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    The ABC Murders: A Hercule Poirot Mystery: The Official Authorized Edition
    The ABC Murders: A Hercule Poirot Mystery: The Official Authorized Edition
    The ABC Murders: A Hercule Poirot Mystery: The Official Authorized Edition
    Audiobook6 hours

    The ABC Murders: A Hercule Poirot Mystery: The Official Authorized Edition

    Written by Agatha Christie

    Narrated by Hugh Fraser

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    Now an Amazon Prime original limited series!

    Agatha Christie’s beloved classic The A.B.C. Murders sets Hercule Poirot on the trail of a serial killer.

    There’s a serial killer on the loose, working his way through the alphabet and the whole country is in a state of panic.

    A is for Mrs. Ascher in Andover, B is for Betty Barnard in Bexhill, C is for Sir Carmichael Clarke in Churston. With each murder, the killer is getting more confident—but leaving a trail of deliberate clues to taunt the proud Hercule Poirot might just prove to be the first, and fatal, mistake.

     

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateJul 3, 2012
    ISBN9780062232243
    Author

    Agatha Christie

    Agatha Christie is the most widely published author of all time, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. Her books have sold more than a billion copies in English and another billion in a hundred foreign languages. She died in 1976, after a prolific career spanning six decades.

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    Reviews for The ABC Murders

    4.5/5

    451 ratings63 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Most enjoyable read. Ms. Christie had good insights into human behaviour.
    • 4/5
      I had forgotten how good Agatha Christie was as a writer. I thoroughly enjoyed The ABC Murders and plan to read more of her works.
    • 4/5
      This is a different book for Christie. I wasn't expecting her to play with points of views like that but it was refreshing and gave the whole story an odd quality.
      Very interesting plot and some hilarious lines of which here is a choice exemple -

      'She really is a lovely girl,' I said.
      'And wears very lovely clothes. That crepemarocain and the silver fox collar - dernier cri.'
      'You're a man milliner, Poirot. I never notice what people have on.'
      'You should join a nudist colony.'

