Blog Post -The ABC Murders

The ABC Murders describes what is thought to be the serial murders of a madman who had started sending Hercule Poirot letters of his planned alphabetically ordered murders, explaining his ‘game’ to annoy the retired detective personally. Agatha Christie’s story starts with the murder of Mrs. Ascher, a kindly older lady who runs a news stand. Just before, Poirot receives a letter foretelling her death. The police immediately drop all suspicions of her drunk, separated husband, when an ‘ABC’ train guide is found face down next to her corpse. Throughout the rest of the story, there are three more murders, all in alphabetical order, except for one man mistaken for another who was stabbed in a dark movie theater.  Poirot attempts to discover the contents of the mind of the madman by looking over all of the motives in every situation, but finds it so different to attempt to find the reasoning of virtually random murders. As it turns out , that was more similar to the deaths caused by an assassin with motive than he thinks. By discerning how and where the victims died, what the murder needed to kill them could be seen. He was inconspicuous, covered up being crazy well, and was strong enough to kill the victims with a number of different blunt objects.

By the middle of the book, through the parts of the book narrated by the 'madman' rather than Poirot's friend Hastings, the reader finds that the murderer may be unable to tell that he is murdering people a lot of the time. The fact that he doesn’t realize that he is in the same place of the murder so often does not occur to him until the second death. He probably never would have suspected himself if not for the fact that he is so insecure about being the kindly old man that everyone else sees him as. The author supports many themes throughout the book, especially consistency of character. That personality is so important to why every person does whatever they do. This is generally how Poirot find the murder most often, and he stays consistent himself in that matter. Another theme that has some role in this book is fate. The entire scheme was meticulously planned out, but not everything could be planned. There were still the few things that could not be controlled, that had gone wrong just because they did. There is also a bit of a prophecy that one of the characters was told, that seemed meant to be, because after it is mentioned once it comes true.

I thought that this book has so many statements about who people are and how that affects every action of theirs that it can really make the reader think about their own actions. The fact that the author describes people so well is one of the things that makes her detective mysteries as realistic as they are. The hints about character are what helps solve the crime, and that is easier to see earlier in the book, but what throws off a lot of suspicions because the suspect of this case is different than many of her other books because the nature of the murders are that they are done by the insane. There is little motive at all and it is hard to see why the crimes are committed in the first place because there is almost nothing tying the dead to their killer.