The ABC Murders — A Hercule Poirot Mystery

The ABC Murders Review

Published in 1936, The ABC Murders represents Agatha Christie at her most structurally inventive. The setup is deceptively simple: Hercule Poirot receives a taunting letter from someone calling themselves ABC, predicting a murder in Andover. The murder happens. Another letter follows, predicting a murder in Bexhill. That murder happens too. The pattern seems clear — a serial killer working alphabetically through British towns, with an ABC Railway Guide left at each scene.

Christie’s genius is to make the pattern itself the misdirection. By 1936, she had already published The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Murder on the Orient Express, demonstrating that she understood how deeply readers invest in the conventions of the detective genre — and how thoroughly those conventions can be exploited. The ABC Murders performs a similar trick, but with the serial killer format rather than the locked-room mystery.

The novel’s structure is also unusually modern for Christie. The investigation is told partly from the perspective of Captain Hastings (Poirot’s Watson), and partly through chapters following a man named Alexander Bonaparte Cust — a commercial traveller who finds himself in each murder location without being able to account for his time. This dual perspective creates a form of dramatic irony that Christie manages with complete control.

Poirot himself is in fine form. His insistence that the alphabetical pattern is a screen rather than the truth sets him apart from every other investigator on the case, and his reasoning — which pays careful attention to what a serial killer pattern would actually obscure — is genuinely satisfying when it unfolds.

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set The ABC Murders apart: The serial killer format is used as misdirection with complete structural control — Christie at her most architecturally inventive; The Cust dual-perspective creates dramatic irony Christie manages without a single misstep; Poirot’s insistence that the alphabetical pattern is a screen distinguishes him from every other investigator on the case; and The solution reframes the entire novel on rereading — all necessary information was present throughout. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Themes

The thematic concerns of The ABC Murders give it weight beyond its surface narrative. Patterns that seem to define a crime can be constructed specifically to misdirect investigators away from a much simpler truth. Serial killer conventions can be weaponised as cover for something far more intimate and personal. Poirot’s method — attending to psychology rather than physical evidence — solves what purely procedural investigation cannot. The most audacious mystery structures exploit reader expectations built up by the genre itself. These ideas emerge from the texture of the work rather than explicit statement, which is the mark of ambitious fiction done well.

Craft and Construction

What lifts The ABC Murders above the competent is the control Agatha Christie exercises over pacing and information. The reader is never ahead of the story, but neither is the mystery artificially maintained by withholding plausible deductions. The solution arrives feeling earned rather than arbitrary — the definitive test of plot construction in crime and thriller fiction.

Limitations

Readers who have encountered the plot’s structural trick in discussion may have the misdirection spoiled before they begin. Hastings as narrator is less compelling than in some Poirot novels — his function here is largely functional. The actual victims receive limited characterisation given how central their deaths are to the plot. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Our rating: 4.4/5 — Christie’s cleverest structural gambit, deploying serial killer conventions as cover for something far more intimate.

The Series Killer Misdirection and Christie’s Method

The ABC Murders was published in January 1936. The novel’s central structural device — a serial killer who announces murders in advance by alphabetical location, drawing Poirot and Hastings across England — was recognized by reviewers as one of Christie’s cleverest gambits: the apparent pattern conceals the actual motive, turning the reader’s attention in exactly the wrong direction.

Christie served as vice-president of the Detection Club, a society for crime writers founded by G.K. Chesterton in 1930; its members included Dorothy L. Sayers and John Dickson Carr, and the club maintained a “code of conduct” for detective fiction that prohibited certain forms of unfair misdirection. The ABC Murders can be read as a sophisticated meditation on precisely how far such misdirection can legitimately go while still offering a fair puzzle to the reader.

The novel has been adapted for television three times: most notably in the 1992 ITV adaptation with David Suchet, and in a 2018 BBC series with John Malkovich as a more psychologically ambiguous Poirot. Christie published 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, selling over two billion copies — making her the best-selling fiction writer in history. The Guinness World Records credits her as the best-selling novelist of all time, surpassed only by the Bible and Shakespeare in copies sold.

Christie’s British sales during the 1930s made her the bestselling novelist in the UK; the Detection Club, founded in 1930 under G.K. Chesterton’s presidency, required members to swear an oath that detectives would not solve crimes through “Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo-Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence or Act of God” — rules Christie followed with characteristic discipline in The A.B.C. Murders.