    • 4/5
      What: paperbackWhat else: First person narrativeWherefore: it was on Mount TBR, and my Kindle was acting up Hastings: "I admit," I said, "that a second murder in a book often cheers things up." Poirot has semi-retired, but has discovered he is no better suited to the state than Holmes is said to have been, and so lets it be known that he is available to take those cases that interest him (again, like Holmes). At the beginning of this tale Hastings has come home to England from his ranch in Argentina, and expresses his hopes that some interesting case might pop up while he's there. And, of course, it does. Though it does not necessarily seem that way at first. Poirot receives an odd letter – printed, in common ink on common paper, and a postmark unremarkable – which proposes a challenge for the great mind. It's cheeky, and mildly insulting to the famous detective, and is signed "A.B.C.", and indicates that something is going to happen on a specific day in a specific town, and let's just see how clever you are! Hastings pooh-poohs the letter as one of those things written by some random crazy person, but Poirot is troubled by it. Something does indeed happen on that day in that town: an elderly woman is found murdered in her tobacco shop. Poirot, uneasy, heads to the crime scene. Hastings makes no bones about how utterly bored he is with the mere "sordid murder of an old woman". It's because the killer seems to be obvious – if Poirot hadn't received the letter there would never have been any question about it. And it's also because the victim is dull. A sordid domestic dispute is the only reason an older woman would be murdered. Bo-ring. This was about when I realized how little I like Hastings. I don't know if Christie was purposely using the smart Holmes-stupid Watson template, but Watson was never this thick, and would have given a damn about the death of an old woman, whether it was a case deserving of a great detective or not. As it turns out, this is deserving: the woman's name, her shop name, and her town all begin with "A". Then another letter comes directing Poirot's attention to a town beginning with "B". Uh oh. And sure enough, the victims begin to pile up, in strict alphabetical order. I've never been a big Poirot fan. I don't know if it's the prissiness or the accent or the little grey cells or the mustache or what, but I'll take Miss Marple any time, scary as she can be. In fact, I pulled this off the shelf because I would have sworn it was a Miss M. Oops. Still, the story was fun – except for one thing, which will be a spoiler I'll mark as such in the last paragraph of this review. It was as though Christie made up her mind to make this a very thorough departure from the usual plot, and had some fun playing with her serial killer. She also had fun with her secondary characters. A few of them – one victim's sister, another's niece, the official investigators – were lovely, with a surprising amount of life for minor characters in a fairly short book. I liked the attitudes taken toward the string of crimes. Poirot is grave; Hastings is confused (no surprise there); Japp and the other professional investigators are grimly determined to stop this string of sequential murders before it gets too far into the alphabet. "I", they figure. Hopefully "H". They're just being realistic, but the apparent callousness of it is breathtaking, like the tv crime shows where the detectives are seen joking over the corpse (*cough*Rizzoli and Isles*cough*). The solution is the part that bothered me – and here comes a big fat spoiler (though it's who the killer is not rather than who it is). The actual identity of the actual murderer was fairly satisfying. It was the fact that the narrative often broke away from Hastings's first-person journal entries to follow an unknown about for a little while in the most incriminating manner – that was what annoyed me. In a way, the poor man was so obviously the murderer that it was obvious he was not the murderer, if you know what I mean; however, it felt like being lied to when it became clear just how innocent he was, and I'm not sure if there was any evidence that would lead an armchair detective to figure out who, in fact, dunnit. I generally dislike murder mysteries in which the narrative departs from the usual point of view to show the story from the killer's angle; on the whole I'd rather stay with the hunters full time. When the breaks turn out to be not so much a red herring as a red humpback whale, I just feel like Dame Agatha was snickering up her cardigan sleeve at me. All in all, though, this was more fun than I expected, and made me glad I've picked up a healthy stock of Christies to fill in any gaps in my reading schedule. As if there were any of those.
    • 3/5
      Serial-killer stories and golden-age private detectives don't often intersect, for obvious reasons - tracking down a serial killer normally requires the kind of large-scale teamwork that makes police-procedurals so interesting. So Christie has to play a few tricks here to finagle Poirot into investigating a set-up that rapidly turns into a template for so many later serial-killer stories - victims widely separated in location, social class and personal situation, but linked by a bizarre "signature" element - in this case Alice Asscher in Andover, Betty Barnard in Bexhill, and so on, are all found with an "ABC Railway Guide" next to them. The police steadily plough through the process of amassing clues, whilst Poirot focusses on what today's crime novelists would call the forensic psychology aspect of the case, trying to work out what it could be that motivates the killer. And of course has plenty of opportunities along the way for chaffing his sidekick, Captain Hastings, about the conventions of detective fiction. He pours particular scorn on the importance of the Clue, in particular the "curiously-twisted dagger" or the "little-known oriental poison". (And a few passing references along the way to past and future Poirot books.) There's also a lot of interesting discussion calling into question our preconceptions about crime and madness - you can't help wondering if there's some biographical significance to the way the main suspect himself has a genuine doubt in his mind about whether or not he committed the crimes, bearing in mind Christie's high-profile fugue ten years earlier. But the seriousness of the discussions is a little undermined by the way characters seem to keep saying "homicidal murderer" when they presumably mean "homicidal maniac"...Fun, even if not without a few big flaws, and I'm glad to have read it at last. And obviously an influential crime story, since it launched a major plot convention re-used by many other writers since.
    • 4/5
      Hercule Poirot, the world renowned detective, is sent a letter from A. B. C., a mysterious person who writes to Poirot to get his attention. Realizing he intends to kill multiple people, Poirot sets out to catch him before he can kill anyone else.

      This was a bit different from the other Poirot mysteries that I have read thus far because it was more about the killer than the crime. Poirot connects seemingly unrelated people to one killer and discovers the truth of the crime.

      Again I am awed by Christie's skills with mystery. I definitely did not see this ending coming and I applaud her intelligence.

