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“Who are you? You don't belong to the police?"

“I am better than the police,�� said Poirot. He said it without conscious arrogance. It was, to him, a simple statement of fact.

Poirot #13 is one I had read many years ago, but am re-reading anyway, since I am now reading them all in order.

In this one Christie creates an idea followed by hundreds of others in different ways: Having a killer use the alphabet to associate with his killings--Mrs. Ascher in Andover, then Betty Barnhard in Bexhill, and so on. There’s also an ABC travel guide left by each victim. There’s also a character suspected of murder with ABC as his initials. . . It’s a serial killer, so we have to reference Jack the Ripper, of course. This killer writes intriguing and clever notes to Poirot taunting him, telling him he will kill someone in three days. So it's the first big "public" murder story for Poirot, where newspapers follow the events. And it's pretty good, overall, maybe 3.5 or so, but:

A narrative problem/interesting dilemma Christie creates for herself: Captain Hastings, Poirot’s sidekick, is unimaginative, clueless, AND he is also typically the narrator of any story he appears in, so he is either frustratingly or comically unreliable. This is a narrative strategy Christie uses in sort of comic fashion for delaying any idea of our knowing what is going on so we will keep reading until the last pages when she/Poirot reveals whodunnit.

In this volume Christie adds another challenge. Not only is Hastings a dope as Watson-ish sidekick to Poirot, Christie also has him try “fiction,�� to try and tell the story of the crime, short chapters told that would seem to indicate the person he—Hastings--believes from the beginning dunnit. The problem as Hastings relates it is to use this device to try and get into the mind of various characters and see things from a perspective he couldn’t know, but could only guess at. Okay. . . So there’s this meta-fiction element, but it’s not always so well handled, and in the end, all these “insights,�� it’s just another smokescreen for all he does not know. And how can a dope like Hastings be a convincingly good writer? So in general this compounds the Hastings problem, IF you are trying to take the murders seriously, but if you are just looking for silly comedy, well, there you are, good job. Lucky these interludes are just a mild distraction to Poirot's handling of the case.

So, complaints aside, I still think this is quite well done over all. And here's why: For instance, as there is some interesting reflection about the nature of mysteries themselves. And okay, I'll say something nice about Hastiings on this subject. At one point Poirot and Hastings imagine themselves as possible writers of a mystery, and Hastings says “I admit," I said, "that a second murder in a book often cheers things up.�� And then we actually hear of the second murder, of course. Okay Ill admit that kind of thing is cute, smile-worthy, and happens a few times here.So there are aspects of this meta-fictional approach that work for me.

There is more than the usual amount in this book of reflection about criminal psychology, and it's interesting as Poirot has to use this to figure out the killer through his letters. I was curious if this xriminal psych angle was in vogue in 1936, or not. But as with today, many in the book suspect the serial killer is “mad,�� by which I mean insane. Are people who kill multiple people crazy? In some sense, sure . . . unless they try to get off by using the insanity defense, those scallywags! Then we know they are not mad because they are merely devious! But we are supposed to suspect crazy people throughout, because. . . well, they are obviously unstable people who kill, right?! Are unstable people capable of possessing any insights whatsoever? Are “normal��-seeming people ever killers? What is normal? Are we who are reading this book normal? Who defines normal and stable? Who knows the answer to these questions? Well, Poirot, of course.

So this is a good one, not a great one, flawed but still fun. And I was pleased with the suprising resolution engineered by Poirot. Part of my bump up from 3 to 4 stars finally is my just liking Poirot whenever he is center stage. And in some ways Christie just is getting better as she writes, so I kind of forgive her a bit for hanging on to Hastings as long as she does, though everything gets better when he is gone.