In her lifetime she released an almost obscene amount of novels (66) and short story collections (14) many of which, today, are considered classics in the crime/mystery genre.

During her lifetime she also created not one but two very famous “sleuths” to inhabit many of her novels.  The more well known of the two, Hercule Poirot (the other is Miss Marple), appeared in 33 of those 66 novels and some 50 short stories.  Like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot is a detective with an intelligence that is superior to those around him.  He makes all the connections between crime and murderer and solves crimes that leave all others baffled.  Curiously, also like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie grew to hate the character of Poirot, though unlike Mr. Doyle reserved the “last” Poirot case, Curtain, for release in 1975 (Mrs. Christie would pass away in 1976).

Over the Holidays, Amazon.com offered many books for sale.  Among them were several Agatha Christie novels, some of which I read and others which I didn’t.  I think I read her 1936 Poirot novel The A.B.C. Murders many, many years ago.  However, if I did, I recalled no details so reading this book was, essentially, like reading it for the first time.

The book is the 13th to feature Mr. Poirot in the lead and it is an interesting book to read, though because of my familiarity with Mrs. Christie’s writing style I found some of the bigger surprises not quite as surprising, I suspect, as most virgin Agatha Christie readers might find them.

To begin, the mystery presented is different from some of the usual Agatha Christie affairs.  Hercule Poirot, living in London, receives a strange letter from someone who signs it “A.B.C.”  The person states s/he will kill someone in a certain town (the town’s name begins with the letter “A”) and dares Hercule Poirot to find and stop him/her.

The police wonder if the letter is written by some crank and Hercule Poirot hopes this is the case while clearly worried it is not.  To make a long story short, a murder is committed and the victim’s last name also begins with an “A”.  Then a second letter arrives, indicating the next victim, who will have a “B” in their last name, will be found in a town that begins with the letter “B”.

What’s fascinating about this novel is that many of the Agatha Christie novels I’m familiar with tend to be murder mysteries revolving around a set of characters and this novel and this one hints at the possibility of Hercule Poirot going up against a serial killer.

What is even more fascinating, I found, is that at one point Mr. Poirot states something along the lines of wanting to get into “the killer’s mind”, a big plot device used very effectively nearly a half century later by Thomas Harris in his Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs novels, both of which were eventually made into very good movies (I refer to the Michael Man directed Red Dragon adaptation Manhunter rather than the remake done post Silence of the Lambs).

As I read the novel, I was fascinated by how well Mrs. Christie writes.  She manages to say a lot with very little, often allowing the dialogue to propel the story along and giving us tasty hints as to what characters are all about.  I particularly enjoyed the way the character of Thora Grey was presented.  MILD SPOILERS In the end, the character was revealed to be a gold-digger and her plans fell by the wayside.  I suspect in other author’s hands the character would have been presented as much more nasty but Agatha Christie manages to show us the relative good in her even as she’s revealed to be a calculating woman.

Unfortunately and as I mentioned above, being familiar with Agatha Christie’s writing style, some of the bigger surprises the book offers didn’t surprise me as much as I would have hoped, though I would easily recommend this book to anyone interested in sampling Mrs. Christie’s novels.

To get into that, I’m going to have to get into some bigger…

SPOILERS

Still there?  Again, if you want to read the novel, I strongly urge you to look away from what I’m going to talk about.  Beware!

Still there, redux?

You’ve been warned!

The A.B.C. Murders tries to make us think we’re dealing with Hercule Poirot going up against a mad serial killer yet almost from the very first page I knew there had to be more to the story.  Again, I may have read the story before many, many years ago, so maybe its not so much that I’m clever but rather that I had details of the plot buried deep in my subconscious.

Regardless, from the moment we deal with the idea of a possible mad serial killer taunting Hercule Poirot, I somehow knew the murders he’d face were a distraction and that this whole effort to present the idea of a serial killer was, in reality, an effort to hide one particular murder.

Once you’ve put yourself in that frame of mind, as I did early in the novel, it was clear which of the murders (there are four in total), was “the” one.  It was easy to figure out as it was the murder that others had the most to gain from.  As in money.  Three of the victims came from simple means and one was a wealthy person who would leave behind quite a bit of money.

Once I determined the murders were a diversion, and this was well before that victim was named, I started looking for the clues to whodunnit and why.  It became a simple bit of deduction on my part and there were only two possible candidates for the role.  However, this was also where parts of the novel started to stretch credulity.

The idea of presenting us with a bogus “mad” killer is all good and well, but when you have an actual character presented in the book who is being framed for this, a character who is absolutely perfect for the frame (he’s a WWI vet who suffers from blackouts and therefore isn’t even certain if he committed some of the crimes), you begin to wonder just how much free time the real murderer had to a) find the patsy, b) plan out the elaborate charade, and c) commit the actual murders without being found out until getting to the one that was the true victim.

As entertainment, The A.B.C. Murders is nonetheless an enjoyable, entertaining novel whose biggest flaw is that it hopes readers will accept all the above and not question it…at least not too much.

While at times preposterous because of this, The A.B.C. Murders is nonetheless worth checking out.