      I also really loved this because the ending was so satisfying. I loved how Poirot takes the time to console Cust, an old man that no one seems to care about, after he was framed. I thought that it was a beautiful moment and very uplifting.
    • 4/5
      Definitely one of the better Poirots. Unusually for Agatha Christie, a psychopathic serial killer is murdering people completely unknown to him, based only on the alphabet and an ABC railway guide. Could be seen as more modern than some of her other books. I'm not sure why I think that but the thought struck me very early on and didn't go away. There was more tension built up by the end than in some others because everyone can tell what will happen unless Poirot works out who did it, in a seemingly unsolvable mystery. Ending was both believable and completely surprising. I certainly didn't guess it, and I have a fairly good track record.
    • 4/5
      This was a bit dull and dragging until the end, which was excellent.
    • 4/5
      One of my early Christies, and a good one despite a highly improbable and meticulous plot. Hercule Poirot receives a disturbing letter from an apparent madman, announcing the date and location of a future murder. The writer signs himself "ABC," and when the letter proves to be more than a hoax, an ABC Railway Guide is found next to the body of the murdered woman, Alice Ascher. But A is just the beginning. Betty Barnard is next, and then Sir Carmichael Clarke — and all seemingly for the sole purpose of baiting Poirot to match wits with a homicidal maniac. Some of the characters are a bit one dimensional. The solution to the mystery is rather complicated. There's a big fat red herring so big, fat, and red that it's almost unsporting. But I don't care. Hastings is still humorous, the story moves along at a good clip, the dialogue flows naturally, and of course, Hercule Poirot does his thing. It's just plain entertaining and isn't that why we read Agatha Christie in the first place? Fun stuff.
    • 5/5
      Awesome story! If you’re a mystery fan you’ll love this one!
    • 5/5
      This narrator is great! And of course, Agatha Christie is the queen of the spellbinding mystery. I would highly recommend this as a "commuting book."
    • 3/5
      The ABC Murders again contain a truly original plot idea from Agatha Christie. The twist at the end is unexpected. Perhaps too unexpected. For the first time in the Poitor series, I wasn't even looking for a particular murderer, since he is so clearly introduced to the reader from the very beginning. It therefore didn't read like a detective's narrative, but rather like a police/crime story.

      Amazing to see how Christie keeps on managing to find truly original plot layouts in this amazing Poitor series.
    • 4/5
      A cleverly-written book featuring Poirot, who tries to solve a series of apparently arbitrary murders.
    • 5/5
      I saw a film adaptation of the title. Nothing ever compares to the written story of the Same herself.
    • 3/5
      I am a huge fan of Agatha Christi and would not give her a bad review if she were still alive. her books And then there were none, Death on the orient express, The death of Roger Ackroid and others are brilliant and also fun on a character and personal level. well, maybe not the first of the above-mentioned. Anyhow, this book was unsatisfactory in the story, which felt like all the serial murder stories we are so used to ( to be fair she wrote the book in 1936), and even the summing up was nothing special. So I say, read Agatha Christi, just not this book.
    • 5/5
      Amazing! Best of Poirot mysteries. Loved it more than the murder of Roger Ackroyd.
    • 4/5
      Enjoyable book. Surprise twist at the end. Plenty of red herrings.
    • 5/5
      Brilliant as always. I look forward to Poirot’s logic and great reveals. I am always a fan of mystery novels but Christie is so crafty and ingenious that you’ll never guess it. Love the twists!!
    • 4/5
      Enjoyed the ABC Murders. Quite a different plot than other Poirot mysteries. Nice twist in the end. As always really enjoy the Poirot audiobooks read by Hugh Fraser. He plays Col. Hastings in the TV version of Poirot and it really gives a nostalgic touch.
    • 5/5
      Hugh Fraser gives a real tour de force as narrator, giving voice to characters posh, common, northern, male, female and of course, Belgian.
    • 4/5
      Poirot, Hastings and Japp hunt a sadistic serial killer.

