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All About Agatha Christie

And Then There Were 49: The ABC Murders by Agatha Christie

All About Agatha Christie

Catherine Brobeck & Kemper Donovan

Tv & Film, Books, Film Reviews, Arts

4.71.6K Ratings

🗓️ 17 December 2017

⏱️ 58 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

A serial killer is on the loose… or *is* he (or she for that matter)? Come deep-dive with us--into the depths of this unusual Christie novel, in which our analysis gets granular enough to identify not one but two points of intersection between this novel and podcast favorite The Man in the Brown Suit. (I know; we were surprised too… surprised, and delighted.) Does Christie pull off everything she's trying to achieve here? Perhaps not, but we enjoyed the ride nonetheless.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Welcome to All About Agatha, the podcast dedicated to reading and ranking every single

0:09.3

mystery novel written by The Queen of Crime Dame Agatha Christie. I'm Kemper Donovan. I'm

0:14.6

Catherine Broback. And this week we are discussing a novel. Hurrah. That

0:19.6

novel is the ABC Murders. Catherine Broback, tell us a little bit about the publication history of this one.

0:25.8

So it was first released in the UK.

0:28.0

Fancy that!

0:29.0

It's been a while.

0:30.3

So January 6th, 1936, and then in the US by of course Todd Meade on February 14th of the same year.

0:37.4

Let's just get right into our victims because we actually have a bunch.

0:43.0

Our first victim, her name is Alice Asher,

0:46.0

and she is a tobacconist slash newstand,

0:48.0

proprietress, a resident of Andover,

0:51.0

yes, that is Andover with an A.

0:53.8

She is late middle age, which I think is being kind.

0:56.9

She's kind of old.

0:59.1

And she's estranged from her abusive husband

1:01.2

and found murdered in her newspaper shop bashed over the head with an

1:04.7

ABC rail guide found open on the counter to the rail schedule for Andover.

1:09.3

And she is our first victim.

1:10.7

Our second victim is one, Elizabeth Betty Barnard.

1:15.0

Oh my gosh.

1:16.0

Hmm.

...

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