Hercule Poirot Books (Agatha Christie)

Sarah Harrison: Welcome to Tea Tonic & Toxin, a book club and podcast for anyone who wants to explore the best mysteries and thrillers ever written. I’m your host, Sarah Harrison.

Carolyn Daughters: And I’m your host Carolyn Daughters. Pour yourself a cup of tea, a gin and tonic …

Sarah Harrison: … but not a toxin …

Carolyn Daughters: And join us on a journey through 19th and 20th century mysteries and thrillers, every one of them a game changer.

Carolyn Daughters  00:56
Sarah, I’m excited about our episode today.

Sarah Harrison  01:02
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Carolyn Daughters  01:46
We’re in an amazing place today.

Sarah Harrison  01:48
That’s a that’s a better way of putting it.

Carolyn Daughters  01:51
We’re at Ucross foundation in Ucross, Wyoming, population 26.

Sarah Harrison  01:56
Yes, and we have such a cool guest that we are interviewing this morning.

Carolyn Daughters  02:01
We’re gonna discuss The ABC Murders by Agatha Christie. It’s one of the most popular Hercule Poirot books. Kemper Donovan is our special guest.

Sarah Harrison  02:08
And if you don’t know Kemper, he hosts the All About Agatha podcast, so he seemed like a great guest to have for this particular selection. So Sarah, who’s our listener of the episode? Before we get into that. I want to talk about a great listener, Diane Seaman, from Illinois. Diane recently became a patron of the show, and you can do that too. All you have to do is hit the Support Us button on any particular platform and you can join Diane. She’s going to be receiving a fantastic sticker. I think I’m gonna send her one of our limited edition ones. Oh, I don’t know that I’ve seen the limited I don’t think you have. Well, actually, no, they’re all of our vintage book covers from season one.

Carolyn Daughters  02:52
What do I have to do to get one of these stickers? I have an in with the cohost, so we’ll see what I can do. So today we’re reading, discussing what we’ve already read, The ABC Murders by Agatha Christie. I’m going to give a short summary here, so we’re all on the same page. So as the story begins, we learn 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. Asher in Andover. B is for Betty Barnard in Bexhill. C is for Sir Carmichael Clark 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. 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 100 foreign languages. She died in 1976 after a prolific career spanning six decades. Today, we’re excited to talk about The ABC Murders, our seventh book selection of 2024 and one of our favorite Hercule Poirot books. You can learn about all our book selections, along with selections from previous years at teatonicintoxin.com.

Sarah Harrison  04:14
I have the pleasure of introducing our guest, Kemper Donovan. He’s a full-time writer who is currently publishing an ongoing mystery series via Kensington books. It’s The Busy Body, which is what we’re discussing today. Is the first in the Ghostwriter series. Previously he published the standalone novel The Decent Proposal. He is also the host of the podcast All About Agatha, dedicated to all things in which guys he has appeared on BBC TV and Radio New Zealand and written for the official Agatha Christie website agathachristie.com. Kemper attended Stanford University and Harvard Law School and now lives in Southern California with his husband and two daughters. Learn more at Kemper donovan.com at all about. The dame on Twitter, all about AGA on Instagram, and Kemper Donovan books on Facebook. Welcome, Kemper. Great to have you.

Kemper Donovan  05:10
Thank you so much. I’m happy to be here.

Carolyn Daughters  05:13
Tell us a little bit as we get into this. Okay, you’ve done a podcast episode on The ABC Murders.

Kemper Donovan  05:27
Yes. My partner, Catherine Brobeck And I always have to provide a little bit of context here, because I host all about Agatha on my own now, but for the first five years of the podcast, it’s been it’s been going on for about seven and a half years now, actually almost eight years. Unbelievably, for the first five years, it was a joint venture, and my friend Catherine Brobeck and I started it together. She was also a huge mystery fan, and we had bonded, and one of the bases of our friendship was our shared love of mystery, especially Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot books and the episodes starring David Suchet. She unfortunately passed away at the end of 2021. We were 60 books into our 66 book ranking project of all of Christie’s novels. So I was able to rely on some friends and other Agatha Christie scholars and mystery writers in the wake of her passing, people who had become friends of both of ours. So that’s why it’s a little awkward. Sometimes I refer to myself in the first person when I’m talking about the podcast. I’ll often just slip into “we,” which is why I want to give that context and acknowledge the fact that this is very much Catherine’s project as well, and she’s still a big part of the podcast. So yes, we, we had covered The ABC Murders when Catherine was still here, and because it’s quite an early one, actually. It’s within that glut of Poirot in the 1930s when Agatha Christie was just popping out classic after classic. It’s just amazing how fertile her imagination was in that time she was so productive.

Sarah Harrison  07:16
Yeah, totally. That was one of the episodes that you and Catherine were both on. It was really interesting. I like listening to how people structure their podcast as like, huh, how do they do it? It’s this literary podcast work, and it’s always a little so you guys start by unfolding the plot.

Kemper Donovan  07:39
In the early episodes, we tried to do something a little bit similar. I love what you just did with the summary, because I think it’s great to get someone else’s perspective. We were trying to shoehorn a one to two minute plot summary so that we could get to the good stuff afterward. But we realized with Agatha Christie that the plot is the good stuff that sometimes being able to marinade in the plot and what was happening and all the twists and turns that she takes with her plots, and even just all the little character moments and adding commentary that we shouldn’t rush that part. So we ended up devoting the first half or even two thirds of each podcast episode, where we would review a novel, to just unfolding the plot of the novel. And then we would talk about any adaptations that existed for that novel. And when it comes to Agatha Christie, there often are adaptations. There are very few novels that haven’t been adapted at all. And then we would talk about where the novel fell in our ranking system, because we were assembling this grid of all 66 novels that would put them in rank order according to certain criteria. Those criteria had to do with plot and character and setting and also just the ineffable qualities of liking or not liking one title over another. And that’s part of the fun of Agatha Christie, because I think she’s a genius. I think she’s one of the best writers ever, full stop. But she is not an entirely even writer, and she wrote so much that I think everyone who’s a devotee of Christie has those Hercule Poirot books that they love and those books that they don’t love so much. And I always have to say this is relatively speaking. I’m always happy when I’m reading in Agatha Christie, even my least favorite Agatha Christie, even Posture to Fate, which, yes, is our lowest ranked Agatha Christie novel.

Sarah Harrison  09:37
That was definitely gonna be a question, yeah.

Kemper Donovan  09:41
But even posture and fate, I was happy to read that one and, but it’s really fun, I think, to talk about, well, why don’t I like that one as much? And why do I like this one so much, and how do we parse through those differences, and how can we figure out what she does really well? And maybe in some instances is what she’s not doing as well. That’s why it was just Christie. Felt like she was just a really great author to apply this a ranking project too. Most authors don’t produce enough material for a grid.

Carolyn Daughters  10:15
What may I ask? What is the top rank?

Kemper Donovan  10:19
Our top-ranked novel is Five Little Pigs, which is a novel from the early 40s. And that’s a little controversial. I think most people would assume that it would be And Then There Were None. And Then There Were None is our second ranked novel, and they actually tied. Their score is the same, but we decided to give Five Little Pigs the edge. It was definitely Catherine Brobeck’s favorite novel, and I was persuaded by her. I didn’t love it the first time I read it, but when I reread it for the podcast, I could appreciate its brilliance, I think, better than I did when I was younger, which also happens with Agatha Christie. I think a lot of Christie fans first read her when they were pretty young readers. And it’s interesting to go back and to see, oh, there are actually different ways that we can read these novels. And there are layers to them. If we take them seriously and we read them closely, there’s a lot going on. And I think you can certainly say that about The ABC Murders. It’s a very rich text.

Carolyn Daughters  11:19
I came to Agatha Christie as a young teenager, probably like 13, 14, and started with the Miss Marple stories, and then I went through this whole teenage phase of wanting to spend any spare cash I had on books and bookstores, and came to The ABC Murders as the first of the Hercule Poirot books I read. And I looking back trying to figure out why this might have been The ABC Murders. Maybe it was the like I was looking for Agatha Christie, because I loved her, and ABC was probably at the front of the list, I’m guessing. But I don’t think I had much information about which book I’d want to read next. And so this book grabbed me. We have a fondness for various things from our childhoods or our teen years, and so I have this fondness for this book for sure. Now it’s, it’s called that by many people, the first serial killer book. But, of course, it’s not necessarily really a serial killer book,

Sarah Harrison  12:26
What was your take on that? And it’s important in the canon. Do you consider it the first serial killer book? Or no?

Kemper Donovan  12:34
Well, the funny thing about Christie’s concepts, because she has so many great high concepts, right? There are so many Hercule Poirot books like Murder on the Orient Express and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. I’m not going to spoil any of those titles, but if you’re a Christie fan, that each of those titles, curtain as well, contains a big idea, like a big high concept that you can boil down to one sentence. It’s usually blank. Did it? And, and she’s renowned for that, but if you actually look back at the landscape that she was writing in the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, even 70s. Um, often people had done something similar before, or something that, if you really wanted to make the argument. You could say, This had, had been there before the I think the crux of the matter is that Agatha Christie did it best. She didn’t necessarily do anything first. And I don’t have any Hercule Poirot books or other books that I can point to that are earlier “serial killer novels” than Christie, but I’m sure they exist. I think it’s not even necessarily important if she was the first one to do it. Because I think the important thing about this book is that it’s brilliant, and it really gives you that flavor of a serial killer, but at the same time, and this is such a Christie thing, that’s a red herring, right? Like that. It is not in any way. And I assume that we are. We can spoil away here on this episode. All right, I will, yes, I will do my best not to spoil other titles. I’ve learned that the hard way on my podcast, people get very angry about spoilers. And I get it. I get it. It’s a big taboo among mystery readers, but so the serial killer thing is the big red herring of this book, right? So she gets to have her cake and eat it too, which is such a Christie thing. And I just love that about this book. There are other novels in the canon where she does something similar, where there is a big elaborate ruse, which is really just hiding a very simple meat and potatoes murder. And I love the simplicity that I mean at its core here, all we have is a murder for money. We have a man who wanted to make sure that he inherited from his brother rather than losing. That inheritance to a niece or nephew, and that was it. And the fact that it is that simple, that that’s what we get at our end, and she has all of this elaborate plot and intrigue covering that which gets us through so much of the book. I sometimes when I read lesser authors, I think I get angry when I realize so much of what I read had nothing to do with anything. And was this surface red herring. And I think what Agatha Christie does so well is that the red herring isn’t really surface. I mean, it had to be that elaborate, and it had to really seem as though there was this nationwide serial killer on the loose for Franklin Clark’s plan to really work. So I buy everything that happens, and I so enjoy the ride. And it was interesting rereading the book for this episode for your podcast, because this is my I think it’s only my third read. Like I read it once myself, once for my podcast, and now once for your podcast, but I was not in any way bored by any of that elaborate red herring dressing, because she just does it so well, and it’s such a great ride. And I love being able to be there with Hastings and have his voice guide us through this big adventure that Poirot and this team of investigators is on and I love inspector Chrome, who’s such an unusual inspector. I think we’re used to Japp and we’re used to the quote, unquote dumb inspector, but I love how he is supercilious and withholding, and all he says is, oh yes. And he drives everyone crazy. He’s such a great character. I don’t think she often gets credit for creating great inspector characters, and sometimes they’re not great, like sometimes I call them on the podcast, because it sometimes seems like, oh yeah, here’s the inspector in one of the Hercule Poirot books. We have to slot into the inspector role for this story, because she doesn’t use Japp as much as you would think if you watched Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, if you just watched the series where they always used a Jap so that they could have Philip Jackson in every episode, which is fantastic, but Chrome is a great example of a single inspector who never really appears again. I can see him. I know exactly who he is. I love that there’s an alienist on the team that we have this psychiatrist. It’s all of those tropes that would become, I think, so familiar of the serial killer investigation, where you have to have your psychiatrist, and you have various people, both local and on a national scale, who are searching for this person. And I just love that at the end of the day, has nothing to do with that, and she just pulls the rug out from under you, just like Agatha Christie does almost every single time in the Hercule Poirot books. It’s fantastic.

