March’s Read Christie 2026 theme has been to choose and read one of Agatha Christie’s books which made the biggest impact on me as a young reader. With a prompt such as this, choices for every single reader are going to be intensely personal and individualised ones. I smiled when I saw the remit for this month because I was able to go straight to my bookcase and pick up a novel without hesitation. My choice for March is The ABC Murders. Let me explain why this has been, and will no doubt be, the easiest reading decision I make for this challenge and probably for the entire year.
So, what is The ABC Murders about? Before I go any further, I’ll give a brief explanation. Hercule Poirot receives a letter, telling him a murder has been committed in Andover – but this is a strange missive, as it comes directly from the murderer, typed, mocking Poirot and daring him to do something about it, and about the murders which threaten to follow. Indeed, the next one will be in Bexhill. The letter is signed ‘A.B.C.’. Poor Mrs Asher who runs a sweet shop in Andover is the first unfortunate corpse. So begins a series of deaths, always with a copy of the ABC railway guide left behind. Poirot, assisted by Hastings, and with Inspector Japp also joining them on the trail, need to capture this murderer as every part of the country begins to wait for it to be its turn and the victims use up all the letters of the alphabet. Meanwhile, the mentally fragile Alexander Bonaparte Cust has just been given a job selling stockings. He has all his equipment for finding his customers all across England: the stockings in a case, a typewriter, and copies of the ABC railway guide…
I was fascinated by this story, the way it built upon itself piece by piece, by the investigation and the clues until they converged in an ingenious solution right at the end, and, of course, by the distinctive characters on both sides of the moral and legal fence. If you’ve read any number of my blog posts and articles, or you follow me on social media (@claireladdsauthor, if you’d like to), you might know that I have an enduring love affair with all things Agatha Christie. This certainly isn’t because I write mysteries myself, or not in the way readers interpret conventional ‘mystery fiction’, certainly. Writers don’t write in every genre that they read. I have an immense respect for mystery fiction authors; the plotting of the crime or mystery has to be intricate and finely woven with breadcrumbs of detection and clues interspersed with red herrings, all while ensuring the characters are wonderfully developed and function as they need to. This respect I have was planted the day my dad came home from town with a copy of The ABC Murders.
I remember vividly Dad presenting it to me, as a ten-year-old. He already knew I was the kind of reader who devoured The Secret Seven (I wanted to be one of them. I’d have volunteered to be Scamper the dog’s next biscuit if it meant I could get in that shed and listen in on the secret conversations). Dad had also bought me some of the Famous Five and Nancy Drew books and had watched me devour them. But this present, on this evening, felt like something else, something special. He told me he had seen it and thought I would like reading it. Why this particular Christie book, I have no idea, but I did know that he’d bought it from our local bookshop, and I also knew that the entire middle section of the shop had multiple bookcases which only housed Agatha Christie books, with roughly ten copies of each one on the shelves. It was a sight to behold, and I used to spend ages staring at it when I went into the shop, no doubt much to the secret irritation of the man who ran the fountain pen section directly opposite. Having me propped incessantly against his glass counter I imagine did his pen sales no good at all. To his absolute credit, he was a very lovely elderly gentleman who never once asked me to move, even a little bit.
As a young reader, this was a pivotal moment in my reading. It was an indelible mark in my mind that I’d gone ‘up in the world’, had become an adult reader. This change in mindset paved the way for, not only my devoted and voracious devouring of Christie books, but also many others. My bookshelves have filled non-stop ever since, not only with Agatha Christie, but with so many kinds of books which have interested me over the years. I did move to either side of the Christie shelves in the shop (eventually, and every so often as curiosity and the need to regain bloodflow in my bookcase-rooted body drove me), to the works of the Bronte sisters, and of Thomas Hardy, and Keats and Daphne du Maurier, and Jean Rhys and Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Aeschylus and so many Ancient Greek and Roman writers, and … the list was endless, because I felt I was allowed to read beyond children’s books. That one igniting incident of being given The ABC Murders had fuelled my fire as a lifelong reader and had given me permission to explore the worlds between the pages, and to expand. It was as if my imagination had been given wings and it flew and flew, never running out of energy because it was constantly being fed.
My imagination had, of course, also been given Hercule Poirot. Dad could not have picked a protagonist more perfect for me. From the moment I began reading about him, I adored him. It led me to spend an inordinate amount of time preventing customers from seeing the full range of fountain pens available in my local bookshop’s beautiful pen section because I spent every spare minute gazing upon the Christie bookshelves, with a voracious need to hunt down every Poirot story I could lay my hands on. To aid me in my Poirot hunt and beyond, I typed up an alphabetical list on my clunky, manual typewriter, so I could tick off every Christie book I bought and read. I still have that original list somewhere. My utter adoration of Poirot from the outset has also led to many hundreds (or likely thousands) of hours watching film and TV adaptations of the Poirot books, too. This has been my solace and comfort blanket on many, many occasions, and my obsession. Even my Masters dissertation was written on Agatha Christie’s books and adaptation! This is the wonderful thing about reading. It can lead you down so many rabbit holes of complete joy and fulfilment, specific to you.
Ultimately, what I can wholeheartedly say is that, while I love the book itself, it has always been much less about the story within The ABC Murders than receiving the novel as a representation of adult fiction which has caused it to be the Agatha Christie book which has made the biggest impact on me as a young reader. I doubt my dad could have guessed at the impact giving me that one Agatha Christie book would have on the rest of my life. But I’m unendingly grateful for it. I often hear people telling me that it was ‘X’ book which hooked them on reading. I’ve been hooked all my life. It’s why, as a young reader, I always hoped for a book as a present, and as an adult I have no hesitation in giving them as gifts. I would urge anyone to give a book to someone; you never know – it could be you who begins their love for literature, and a gift that will last a lifetime.
You might also like:
