CHALLENGES FOR AGATHA CHRISTIE AND HERCULE POIROT IN THE NOVEL “ABC MURDERS”

PROBLEMS FOR AGATHA CHRISTIE

Agatha Christie was a famous writer of crime fiction. She was known as the “Queen of murder stories,” the focus of her stories was serial killing, its detection, the culprit and the motive behind the crime. While writing on detective fiction, a writer has to keep in focus many things. Some of the challenges that Agatha Christie had to face while writing about serial killings are discussed below:

The biggest challenge that Agatha Christie had to face was to make sure that the reader must have the opportunity to solve the mystery with the continuation of the story; Agatha Christie needed to define all the clues and every point of the story in clearly. Agatha Christie used to describe every point in detail; she made sure that she creates a complete picture in the mind of the reader so that the reader can solve the mystery by himself even.

Another challenge, which Agatha Christie faced, was that she had to solve the whole mystery and bring the real culprit using logical deductions, when writing detective fiction writer cannot reach the culprit by accident, or any coincidence, a writer has to make sure that he uses logical reasoning to reach the climax of the story. Agatha Christie used very good logical reasoning to reach the culprit and left no loose ends in the story. That was a specialty of her writing; she used great logical reasoning to reach the culprit. We can take the example of ABC murders, there were 3 murders in the same way and in a pattern, the murderer sent letters to a private detective namely, Hercule Poirot, telling him about the murders. The name of the people who were being murdered was in alphabetical order, like Alice Ascher of Andover, second Betty Barnard of Bexhill-on-Sea, third Sir Carmichael Clarke of Churston, and after murdering the person, the murderer left his mark “ABC” on the murder site. At first, the evidences were pointing towards a salesperson, and that salesperson, namely Alexander Bonaparte Cust, even turned up in the police station to confess his crimes, but Hercule Poirot used logic to determine that he was not the real culprit and applied logical reasoning to determine that the brother of Carmichael Clarke was the real culprit. This story is a classic example of how Agatha Christie used logical reasoning to determine the real culprit and bring him out.

Another challenge a writer has to face while working on detective fiction is that the story should revealing the truth all the times, it should be written in a way that the truth must be apparent all the time on the reader. Agatha Christie used the technique of logic and description to deal with this challenge. She described every clue that the detective found in detail and when a reader re-read a novel he realized that the truth was evident all the times and he could grasped the truth had ...