So, the first four episodes of this anime series adapted short stories from Agatha Christie’s writing with each twenty-five minute episode being dedicated to one short story. But I’m very intrigued with where the show is going now; it’s going to start adapting some of Christie’s novels in multi-episode story arcs. This seems kind of awesome and it starts with a good one: The ABC Murders. In this episode, Poirot receives a message from someone who tells Poirot that in a month’s time (or something like that) he’s going to murder someone with a name that starts with A in a town that starts with A. The police scoff at it and even Hastings and Mabel think it’s just a joke. Until the day arrives and kindly old shop keeper Alice Ascher is brutally murdered in Andover. This is another one of those Christie stories that has had a tremendous impact on crime fiction; it has a very different flavor from a lot of her stories as this novel teases us with the concept of a psychopathic serial killer murdering according to a pattern as a challenge to Poirot. I mean, this story concept has been used in hundreds of movies and television shows and books, I reckon. So far this one is following the story very closely, which is interesting since this is ostensibly a show for kids and it features some pretty brutal murders. All off screen, but still. And as the episode draws to a close, a second letter arrives; next month, the letter is B! 3 stars.
tl;dr – first episode in a multi-part adaptation of The ABC Murders is very promising and extremely faithful to the novel, one of Christie’s most influential. 3 stars.
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