Tag Archives: Agatha Christie

The ABC Murders

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Agatha Christie’s 1936 novel The ABC Murders (also known as The Alphabet Murders) is her first stab at a serial killer story. Sorry – couldn’t resist the pun.

She followed on from Philip MacDonald’s opening foray into the sub-genre X v Rex, published in 1934 under the alias of Martin Porlock. This book, written from the perspective of the killer – the so called inverted style in which the suspense is generated by whether or not the killer, whom the reader already knows, will be caught rather than trying to solve whodunnit – begins to explore the psychology of the murderer. In this it has similarities to the earlier Malice Aforethought by Anthony Berkeley, writing under his Francis Iles pseudonym, in 1931.

Christie also purported to examine the psychology of the criminals – indeed, you could argue that much of Miss Marple’s detecting follows a psychological profiling approach – finding similarities in patterns of thought or behaviour that follow archetypes she has observed in her village of St Mary Mead. However, Christie never felt the explication of the criminal psyche should ever be anything but subordinate to the plot.

But then Christie only used her own name for her detective fiction (she reserved her alter-ego Mary Westmacott for romances), so she was to an extent hidebound by the public’s expectations of “the next Christie”. Both MacDonald and Berkeley made use of pseudonymous novels to explore new avenues to writing detective fiction in a way that Christie chose not to. They were thereby freed from the constraints of audience expectations by taking this approach.

In fact, Christie’s approach in The ABC Murders is innovative, mixing conventional first person narrative through her usual character of Captain Hastings, with narrative from the perspective of the killer.  She finesses the latter sections through the device of a purported reconstruction of the killer’s perspective after the fact by Hastings (with the benefit then knowing of Poirot’s solution) for his telling the story in the book. This is mixed with the introduction of actual letters from the killer addressed to Poirot, which give the killer a voice on the page. Such a mix of narrative perspectives had been done before – as early as 1868, Wilkie Collins was experimenting with this approach in his detective novel, The Moonstone.

What makes Agatha Christie’s entry into this multiple-perpective, serial killer world more significant than the more ambitious works of Anthony Berkeley/Francis Iles and Philip MacDonald/Martin Porlock is the size of her market. She was selling vastly more books than the others. Therefore he influence was commensurately greater.

I would argue, therefore, that The ABC Murders is one of the most significant Golden Age novels and a vital step out of the cozy and into the murkier, much more sinister world of the serial killer. Without her breaking the ground with the mass audience, the seeds could not have been sown which later bore fruit in the multitude of later novels which we see now featuring serial killers driven by innumerable warped psychotic impulses.

So it’s Agatha I have to thank for the sleepless nights I now endure having been “creeped out” by the visceral, nightmare visions I have subjected myself to, reading the likes of everything from Mark Billingham’s Tom Thorne books to the gruesome finds of Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta.

Mark

The Mysterious Affair at Styles

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I have just re-read The Mysterious Affair at Styles in the light of comments made by Martin Edwards at The Bodies From The Library Conference last week. Martin reminded delegates that as we look back at them now the Golden Age authors we think of as relatively elderly figures were, at the time they were writing in that period, just starting out on their writing careers. They were the bold young Turks carving out a niche for themselves and defining a new genre. They were constantly innovating and what we, with the benefit of 80 or 90 years of hindsight, may think of as hackneyed cliches that have dulled with of over-use by subsequent lesser talents were actually brilliant innovations that genuinely took their readership by surprise. 

I have read Agatha’s debut novel in the  Folio Society edition which is stylishly illustrated by Andrew Davidson with 7 plates including the above final scene where Hastings is finally enlightened by Poirot how the Affair was solved. 

So many maps

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One of the great delights of golden age detective fiction is the plethora of maps that appear.

As I read through the recommended list of books from our conference speakers, three of the books I have just completed, Overture To Death by Ngaio Marsh, Look to The Lady by Margery Allingham and The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L. Sayers feature maps (and sometimes more than one such map) of the locations where the crimes take place. And one need look no further than Agatha Christie’s first Poirot novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles to complete your full house of all four Queens of Crime including a plan of the setting for the action. They are, of course, not alone in having this feature.  Fully half of the books I have been reading in preparation for the conference, by almost any of the golden age authors, have something of the kind.

This fascination with pictorial representations of the scene in no way indicates shortcomings in the descriptive powers of the writers. This is far from the case. It appears more to be adherence to a convention and bowing, therefore, to their audiences expectations.

It does make for an interesting diversion from the main business of reading the story to check the maps to follow routes taken by characters – do they seem to be sensible ways to get from A to B in the time available? Will the alibis stand up?

But sometimes, the layout is not significant to the plot. In that case, is the presence of the map in itself a giant red herring, implying that character’s movements around the setting for the events is of greater importance to the solution of whodunnit than is in fact necessary?

Perhaps this is why two other books I have also read recently, X v Rex by Philip Macdonald (writing as Martin Porlock) and Malice Aforethought by Frances Iles (aka Anthony Berkeley) do not use maps. Each is, in its way, consciously breaking with the traditions and conventions of the genre.  Neither is a classic whodunnit puzzle to be solved. The former is arguably the first attempt to portray a serial killer and reveal something of the killer’s psychology that drives them to commit the crimes; the latter is an inverted tale where you know the identity of the killer and the question is whether or not he will get away with the murder or be caught (wherein lies the suspense).