**2018 UPDATE**There's yet another unnecessary, unwanted remake of this book into a 3-part miniseries being made John Malkovich will appear as Poirot, which is as ludicrous as that Brannagh dude and his mustachios appearing in the unnecessary, unwanted remake of that carbuncled itself onto screens last year.Rupert Grint, of Harry Potter fame, will also appear. And obviously an influential crime story, since it launched a major plot convention re-used by many other writers since.

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 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.

He pours particular scorn on the importance of the Clue, in particular the 'curiously-twisted dagger' or the 'little-known oriental poison'. And of course has plenty of opportunities along the way for chaffing his sidekick, Captain Hastings, about the conventions of detective fiction. 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. 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. 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.

The abc murders novel