Carolyn Daughters  17:53
She leads you down this road. You think the book is one thing, and then, Sarah, you were surprised by the ending,

Sarah Harrison  18:00
I didn’t figure it out until the page before, but I’m not that savvy. I know a lot of people, that I think, Oh, she does a good job this one. They start being able to tune in a little more, whereas we’re doing really more of a survey. So I was making the connection between this book and the one we just read, which is Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy Night, which also deals a lot with the psychology of the person. In that case, more just like a vandal. There weren’t any murders, but there was a lot of dwelling on Freudian themes, like sexual repression. And this one was like, what creates this mad man and the ego.

Carolyn Daughters  18:47
But also in Dorothy Sayers’ Whose Body, which is Sayers’ first book, we get an introduction to PTSD. In that book, Lord Peter Wimsey has anxiety attacks. For me there’s a lot of things about The ABC Murders and Whose Body and Gaudy Night that feels contemporary when I’m reading them. I could almost see it on CSI, or one of those sorts of shows where they’re bringing in the expert team, or they’re dealing with issues that seem really relevant, and something we would deal with today?

Kemper Donovan  19:31
Yeah, I agree with that. It’s interesting. There was something going on, and we need an anthropologist to answer this question, because I don’t really know this is just a theory of mine, but there are a couple of her Hercule Poirot books from around this time really deal with psychology in a very central way. And Poirot always talks about psychology, but that’s him. I feel like he does that in most books, and he’s usually an outlier who’s going on and on about psychology. But. This book is obsessed with psychology. Appointment with Death, which was also written in the 30s, is very much about psychology. Sad Cyprus as well, which was just a couple of years after that. And they’re very different from, I think, a book like Endless Night, which is more of a psychological horror, a la the 60s. To me, it feels almost like a 60s horror movie. The reason I bring it up is that Agatha Christie really did change with the times, and she very much was drawing on contemporary themes and preoccupations. And it seems like there must have been something in the ether as to psychology and repression and all of these kinds of things. Which feels very modern. If CSI Miami had said they used The ABC Murders as a blueprint, I would believe them, because it, it feels like it’s all there. What they do in an episode. It’s so great.

Carolyn Daughters  21:00
This character, Alexander Bonaparte, Cust, okay, so, like, the first two names, right? Are, like, amazing, and then his last name is cost, yes, world conqueror, people. It just feels to me like a genius name for a character. But you are led for a while to think this is the murderer.

Sarah Harrison  21:23
The whole book your list. They even do the little vignettes into his mind. Yeah, you always do, like we just read, oh my goodness, it was the series, Barbara Nickless.

Sarah Harrison  22:28
She always did the vignettes, and then I would look into the vignette. And it was always the vignette into the killers. I was thinking, like, oh, well, I must be looking into what’s going on in the killer’s head.

Carolyn Daughters  22:39
So Barbara, it’s the way it’s usually said. Barbara does have like these chapters where she’s dipping into the murderer’s head, so we’re following him. And then we come back to the main story.

