The ABC Murders

Description

In 1935, narrator Arthur Hastings returns to England and visits his old friend, the renowned Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. Poirot has received a letter about an impending murder signed “A.B.C.” Soon afterward, a woman named Alice Ascher is killed in her shop in Andover. An ABC Railway guide is found near her body.

Poirot begins receiving more letters predicting murders, signed with the same initials. Despite the efforts of Poirot, Hastings and police inspectors Japp and Crome of Scotland Yard, the murders continue. Betty Barnard, a flirty waitress, is killed in Bexhill on the beach, and a wealthy man named Sir Carmichael Clarke is murdered at his home in Churston.

Poirot, Hastings and the inspectors question the victims’ friends and family. Poirot enlists several of them to be part of his “legion” to see if their collective memories will help catch the killer. The legion members are Carmichael’s brother, Franklin Clarke; Alice Ascher’s niece, Mary Drower; Betty’s fiancé, Donald Fraser; Carmichael’s assistant, Thora Grey; and Betty’s sister, Megan Barnard. Carmichael’s widow later recalls seeing a man selling stockings, and Poirot realizes stockings were related to each crime.

A new letter to Poirot promises a murder in Doncaster. It goes awry, and the wrong man dies in a movie theater. Police receive a tip from landlords about a traveling salesman named Alexander Bonaparte Cust who was seen with his hands covered in blood. Cust is epileptic and has constant headaches resulting from a head injury he suffered in World War I. While Cust has been peddling stockings, the stocking company says they never hired him. Cust can’t remember things when he blacks out. So when the police capture him, he confesses he probably did commit the murders.