The A.B.C. Murders - Literary Significance and Reception

Literary Significance and Reception

The Times Literary Supplement of January 11, 1936 concluded with a note of admiration for the plot that, "If Mrs. Christie ever deserts fiction for crime, she will be very dangerous: no one but Poirot will catch her."

Isaac Anderson in The New York Times Book Review of February 16, 1936 finished his review by stating, "This story is a baffler of the first water, written in Agatha Christie's best manner. It seems to us the very best things she has done, not even excepting Roger Ackroyd.

In The Observer's issue of January 5, 1936, "Torquemada" (Edward Powys Mathers) said, "Ingenuity...is a mild term for Mrs. Christie's gift. In The A.B.C. Murders, rightly chosen by the club as its book of the month, she has quite altered her method of attack upon the reader, and yet the truth behind this fantastic series of killings is as fairly elusive as any previous truth which Poirot has had to capture for us. The reader adopts two quite different mental attitudes as he reads. At first, and for a great many pages, he is asking himself: "Is Agatha Christie going to let me down? Does she think she can give us this kind of tale as a detective story and get away with it?" Then the conviction comes to him that he has been wronging the authoress, and that he alone is beginning to see through her artifice. In the last chapter he finds, because brilliant circus work with a troop of red horses and one dark herring has diverted his attention from a calm consideration of motive, he has not been wronging, but merely wrong. It is noticeable, by the way, that characters break off at intervals to tell us that we have to do with "a homicidal murderer." We are ready to take this for granted until Mrs. Christie (I wouldn't put it past her) gives us one who isn't."

E. R. Punshon reviewed the novel in the February 6, 1936 issue of The Guardian when he said, "Some readers are drawn to the detective novel by the sheer interest of watching and perhaps anticipating the logical development of a given theme, others take their pleasure in following the swift succession of events in an exciting story, and yet others find themselves chiefly interested in the psychological reactions caused by crime impinging upon the routine of ordinary life. Skilful and happy is that author who can weave into a unity this triple thread. In Mrs. Agatha Christie's new book…the task is attempted with success." He went on to say, "In the second chapter, Mrs. Christie shows us what seems to be the maniac himself. But the wise reader, remembering other tales of Mrs. Christie's, will murmur to himself 'I trust her not; odds on she is fooling me,' and so will continue to a climax it is not 'odds on' but a dead cert he will not have guessed. To an easy and attractive style and an adequate if not very profound sense of character Mrs. Christie adds an extreme and astonishing ingenuity, nor does it very greatly matter that it is quite impossible to accept the groundwork of her tale or to suppose that any stalking-horse would behave so invariably so exactly as required. As at Bexhill, a hitch would always occur. In the smooth and apparently effortless perfection with which she achieves her ends Mrs. Christie reminds one of Noël Coward; she might, indeed, in that respect be called the Noël Coward of the detective novel."

An unnamed reviewer in the Daily Mirror of January 16, 1936 said, "I'm thanking heaven I've got a name that begins with a letter near the end of the alphabet! That's just in case some imitative soul uses this book as a text book for some nice little series of murders." They summed up, "It's Agatha Christie at her best."

Robert Barnard: "A classic, still fresh story, beautifully worked out. It differs from the usual pattern in that we seem to be involved in a chase: the series of murders appears to be the work of a maniac. In fact the solution reasserts the classic pattern of a closed circle of suspects, with a logical, well-motivated murder plan. The English detective story cannot embrace the irrational, it seems. A total success – but thank God she didn't try taking it through to Z."