Kemper Donovan  22:58
I was gonna say it’s the first-person POV, which you have, even in stalker-like, serial killer horror movies, right? Where you get the heavy breathing and the POV camera going like that. It not exactly, because, interestingly, it’s, it’s the all the other sections that are actually first person, right? Because they’re from Hastings’ point of view, and the Alexander Bonaparte Cust ones are third person, but they have that feel to them, where you’re getting that perspective, and that too, I think, is such a thriller trope, the one aspect of this book, and I remember I talked a lot about this with Catherine on the podcast, and we were reviewing this novel of all the Hercule Poirot books. For me, one of the weakest elements of this book, though, is that structural awkwardness and Hastings. Calls it out at the beginning where he says, Well, I’m telling the story the way I usually tell the story, except for these little interstitials that I have composed myself, and even though I wasn’t there, I can say with authority that this is actually what happened. And I’ve always been a little suspect of Hastings’ abilities as a narrator and ad a chronicler anyway. And namely, not even because Hastings is a little dim. Agatha Christie does make him a little dim, but she’s inconsistent and vague as to what his storytelling position really is like. Sometimes it seems very much like he is sitting down and writing this like, and this is one of those instances because he says it like he is sitting down and writing this story. He is Watson. And Watson very clearly in the Sherlock Holmes stories, is writing them. Other times, it just feels like he happens to be the first person narrator of a story that’s not being written at all. And that inconsistency bothers me sometimes, or I don’t always know where I am with Hastings, and I think here, because of that, I didn’t totally believe that he would have been able to pull off this. This first person and then interspersed with third-person, grand opus. So that’s a little tough sometimes. But it’s a quibble.

Sarah Harrison  25:14
It’s a quibble because the book is brilliant overall, to say, from the perspective of an Agatha Christie novice, I just glossed over it. I don’t have suspending disbelief when I read the Hercule Poirot books. I was that’s good anything. It was a big trick, because I’m thinking like Barbara’s. So obviously I’m, I’m reading the killer section, sure. And that just made it more surprising to me.

Carolyn Daughters  25:36
I even felt like it could have just gone into his voice without Hastings having to say there are going to be these interstitials, and, I’m an authority. Everything’s fine. It’s right. I have it on very good authority that this is actually what happened. But when I read Hastings on the page, I think, okay, Agatha Christie has made him a little dim, for sure. But that has played up brilliantly, but played up so much in the David Suchet Hugh Frazier depictions that for me, I wonder for myself if that influences my perception of Hastings on the page, because I think he comes across as way More dim in the Poirot ITV version than he does even on the page. And He’s so charming, like The ABC Murders is, it’s just amazing. He returns with this. The plot is a little bit different. He returns, I think, from a six month tour of South America, and comes with this Cayman alligator, crocodile gift, stuffed gift for row. And honestly, like I’m actually laughing when I’m watching this thing. If you haven’t seen it, it’s amazing. But he comes across as just so much more dim, even on the screen, than on the page.

Sarah Harrison  26:57
As someone that hasn’t seen the screen version of the Hercule Poirot books. So I always get this thing as someone that hasn’t seen the screen version, he comes across as dim on the page, in a mixed up way, like, I think Jap and Poirot are usually pointing it out, like, Oh, these things goodness. But for myself as the reader, I’m often like, I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know either. I guess I’m here with Hastings, not knowing, not having the clues. And people shake their head at me because I saw the mystery.

Kemper Donovan  27:34
Yeah, I think she makes really good use of him as a first person narrator in a mystery where he can misdirect by way of misinterpreting a lot of what he sees, and also by underestimating Poirot. I think that’s where he comes across as dim on the page, because time after time he continues to underestimate Poirot, and it’s like, Come on, man. After the 18th case that this genius has solved. Maybe you should just have confidence in pretty much everything coming out of his mouth, because I certainly do as a reader, but I it’s one of my favorite things actually, about the Hastings character is that irony with which he’s presented, because it really is modern and that, I think, is a way in which Christie differentiated what she was doing from Sherlock Holmes very quickly, because there’s not the same sense of irony with Watson. Watson certainly is not a genius like Sherlock Holmes is, but he’s an intelligent doctor, and he’s an upstanding gentleman, and he’s the terra firma of those books, those sorts of wacky adventures, and that works. But Christie is doing something different. She actually is using irony for humor, but also to misdirect and to actually layer in some of those clues that don’t get elucidated until the end, which really isn’t what Arthur Conan Doyle was doing. If you go back and you read those Sherlock Holmes books, they’re much less solvable mysteries than you think they are. They’re really, they’re really just adventure stories, like they’re you can’t solve anything. And sometimes, I think Agatha Christie started out her career very much writing directly inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle and the Sherlock Holmes stories. It’s very obvious in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, she references Sherlock Holmes multiple times in that book and in some of the earlier books. But you can really see her coming into her own, and I think in a large way, with this Hastings character in the Hercule Poirot books. He seems very much to have been born in the mold of John Watson. And he is. But then, if you look really closely at what she’s doing, she’s, she’s building on that. She’s doing something different and drawing on, dare I say 20th century modernism in a very accessible way. She’s not riding the wasteland here or anything like that, but, but she’s like, that’s what I love. It’s, it’s, it’s almost like the equivalent of when you have your high fashion on the runway, and then you take that, you take elements from that, and you make it accessible for people who can actually wear it. I feel like that’s what Agatha Christie was doing with some of those modernistic motifs writing in the 20th century.

Sarah Harrison  30:15
I’m glad you brought up The Mysterious Affair at Styles, too, because that’s exactly where my mind went, that was our first Christie book we read. And Hastings came across as silly way back then, I remember especially just thinking every woman is in love with him, and he’s in love with every woman in that book. He’s recording it all very seriously, but it’s hard to not chuckle. So he was, he seems so fully formed even pretty early on as interesting aspect of the storyteller.

