The ABC Murders

First published in 1936, The ABC Murders finds Hercule Poirot confronted by a killer whose method is as unnerving as it is methodical: a series of murders apparently arranged in alphabetical order, each preceded by a taunting letter addressed to the Belgian detective. With the victims scattered across England and an ABC railway guide left beside each body, the case seems to transform murder into a macabre game of sequence and chance.

Narrated by Captain Hastings, the novel combines the familiar pleasures of Christie’s puzzle-making with a more unsettling meditation on pattern, manipulation, and the human desire to impose order on violence. Poirot must look beyond the apparent logic of the crimes to discover the intention concealed within them. One of Christie’s most ingenious investigations, it also plays cleverly with the conventions of detective fiction, testing the reader’s confidence in what a mystery appears to be.

From the book

“The impossible could not have happened, therefore the impossible must be possible in spite of appearances.”

— Agatha Christie, The ABC Murders

On The ABC Murders

“If Mrs Christie ever deserts fiction for crime, she will be very dangerous: no one but Poirot will catch her.”

— The Times Literary Supplement, 11 January 1936