Hercule Poirot and the quest to find a methodical serial killer
Agatha Christie’s refreshing new take in “The ABC Murders”, straying from her favourite locked-room mysteries
Since joining Goodreads back in 2016, I have read 354 books, 90 of which belong to the mystery-thriller category. A staggering 25% of my total reads surmises my love for the genre. However, I have been noticing a downward spiral in shock value from such books. There are rare books (ahem, masterpieces) that make me guessing till the end while being readable, realistic and providing a perverse thrill in a world of doom and murder.
A major chunk of mystery books throned at NYT Bestsellers follow a certain pattern, a Goody-Too-Shoes narrator who thinks the best of everyone, a best friend/love interest they rely on for everything, a plot where they begin doubting that person and voila, that person is the murderer. If someone asks me the most disastrous recipe to create a mystery, you can guess what my answer will be. For people who love a doomed world and need a respite from their lives to get engrossed in a tale of a complicated murder with immense worldbuilding, Agatha Christie is a beacon of hope. Thanks to her, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple were born, going on to etch their names in mystery in golden letters and becoming immortal in the hearts of millions all over the world.
I discovered the mystery genre while walking between the bookshelves in my high school’s library. That was the time I came across Enid Blyton and thus, began daydreaming of being a child detective while finishing The Secret Seven series. That time came to end because of a soon-to-fail attempt to get admission to a good university. My college life was the polar opposite of what we see in movies. Suffice to say that my survival after 4 years is one of the two good things to come out of it. Rediscovering the joy of reading was the other good thing. And, now, I wanted to be the sidekick of Hercule Poirot, the amazing detective created by Agatha Christie. You can assume that no parent wants their child to be a sidekick of a detective who doesn’t exist, so, I went the conventional Indian way of being a software engineer.
“Who are you? You don’t belong to the police?”
“I am better than the police,” said Poirot. He said it without conscious arrogance. It was, to him, a simple statement of fact.
I can wax poetry and sing songs of praise of Christie and reminisce about my past all day long, but this article is about The ABC Murders and Agatha Christie’s stray from a parlour drama, into a hunt for a well-organized serial killer. Told from the perspective of Mr Hastings, Poirot’s friend, you will draw direct comparisons to Dr Watson, the confidant cum friend of Sherlock Holmes. Poirot himself is similar to Sherlock, especially in the usage of intellectual deduction to solve crimes. Both the detectives were supported by underrated assistants and displayed an intellectual snobbery that rubbed people the wrong way.
The story starts when Poirot receives a letter from A. B. C. mocking his intellect, warning of a future event in Andover and a bait to find him. The sender turns out to be a man of his word and murders Mrs Ascher, an old lady who runs a local store in Andover. Near her dead body lies an ABC Railway Station guide which eventually becomes ABC’s well-known symbol. In parallel, we come across some chapters about Alexandre Bonaparte Cust and his whereabouts. Poirot receives more anonymous letters warning of similar events in Bexhill and Churston as the story progresses.
Words, mademoiselle, are only the outer clothing of ideas.
A. B. C. stays consistent once again and murders Elizabeth Barnard at Bexhill and Sir Carmichael Clarke in Churston. Other people assisting Poirot in the serial killer hunt are Chief Inspector Japp, Inspector Crome and Dr Thompson. Christie created Japp after getting inspired by Inspector Lestrade in the Sherlock Holmes series. Crome is quick to jump to conclusions and dismissive of Poirot’s abilities. Dr Thompson is hard at work trying to build a psychological profile of the murderer and understanding his mindset. While the police are functioning at all hours to alert citizens and setting up surveillance in the places, Poirot forms a team of amateur sleuths, comprising of the members of the grieving families to uncover new information and identify similarities among the cases.
And that is where the gambler (and the murderer, who is, after all, only a supreme kind of gambler since what he risks is not his money but his life) often lacks intelligent anticipation. Because he has won he thinks he will continue to win! He does not leave the tables in good time with his pocket full. So in crime the murderer who is successful cannot conceive the possibility of not being successful! He takes to himself all the credit for a successful performance — but I tell you, my friends, however carefully planned, no crime can be successful without luck!”
One aspect I particularly like about this book series is how the author lightens the overall mood with inane humour, random conversations and astute observations about humans and their behaviour. But Christie takes it a bit further because all these “random” moments are carefully placed and play an integral part in driving the story. They provide multiple dimensions to every event and make the reader tangled, blocking them at every path and providing the reader with the mystery experience till the epilogue.
However, the primary highlight in this book for me was the unrelated chapters that detailed Alexander Bonaparte Cust and his activities. They provided us with a different point of view and direct hints about the identity of the murderer. But it’s Agatha Christie, and she knows how to throw one curveball after the other. These chapters, though providing hints, subsequently revealed an underlying plot that was hidden cleverly. The mystery was not the murderer himself, but his motive for planning such an elaborate scheme that involved alphabetically selecting locations and killing people whose last names end with the same letter. Only when we question the motive that we understand that a lot is at stake, and the straight plot Christie was handholding us through has hit a wall.
Christie is a master storyteller and concocts a perfect world where finding the murderer is minuscule as compared to the motive. She is a crafty devil who, at any instant of the novel, can make me believe that I am actually the murderer in this complex fictional web of drama, intrigue and mystery. She dangles just the right amount of bait in front of the reader. The reader knows it’s fake, they know they will feel foolish when this bait unravels into nothing, but they can’t help but jump to take it. If it’s Agatha Christie, I will always be glad to play the fool and take all baits, if only for the chance to read more of her classics.