Carolyn Daughters  30:50
One thing that I thought was really interesting, hearkening back to what we had talked about with how contemporary these Hercule Poirot books feel, is in Dorothy Sayers’ Whose Body we see the post-war effects on Lord Peter Wimsey. Alexander Bonaparte Cust in The ABC Murders has bouts of epilepsy due to his wartime experience. He had a head injury and other trauma from the war. This feels really contemporary to me, recognizing the effects of wartime on people who fought in the war. But also then I started thinking, Okay, I think this book is 1936, and a decade earlier, Agatha Christie had vanished, and had explained, when she was located, that she had no memory of, how did I get here and what’s going on? And I wondered if she was that the bout that Alexander Bonaparte Cust has confusion, lack of memory. Is it possible I did this thing? Was I in this town? Is it possible I was here? He finds a bloody knife in his pocket, and he’s like, Did I use this knife? I wondered if just speculation, because I don’t know how we could know, but the fact that Christie was even drawing on her own life experience of what it is to have a blank space where your memory of what had just happened should be.

Kemper Donovan  32:37
It does make sense. I think it’s possible. I think it’s hard to hypothesize about what her inspirations might have been, especially when we’re talking about the disappearance because she said so little about it, but she does. She wrote 66 full-length mystery novels And hundreds of short stories. So disappearances and bouts of amnesia come up more than a few times in those stories since her own disappearance. And I think absolutely she must have been thinking about that. And I think even, even more important than the fact that he has moments of amnesia is the sympathy with which she draws him, because you really do feel for him. By the end of the book, he is in some ways this pathetic character. But I almost mean that in the true sense of pathos, I don’t think that he’s necessarily to be pitied or something lesser than but he’s someone who is suffering and who has this physical condition that he’s suffering from, and it has really impinged on his life. And he’s this lonely person who is preyed upon in the worst way by this monster, just who, for the sake of lucer, for the sake of greed, and I think she, really, you can feel her sympathy for him. And Agatha Christie really was always very much concerned with the victims of crime in the Hercule Poirot books, even though she wrote murder mysteries, and she always had to figure out, not compelling but at least entertaining or interesting reasons for why one would murder another person. You can always see that her interest really lay with the victims, and how these crimes affected them and how they could potentially be made whole at the end of the story. It’s usually more general than that. She usually talks about the cloud of guilt hanging over innocent people, and how you need to clear away that cloud of guilt, because it’s not fair for the innocent to have to live under that cloud. But it’s very specific, I think, with Alexander Bonaparte Cust and I’m always so happy at the end of the book when he gains his freedom. And if freedom, it’s almost an internal freedom, because what’s so heartbreaking is that he thinks he did it. He is convinced that he’s guilty. Franklin Clark is able to get inside this poor man’s head to the point where he has just betrayed himself and thinks that he’s capable of a monstrous act. And it’s not true. And I love that he has his sense of self restored by the end.

Carolyn Daughters  35:33
Yeah. Five Little Pigs, I think you said, is your top Agatha Christie book. We don’t want to spoil anything, but a cloud of suspicion there that has been around for a very long period of time. And I hadn’t thought about that as the sort of thing that Agatha Christie, she wants to clear that cloud like she or identify that the cloud of suspicion belongs. She wants, she wants it to be accurate. She or her detective Poirot is trying to seek the truth in the Hercule Poirot books.

Kemper Donovan  36:11
I think she would have hated the resurgence of interest in villains that we had, that we had, that we got with The Sopranos. And don’t get me wrong, I love the sopranos, but I don’t think she would have been a fan of Tony Soprano I think she would have said, well, this is someone who kills people, and I know I don’t think that he’s actually a good, secretly, a good person, or someone who deserves to have multiple seasons written, written and aired about him. And that is a little that can come across potentially as a little old fashioned. But I think the for me, the upside of the fact that she focuses more on the innocent is that you never get the sense that there’s a lot of revenge motivating her either. So there’s not a lot of a punitive element and focusing on like, and then they’re going to get what they deserve. Some there are characters within her text who certainly do feel that way. Miss Marple actually feel as and I love Miss Marple, don’t get me wrong, she’s my favorite, but I often don’t feel in that ineffable way that you can sometimes feel the authorial intention, and that’s always open to readerly interpretation. So others may disagree with me, but I often don’t feel that Agatha Christie is focused on a nasty sense of revenge or anything like that. It’s actually much more positive and uplifting, even though she’s telling a story about murder and loss, and I think that also goes a long way toward why people just love her stories as much as they do, and come back to them again and again.

Sarah Harrison  37:49
I feel like the character Mary Drower, who was Asher’s niece, was eloquently stating that perspective in her way, this quiet indignation that her aunt would be murdered. But it was just wrong. It just shouldn’t happen. And it does seem more unfair. I think at the end, Poirot said that all these other people got killed to cover up the person that Franklin wanted to actually kill. It was just a divergent killing.