      "The ABC Murders" is Poirot’s best mystery-cum-thriller. Reunited with both Hastings and Japp, Poirot is part of a dynamic trio of investigators this time around, and – fighting a serial killer who moves across the country, against the clock – all three of them are put to great use. (The adaptation of "The ABC Murders" was one of the strongest of the early David Suchet Poirot movies, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was one of the strongest impetuses for doing the series in the first place.)

      As the killer openly taunts Poirot, and the ‘A’ and ‘B’ murders give way to a ‘C’, and then a ‘D’, a genuine sense of terror is built up: anyone in England could be next, safe only once their initials have been passed. This is not just a situation out of hand after one murder, or a country house with a limited number of suspects and victims: anyone Poirot meets could be either killer or killed, and the lack of connections between the victims – a trope which usually, if it exists at all, is solved early on – disconcerts us as much as it does Poirot.

      Beyond this, there is the novel’s slightly unusual narrative structure, contrasting Hastings’ own in-the-moment point-of-view, with a ‘reconstructed’ third person narrative. It’s unorthodox, very "Bleak House", and adds to the uneasy atmosphere that pervades the entire book. "The ABC Murders" is, simply, an early Christie masterpiece, filled with terror, immaculately constructed, and utilising all three of our leads, as well as the various suspects and hangers-on, to perfection.

      Poirot ranking: 5th of 38
    • 3/5
      Audio book performed by Hugh Fraser
      3.5***

      When Captain Arthur Hastings returns to England from his ranch in South America he knows he must call upon his old friend Hercule Poirot. Poirot is retired, but takes the occasional special case – “the cream of crime.” He shares with Hastings a letter he has received, challenging him to solve what will happen in “Andover on the 21st of the month,” and signed simply A B C. Sure enough a Mrs Ascher who runs a tobacco shop in Andover is found murdered, a copy of the ABC railway table left open on the counter next to her body. The next letter directs Poirot to a town beginning with B; and the murder victim’s name begins with B. The police are baffled because there are no witnesses and no obvious clues – except for the ABC railway guides found with each body. But Poirot’s little grey cells are working overtime and he focuses his analysis on the psychology of the likely killer.

      First published in 1936 this is Christie at her best. There are plenty of clues though only a seasoned detective will recognize all of them. As is typical of “cozy mysteries” the murder happens off-page – we may find a dead body, but will not be treated to the gristly and violent details of the murder itself. Christie includes a fair amount of explanation on the psychology of the serial killer (or “homicidal maniac”). And I really enjoy the humorous banter between Poirot and Hastings.

      Hugh Fraser does a very good job of the audio. He is able to give each character a unique voice and does a very good job bringing Poirot to life.
    • 4/5
      This was my first book by Agatha Christie. Fascinating study in perspective. And Hercule Poirot is a charming, if irritating sleuth. A serial killer makes the mistake of writing to Poirot - really his *only* mistake.
    • 4/5
      Hercule Poirot beschleicht ein seltsames Gefühl, als er eines Tages einen geheimnisvollen Brief zugesandt bekommt. In diesem fordert ein gewisser „ABC“ den Detektiv heraus. Ein Mord soll geschehen und auch wo und wann er geschehen soll, ist klar.Dennoch kann Poirot nicht verhindern, dass der erste Mord passiert. Schnell wird klar, dass dies kein Einzelfall bleiben wird. Doch dem Detektiv und der Polizei bleibt nichts anderes übrig, als auf den nächsten Brief zu warten und zu hoffen, dass sich der Mörder eines Tages selbst verrät.Doch nach A, folgt B und auch bei C ist man nicht ein Stück schlauer. Lässt sich der nächste Mord verhindern?Hercule Poirot sehnt sich nach einem Fall, doch dass dieser so schnell in sein eigenes Haus geflattert kommt, damit hätte er wohl nicht gerechnet. Agatha Christie schafft in diesem Roman einen Serienmörder, der die Affinität besitzt, seine Opfer in alphabetischer Reihenfolge zu ermorden. Dabei muss nicht nur der Anfangsbuchstabe des Namens übereinstimmen, sondern auch der passende Ort gefunden werden. Die Autorin lässt den Leser wie immer im Dunkeln tappen, allein gelassen mit seinen eigenen Schlussfolgerungen. Nebenbei wird die Geschichte eines Mannes erzählt, der mit seiner Psyche zu kämpfen hat und oft nicht weiß, was Wahrheit und was Wahn ist.Christie schreibt in ihrer gewohnt eingängigen Art. Ein Detektivroman, der mit keinem Wort zuviel erzählt wird, der aber dennoch bei der Jagd nach dem Mörder mitreißt.Eine spannende und fesselnde Kriminalgeschichte.
    • 5/5
      The ABC is too easy a trail for Herkules P, he follows another line. Great reading by Hugh Fraser!
    • 4/5
      In this Poirot mystery he receives a letter from the mysterious ABC warning him of crime to take place which it quickly does on the stated date. A second letter arrives which starts a quest to stop the killer before gong through the entire alphabet.

