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.
Post #4: Murder as Art?
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Ryan's Blog 
You spelled “asks” wrong on line 8. You spelled it “askas”
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I agree with your second argument that her book has lots of literary merit and disagree with your first point of it being “cheap thrills”. I think that her writing is more than just a fill in the blank style because each one of her books is different. I am reading Murder on the Orient Express and it seems to have a very different course of events than this book. I agree with your second point because every time she writes a new book she has to come up with new “twists and turns” like you said. This takes a lot of time and effort to think of new interesting aspects to each one of her books. What are your thoughts?
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