Carolyn Daughters  38:26
Then we come back to and we’ve interviewed a number of authors this year, and several of them have reminded us that the reason the murder is happening in a lot of these books is love or money, right? I mean, there could be a third or 10th or other. There could be other reasons, but love or money are two of the biggest ones. And several authors have said money is number one, above revenge, above love, lost, above all else. If this had been a serial killer book, The alienist in the book says, well, even a serial killer has a reason that they’re murdering. Now maybe it’s because they have some sort of alphabetical list, or maybe we don’t know what it is, but there’s it’s not just they walk through the street and just randomly kill someone. Now I come back to the idea that if this had truly been a serial killer book, it’s a much more complicated book for readers to latch on to, because it’s the motive I think that helps the reader understand or identify and even just a sliver of a way with whatever that with what caused the murder in the first place, or what caused what caused a character to think that they wanted to commit a murder in the first place? I’ve read a couple books with serial killers at the helm, and I find them really difficult. Mystery element is, I don’t know, very complicated for me, you have to really be on that ride with the detective and really connected to the detective versus the plot element that Agatha Christie does so well in the Hercule Poirot books, where we could see that this guy wanted his brother’s money, got it. Serial Killer takes a lot of that out, and it’s just some, some guy without the love or money motive, essentially.

Kemper Donovan  40:31
I think what, what you run up against is some of the rules of the golden age of detective fiction, or of these classic puzzle mysteries. I call the Hercule Poirot books puzzle mysteries that have clues that can be actively searched for and found and solved and used to solve. The mystery by the reader along with the fictional detective. Others call it a fair play mystery, where you really are actively solving or trying to actively solve. You don’t have to read them that way. I, by the way, almost never do try to solve these mysteries when I read them. I’m a very passive reader. My partner, Catherine, was extremely active. It was one way in which we were a good point counterpoint to each other, actually, because I think a lot of people read mysteries passively even though they love the fact that they know they’re solvable, but they don’t actually try to solve them.

Carolyn Daughters  41:22
Was she mapping out details? She has a notepad, and she’s like, Okay, this is what happened here, I wonder. And building threads and things like that.

Kemper Donovan  41:34
I think she was more intuitive than that. I don’t think she was actually writing anything down, but in her brain, in her mind. Yeah, she was doing that. It’s funny. I’m actually reading The Westing Game.

Carolyn Daughters  41:46
I love that. Ellen Raskin, that’s amazing.

Kemper Donovan  41:49
I’m reading The Westing Game with my daughter right now, who’s seven, and it’s a great ya mystery, because it’s one of the few why mysteries that is truly a solvable puzzle. It’s a fair play mystery, and we are writing down clues in a notebook and really trying to figure it out. And I’m almost, I’m not telling her this, but I’m almost doing it. It’s like a primer on how to be a mystery reader if you want to go that route. So, yeah, I mean, I think you can be that deliberate about it. I don’t think Catherine ever was because she didn’t need to be. She was too to be. She was too smart. She was too smarter than that. But, but yeah, and I would say so, one of the rules, though, of these mysteries, if they are going to be solvable, is that the motive for the crime has to be rational. There were literal rules that were written by some of these authors who popularized the genre in the 30s and 40s, Ronald Knox and SS Van Dyne both had separate sets of rules, and that was one of them. And you can see why, because if it is a serial killer, if it’s just they’re crazy, you can’t solve that like you can’t. There’s nothing to figure out. And then I think it does become more of a how done it? Where it’s more like, okay, let’s follow the investigator, whoever the investigator is, and see how they figured it out. More of the Columbo or Poker Face, if a more recent reference works for you, more of that sort of a model, where you see who did it at the very beginning of the episode, and then it’s more about watching the detective figure it out. And that can be very entertaining, but that’s different from the fair play mystery or from the classic puzzle mystery, and it’s interesting. I noticed this when I when I was rereading the Hercule Poirot books for our conversation. She really does pay a lot of lip service to the notion that well, but there probably has to be a rational reason, even if it is a serial killer constantly. And I feel like that’s her way of trying to put her mystery readers at ease as

Kemper Donovan  43:46
Like, don’t worry, there really is, even though it seems like there can’t be, there really is going to be a rational, uh, reason at the end. And in a way, that’s the biggest clue, yeah, right, as to this serial killer thing, cannot be it like that cannot be the answer if there really is a rational, and I think a lot of a lot of authors wouldn’t have had the audacity to try to pull it off. And yet she does, because even though you don’t know that it is going to come down to this very simple, classic Luker motive, I had confidence in Agatha Christie as I was reading, I was like, okay, I’m still along for the ride. We’ll see what happens here. I don’t really, I don’t know what’s happening right now, but, and that’s also where readability, honestly, just sheer readability. No one is better at just keeping the pages turning than Agatha Christie, if this book was hard to get through, with all due respect to Dorothy Sayers, who I do enjoy, I think some of her books sometimes can be a little weighed down at times. I think that Agatha Christie is just eminently readable. No one was better at dialog, and her prose is crisp and it’s clear and it’s straightforward, and a lot of people dismiss it, and they say that it’s simplistic or immature. But. There is, there is I and as an author now, putting my author hat on, I speak from experience. There’s nothing harder to do than simple, clear, crisp, straightforward pros. She was just, she was brilliant at that, in a way that few people are. So I think that also helps her pull off the conjuring trick. In the Hercule Poirot books, The ABC Murders in particular, it seems there can’t be a rational motive. And then at the very end, yes, there is so.