      I enjoyed this book which was a quick read and used my little grey cells with it's twists and red herrings and the end was a surprise.

      As usual the police aren't exactly overjoyed that Poirot is as usual one step ahead of them

      Visiting again these well known characters is like visiting old friends.
    • 5/5
      I've watched the series but I must say I love the book even better. It's engaging and I was quite surprised when the antagonist was finally revealed. I've always loved Agatha Christie and her character Hercule Poirot but the plot of ABC murders is not like any other Hercule Poirot mystery.
    • 3/5

      I liked this book up until the end and we found out who "Really" done-it.

      Col. Hastings is visiting from his Ranch in South America & visiting (a retired) Monsieur Poirot when a murder is announced (yes, that's another title from a different book) via letter to Monsieur Poirot, on such a date in Andover there will be a murder. The victim's name begins w/ A. The letter is signed A.B.C.

      In a bit of time another letter arrives... taunting Poirot... On such a date in the town of B..... A young waitress, Betty B, is found strangled on the beach.... she was stepping out on an extremely jealous fiance. Again the letter is signed A.B.C.

      So-on & so-forth.... C; a well off man whose first & last name begin w/ "C", collects china pieces and whose wife is ill w/ cancer and D towns as well......

      Except in D-town the person murdered last name begins w/ "E"......

      What ties them all together is the London Train A.B.C. maps and a man selling silk stockings......

      In the interim, several of the relations of the victims come together w/ Poirot & Hastings and form a detecting group....

      The ending, how does Christie come up w/ these things? No one could really ever figure them out.... Yer Monsieur Poirot, just puts his little grey cells to it and "Voila"!

      The book held my interest (I read & finished it in bed last night).... There was one really glaring bit of racism: having an immovable face like that of a Red Indian........ Wow, really?

      Also, there was a certain bit of psychology (about liars & schemers & psychopaths) that reminded me of the Troll that I worked with......

      I am trying to read them all..... but obviously not in order, just by what is available @ the Library when I go in.
    • 3/5
      Te narration was great, the ending was underwhelming a bit
    • 3/5
      A mysterious "homicidal maniac" by the name of A.B.C. begins knocking people off based on an alphabetical scheme -- beginning with A. Ascher in Andover. It's up to private investigator Hercule Poirot and his friend Captain... er... Hastings to catch this crook before he can get from A to Z. This book chronicles the events of the murders and chase of the killer, with a nice little twist at the end which readers know must be coming but cannot quite figure out. The question Poirot asks himself through the whole case is not "who?" but "why?" which helps him catch the killer in the end. The twist at the end itself was clever and surprising, but I found myself waiting impatiently for it. While the rest of the book held my attention, I found it a little dull at times. The characters for the most part did not enthrall me, and the methodical investigation of the murders was a little redundant. However, after I finished the book, the turn of events kept me thinking for a while. I'd recommend it, but it definitely is not a "must read."