The ABC Murders

The ABC Murders is a detective novel by the English writer Agatha Christie, first published in January 1936, one of the best known novels to feature her detective Hercule Poirot. Poirot begins receiving taunting letters signed only ABC, each announcing a murder in advance in a town beginning with a successive letter of the alphabet, and each killing is found accompanied by a copy of the ABC railway guide left beside the victim, beginning with Alice Ascher in Andover and continuing through Betty Barnard in Bexhill and Sir Carmichael Clarke in Churston. As the murders mount, suspicion falls on Alexander Bonaparte Cust, a mild, epileptic traveling stocking salesman found to have been present near each crime scene and unable to account clearly for his own movements, but Poirot, narrating the case together with his friend Captain Hastings, becomes convinced that the murders are not the random work of a deranged serial killer but a single deliberate crime disguised within a false pattern, and identifies Sir Carmichael's brother Franklin Clarke as the true culprit, who had committed the other murders solely to conceal his real motive of killing his brother for an inheritance while framing the vulnerable Cust. Often ranked among Christie's finest achievements for its structural experiment of a first-person narrator whose own account cannot be fully trusted alongside third-person chapters describing Cust, the novel has been credited with anticipating and influencing later serial-killer fiction, and it was adapted for television and cited by Christie's own contemporaries as one of her cleverest plots.