Carolyn Daughters  45:24
Sarah, were you thinking, okay, Alexander Bonaparte Cust, all the way through the book, were you thinking she’s just told us up front, and Hastings told us up front. And now I’m just following this, and at the end, I’m gonna learn that. Yes, in fact, it was Alex, like, what were you thinking?

Sarah Harrison  45:39
I was thinking, like, what? Where’s this going? Because it did seem like, well, it’s this guy, it’s this Alexander Bonaparte guy. And then the only clue that Poirot was really making any smart connections with was about the stocking salesman, yes. They’re like, Okay, well, that helped us locate him. And I’m like, well, that’s really not his typical contribution. But where is this going? It’s going somewhere.

Carolyn Daughters  46:08
There’s this legion, right? They gather this legion, which I think Carmichael is the brother is the one who says we should all get together. I love a good legion. I’m all like, in every book, movie, what have you like The Lord of the Rings, whatever. They all the group get together and they’re going to do something together, and I’m on board. I’m like, I want to be part of that group. I love that. And then as the book progresses, we’re not introduced to any real new characters. So if it’s not Cust, it’s got to be one of these other characters. Agatha Christie doesn’t introduce on, say it’s a 300-page book. Page 292, hey, readers, here’s this new guy. We haven’t heard of him or seen him. This happens to be the killer. That’s not how she works. So if it wasn’t Cust, were you thinking, like, oh, it’s got to be one of these other people who are the few people in the cast of characters?

Sarah Harrison  47:08
I was stuck. I have nothing smart to say about myself.

Carolyn Daughters  47:13
That’s the problem with my having read it the first time as a teenager, is I’m having trouble channeling my first read of any of the Hercule Poirot books.

Sarah Harrison  47:21
It was my first read, so I was just like, This doesn’t feel like a normal pacing from what I know of a Christie book, and it’s not happening the way I expected to happen. Just the whole thing felt a little bit stuck until Poirot pulls it out of the bed at the end.

Kemper Donovan  47:43
I think part of what’s so tricky about it is that most Christie’s and most of these classic Hercule Poirot books have a closed circle element, right? So there’s some sense that here is our cast of suspects, and they, and only they, could have done it. And the clearest example of that is because we’re all on an island, and one can get on or off the island, right? But sometimes it’s people who are in a house, and the house was locked, and they know that no one got in or out. Mysterious affair at styles that’s a closed circle history, even though it’s not that isolated, but it is. It feels and that, I think, feels familiar, and it like you laser in as a reader of mysteries, even after only just a couple of mysteries, right, where you’re like, Okay, now I know it has to be, and it’s so wide ranging and diffuse, even though. And it’s brilliant though, because when you went after you finished the novel, and you look back, you’re like, well, she did create a circle. It’s this vigilante group basically, that’s like, Okay, well, Chrome isn’t it isn’t cutting it, so we need to figure out what’s happening here. But it never feels like the classic closed circle cast of suspects. But you only realize after the fact that it actually is, and of course it is, because, like you said, those are the and that’s one of the other rules. I mean, one of those rules that Knox and Van Dyne set out pretty early on too, like in the early 30s, I believe, or couldn’t have even been a late 20s for one of them. But one of the rules was, you can’t pull the murderer out of a hat at the last moment. The murderer has to have been layered in there beforehand. It’s part of fair play, like you have to give the reader, the opportunity to realize that this person was the murderer, and so she does all of the things that you need in a classic mystery, but because it’s structured so oddly, it just doesn’t seem like that’s happening. So I completely understand, I’m pretty sure, it’s always very hard for me as well, to think back to my juvenile read. It’s like decades ago at this point, and like, Who even knows what, where it was going on in our heads when we were kids, like a mess. But I am sure it was muddled, and I was just like, I would just go along for the ride, and that’s why I say the readability. I mean, Agatha Christie just allows, she allows you to do that with ease, because you’re just like, Okay, well, I’m just gonna keep on enjoying this, even though I have no idea what the heck is happening right now and then. Like to for that conjuring trick at the end when he says, It’s Franklin Clark, and here’s why. And you’re like, Oh my God. I’ve been reading a traditional mystery all along, and I never even knew it. It’s so great. I also this is going back to one point we were making just about Alexander Bonaparte Cust, but one of the best moments, I think, within the entire series of Agatha Christie’s Poirot, starring David Suchet, is the moment at the end of the episode when he has a heart to heart when Poirot has a heart to heart with Alexander Bonaparte Cust and he’s so broken. And you really that they make departures in that series from the plot, because they had to sometimes they were adapting short stories, and they had to pad them out. And they would give Hastings, like a sport, a different sport, or a Cayman, or, like something ridiculous often in the TV version of the Hercule Poirot books.

Carolyn Daughters  51:00
Or they don’t want him to be married and gone. So they want him to be like, Oh, I was on a trip for a few months sort of thing. Yeah, exactly.

