My book, The A.B.C. Murders by Agatha Christie, is barley similar to the story i read, A Scandal in Bohemia by Arthur Conan Doyle. The two barely share any plot similarities. The A.B.C. Mysteries is based entirely around the big murder case while A Scandal in Bohemia is about tracking down a picture that the King of Bohemia lost when his former lover took it. There’s barely any correlation between these two stories. The only real connections I see are between the detectives and the lack of emotion. The two detectives, Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes both share the quality of being extremely intelligent. They’re both seen in their world as the smartest people, people who can solve any crime whenever they need to. Both the stories also have the detectives being outsmarted by the culprit, Poirot by Franklin Clarke and Sherlock by Irene. The books also share a lack of emotion in the detectives. This is probably a character trait that results from their intelligence. But both detectives were hard to connect to because of this, making the stories both a little less interesting to read. This causes both the stories to rely heavily on the action. While both have some good action, I definitely prefer reading The A.B.C. Mysteries. The story was much richer than in A Scandal in Bohemia, and the action also surpassed it. The background characters had a lot more life in the story, and the way the book was presented, writing from Captain Hastings point of view and shifting to see how Cust was handling everything was a very interesting way to throw in some huge red herrings. The adventure overall in The A.B.C. Mysteries was genuinely much more fun to read than A Scandal in Bohemia.

Stuart Evers brings an interesting idea forward in his article. In the case of The A.B.C Murders by Agatha Christie, I’m conflicted thinking about whether the book is filled with “cheap thrills” or if it’s truly real literature. This is because on one hand, we have the whole aspect of “who done it?” mysteries, that feel very fill in the blank in a way. We have Hercule Poirot, a classic mystery detective on another murder case. He finds people murdered with similar clues around each of the crime scenes pointing to the killer being one person for all the murders, but who is it? Will he ever find out? These are questions that we don’t really need to askas the reader, because the books always ends up telling us that and not much else. We usually don’t get a ton of character development or worldbuilding, which is exactly the case in my book. But on the other hand, in The A.B.C Mysteries, they literally address this. On pages 22-23, Captain Hastings tells Poirot what his perfect mystery would be. When he tells Poirot that it would be a classic murder case, Poirot responds by saying, “A very simple crime. A crime with no complications. A crime of quiet domestic life… very unimpassioned”. I think that Chrisie was patting herself on the back here. This book really does have some interesting twists and turns and the killer has a very interesting quirk of following an alphabetic way of crime, making each victim, location and weapon start with the same letter of the alphabet. So between these two points, I feel rather conflicted still. I believe that it’s headed more in the direction of being the same old murder mystery book than being something completely new, but it still does have some interesting twists that I’ve never really seen before.

“Now for the truth – I do not know what the murderer looks like, nor where he lives, nor how to set hands upon him.” –Poirot, p. 56

This quote shows a moment of weakness for the famous Poirot. In other Agatha Christie books, we see Poirot being the unstoppable force of wit. He can solve any mystery with ease because there’s always a clue that gives away exactly who it is. He is constantly looking for a challenge in his profession but never really seems to get anything truly trying. This moment shows a change in that. We now see Poirot in a grim light. He doesn’t have any ideas on the case. He’s been stumped. This shows Poirot’s imperfections, which we rarely see. He’s constantly on top of everything in a case, but this time he hasn’t. The book begins with Poirot telling Hastings that he has received a letter offering a challenge, saying that Poirot won’t be able to solve this crime. Poirot’s ego tells him that there’s no way that he could slip up on this crime. But when he comes to a dead end, he starts to break down. He gets upset. This shows Poirot’s true colors, that him being overly confident in himself and thinking that he’s infallible will lead to his downfall as a private detective. His sadness comes from another part of his confidence as well, finding himself being outwitted. Poirot’s intelligence is what makes him what he is. He is always seen as the smartest person ever, a superhuman, not only by his peers but also by himself. So him finally being stumped by a crime, knowing that he truly isn’t the smartest person, makes him feel like he’s lost his identity. This is an extremely low moment for the hero of the story. He doesn’t feel like he can do anything else to solve the case and comes to a point where he wants to give up. Poirot doesn’t ever give up, but here, he loses his confidence.

My name is Captain Hastings. I’m working alongside my good friend Hercule Poirot to try to solve this mystery. The murder of Mrs. Ascher is proving to be a difficult case to crack. There aren’t any witnesses to the crime and too many people in town that it’s seemingly impossible to solve, At the moment, all the evidence is pointing to her husband, Mr. Ascher. This man has been drunk for as long as anyone can remember. He constantly abused his Mrs. Ascher and threatened to kill her when she didn’t give him any money to get more booze. She distanced herself from him a while back, however, but he still seemed to have shown up to her shop to ask for more money, to which she accepted to make him leave. Her only living relative, her niece Mary Drower, proves this all to be true. She grew up with Mrs. Ascher after her mother’s untimely death. She had seen a lot of the abuse first hand, saying that “He’d never let her be in peace anywhere.” She said that she didn’t believe he’d do something like this, with all the threatening, but believes that he is the most likely suspect. We also spoke to the nearby shopkeepers to see if they could provide any information, but they were of little use. But there are a lot of things to sort out before we make the final verdict. There is a lot of random evidence around the scene that can lead to a much more interesting mystery. For example, the train map that was left behind, going to Andover, where the crime took place. We also have the note from an A.B.C. that was sent to Poirot alluding to a crime happening on that day in Andover. There’s a lot more to the mystery that one might see, but Poirot is definitely ready to take the task head on.

In “The A.B.C Murders” by Agatha Christie, we follow Hercule Poirot and Captain Hastings on a murder mystery. Poirot gets a mysterious letter in the mail one day, saying that the writer will be doing a crime on the 21st of the month in Andover, England. It is signed A.B.C.. This grabs Poirot’s attention. As the day passes, Poirot is relieved to not hear of any brutal crimes in Andover. Right as he thought he was in the clear, he gets a call from Chief Inspector Japp from Scotland Yard, saying that there was a murder in Andover the previous night. This problem does engage me, especially because of something that Christie put in the book. There was a brief page about a mysterious man named Alexander Bonaparte Cust, or A.B.C. She leaves a few details about him that help the reader connect the murder to him. It’s fascinating to try to determine how Poirot and Cust will cross paths and how Poirot will solve this mystery.