The ABC Murders (1936)

"I thought it would be nice to have an audiobook . Agatha Christie is one of the very few people to have sold more unabridged audiobooks than abridged ones. That says something about the quality of her writing and the difficulty of abridging detective stories. You can’t leave out the red herrings. Hugh Fraser reads it wonderfully. In many ways, it’s the most complicated challenge Poirot faced. When you come to the end, you really do put down the book and say to yourself: ‘Why on earth didn’t I think of that?’ There was always a copy of the ABC railway guide beside my grandmother’s telephone. I’m sure that’s where the story originated. I can see her sitting there, talking to one of her friends and staring at the book, the plot forming in her mind. It’s always been one of my favourite Poirots . It had a very good TV representation by David Suchet. Yes. It’s common knowledge she wrote her last Poirot in the 1940s, in which he comes to a sticky end. Her agent and publisher persuaded her to put it in a drawer and it wasn’t published for 30 years. Part of Poirot’s attraction is that he is irritating and pedantic. He likes his boiled eggs the same size and he’s dandily dressed. If you’re writing about someone like that, he’s probably going to get to you. The other reason she found him tiresome was nothing to do with him at all. Her mind was so fertile. She was constantly thinking of plots and stories, most of which weren’t suitable for Poirot. She was dying to get those written down. She would ring up her agent or publisher in the 1940s, the era in which the Poirot books were at their most popular, and one or the other would say: ‘It’s wonderful, Mrs Christie, but couldn’t you write another Poirot instead?’ I think that annoyed her too. She wrote many wonderful books without Poirot or Miss Marple in them. Not only Endless Night , but also the book she was most proud of, Crooked House . She was desperate to write more stories like that. Life was a constant struggle, throughout the 50s, to write the books she really wanted to write."

"I can’t remember which was the first Agatha Christie I came across, but I’ve tried to read all of her crime novels. It’s primarily about the plots. Only rarely does the twist in a contemporary mystery book give me the satisfaction that Agatha Christie does. I suppose it’s also the familiarity: with each book I know I’m going to get the same thing and yet cleverly different. The ABC Murders features her Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, before she got really fed up of him. The story is mainly told through the eyes of his old friend, Captain Hastings, who comes back from South America to find Poirot dying his hair. Poirot has received an anonymous letter signed A.B.C., challenging him about a mystery which he won’t be able to solve. The plot revolves around the ABC Rail Guide— the train timetable book that was widely used at that time—and is one of her cleverest. When I spoke to Agatha Christie’s grandson, Mathew Prichard , he speculated at how she came up with it: “There was always a copy of the ABC railway guide beside my grandmother’s telephone. I’m sure that’s where the story originated. I can see her sitting there, talking to one of her friends and staring at the book, the plot forming in her mind.” It gets at what I like in my crime fiction—a writer taking an ordinary object, situation, or person and making it into something menacing, but also having a bit of fun with the reader: this is a train timetable we’re talking about."