Kemper Donovan  51:07
They have fun, they do but, but they had certain rules as well. Actually, Catherine and I interviewed Anthony Horowitz, who is a big mystery writer, and he adapted a number of episodes for that program. And he said one of their rules was we can change up, we can change up incidental characters, but we’re never going to change who the murderer is and why they did it. And I think what they tapped into in that episode was that the emotionality of what is done to Alexander Bonaparte Cust and such as Poirot, is a little more emotionally evolved, I think, than the Poirot on the page. The Poirot on the page in the Hercule Poirot books is a little pricklier, especially toward Hastings as well. It not so much in The ABC Murders, there’s actually, there’s a number of wonderfully comedic moments at the beginning of the book about Poirot dyeing his hair, and Hastings going bald, and Japp pointing out that Hastings is bald, and Hastings being like, Oh, I didn’t think it was really that obvious. There’s a lot of those moments that really do fit within the David Suchet series of the Hercule Poirot books, but they play those moments up as much as possible, and I think add a lot of them, but it just it makes for a really emotionally satisfying and moving scene. And I know a number of other Agatha Christie fanatics such as myself, point to that scene as, like, really, one of the very best in the series overall. So for anyone who’s, I think listening to this episode, if you haven’t watched that adaptation, I 100% recommend it, and I think also what I would recommend then, if you want something very different, is the much more recent Sarah Phelps adaptation starring John Malkovich. And I don’t know if we’re going to talk about that at all, but that goes in a different direction, let’s just say very interesting.

Sarah Harrison  52:57
We are pushing up on time Kemper. But before we close, sure, actually, I have a two-part question I want to hear about tap your rubric as you applied it to The ABC Murders, what are the components? And I want to hear about upon your third reading. Did anything change in that rubric? Or do you still feel like Same, same kind of rankings?

Kemper Donovan  53:27
That’s interesting. Well, we would. So when Catherine and I would rank a novel, we would divide it into six categories, and those categories were plot mechanics, plot credibility, series long characters, book specific characters, setting in tone. And then we had this final category for what we call depictions stuck in their time. And that really had to do with the phenomenon of reading an Agatha Christie novel in the 21st century. At this point, for some of her novels, over 100 years after they were published, and feeling like there might be some elements having to do with intimate aspects of humanity that just rang false or that were jarring and somehow impeded the enjoyability of the read overall. And to be blunt about it, these are the moments. The moments where you’re like, oh, wow, that feels really sexist or racist or homophobic or ableist, etc. And we just didn’t want to ignore that, I think, as part of the experience of reading Christie, which in a lot of ways, is a testament to how well she stood the test of time. Because I think if we were reading anyone from 100 years ago, we would have those moments. And for the most part, Christie acquits herself very well, actually, when it when it comes to writing in more of a timeless way in the Hercule Poirot books. But we don’t want to ignore those, those aspects of the reading experience if we’re doing a podcast about reading Agatha Christie. So I’m just looking at the rankings. Here for The ABC Murders. The ABC Murders did incredibly well in all of these categories. We gave it an eight out of 10 for plot mechanics, a six out of 10 for plot credibility, an eight out of 10 for series characters, a six out of 10 for book specific characters, a six out of 10 for setting a tone and zero deductions for depictions stuck in their time. And I do remember that one of the reasons we gave it zero is that not only does this book really not have any of those jarring moments, but it actually in that it feels so modern is almost, I would say, progressive, especially when it comes to xenophobia, because this is a book that deals head on with it, especially early in the book Mr. Asher. Alice Asher, who’s our first victim, her husband is German, and they acknowledge that they got married and before the First World War, and must have had a really hard time during the First World War due to just basically feelings of prejudice against German people, and that he is just generally regarded as an old German drunk. And it’s very easy to try to pin her murder onto him, and he, too, is a pathetic character who I think we’re meant to sympathize with, or at least, at least pity. Actually, I think we are meant to pity him. And I think Agatha Christie acquits herself quite well in that category. If anything, I feel like after reading it a third time, I liked it even more, I might give the book specific characters ranking or scoring a little bit of an increase, because six out of 10 feels a little bit low to me. I mean, I think that this book has so many great and fascinating side characters, not just the niece of Alice Asher, who you already mentioned, is someone who really does, I think, come through in the book, but Megan Barnard, Betty Barnard’s sister is a fantastic character, and Thora Gray as well. Yes, who is the young assistant and in some ways, the catalyst for the murder that happens, though unwittingly, because Franklin Clark just assumes that Sir Carmichael Clark is wildly in love with her and is going to marry her right after his wife, his sick wife passes away. So I think it’s a great book. I mean, the book is ranked number 11 out of 66 it’s just outside of the top 10, and it’s actually tied with books 10 through 12 in terms of the scoring. So you could even say that we really have a top 12, and that it’s there in the top 12, and that’s really high when it comes to Christie. I mean, the I’d say all the books in the top half of our ranking, and certainly in the top third, are superlative and I definitely think that The ABC Murders deserves to be among those titles.

Carolyn Daughters  57:55
Awesome. Well, Kemper, we’re going to bring you back for a second episode. We’re gonna talk a little bit about Kemper’s book The Busy Body, and also some more Agatha Christie.

Sarah Harrison  58:11
Thank you so much, Kemper.

Kemper Donovan  58:14
Thank you. It was a pleasure talking about The ABC Murders and Christie’s Hercule Poirot books. I appreciate it.

Sarah Harrison  1:00:27
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Carolyn Daughters
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Sarah Harrison
We want to thank you for joining us on our journey through the history of mystery. We absolutely adore you. Until next time, stay mysterious.