The Christie novels I tend to enjoy most are the ones where the criminal’s trick is so subtle, you don’t realize there was a trick at all until the denouement. While a Christie plot would almost never play out in real life, a clever deception like that feels more realistic than a grand Carr-style locked room. Hannah almost replicates this style, but then veers off the deep end with a slew of unnecessary complications.
The book opens with Poirot having a cup of coffee at his favorite coffeehouse when a woman in obvious distress appears. Poirot tries to aid her, but she rebuffs him, tells him not to look for her killer if she turns up dead, and leaves before Poirot can do anything else. Poirot then learns from his housemate, our narrator and a Scotland Yard detective by the name of Edward Catchpool, that there has been a triple homicide at the Bloxham Hotel where a monogrammed cuff link was found in each victim’s mouth. Poirot deduces that the mysterious woman at the coffee shop is connected to these murders and inserts himself into the case.
The tricks in The Monogram Murders feel like logic puzzles inserted into a book to give Poirot something to deduce, rather than a plan someone trying to get away with murder would actually carry out to try to get away with murder. For instance, culprit seems to have wanted Poirot to get involved in the case. But why would any murderer purposefully involve one of the world’s greatest detectives?
Hannah also breaks a certain detective fiction custom in this book. It’s not an iron rule, but it’s a tradition for a reason. As a result of this break, much of the solution ends up feeling like a bloated, over-complicated, unnecessary mess. This is a custom that Christie herself broke in one of her books, but when Christie broke it, she carried it to its logical extreme and made it the core of the story. Here it’s just one part of the solution, and drags the whole story down.
The clueing also falls short in a few places. While we hear about every physical piece of evidence, the narration sometimes neglects to mention the relevant details, or Poirot has important foreknowledge that he declines to mention. Coincidentally, most of these omitted details relate to the broken custom in the previous paragraph, making it feel that much more shoddily done. There are also a few pieces of evidence and information that are introduced so clunkily it’s obvious that they’ll be relevant to the solution. If they had been handled with a bit more grace, it probably would have been much more surprising and satisfying when they came back in the solution. Finally, there are a few deductions based on word choice or grammatical rules that end up a bit hollow since, while technically correct, they don’t feel like they give enough credit to the vernacular.
There’s one more place I think The Monogram Murders is lacking: the pacing (in some parts). There are a few elements that are introduced too early, and a few that are introduced too late. Some mysterious aspects of the crime are established right before the denouement, so we have no time to stew on them before they’re explained. Conversely, Hannah sometimes tips her hand a bit too soon. For instance, about two-thirds through the book Poirot declares that a certain person’s story is a lie and points out some holes in this person’s story, but then in the denouement Hannah seems to expect us to be shocked and amazed when Poirot declares this person’s story is a lie and points out the holes in it.
I know I’ve been pretty down on The Monogram Murders so far, but now it’s time to turn to the good! Overall, it’s a fun read. While there are a few pacing faux pas, as I mentioned, there are also examples of great plotting. For example, we discover what the titular monograms stand for quite early. I could easily see a weaker writer trying to “hide the ball” for a late-stage reveal, but Hannah is upfront. This works particularly well here because the monograms tie into the backstory behind the crime, which I think is the best part of the book. Hannah doles out tidbits on the motive at the perfect pace to keep you hungry for the next morsel. If she had waited until the later part of the book to reveal the meaning of the monograms and the motive behind the crimes, the story would have been much duller.
The characters are highly entertaining, with enough quirks to be interesting but just constrained enough to feel like you could really meet someone like them. Catchpool’s main personality trait is his exasperation at Poirot for refusing to reveal anything, and this manages to stay entertaining for the duration of the book. Hannah also does a fantastic job characterizing and differentiating the three victims. It can be difficult breathing life into a corpse, so the fact that Hannah was able to do this for three at once is impressive.
Poirot himself is the only Christie character to make an appearance (although Hastings gets a quick mention). He is still the arrogant, meticulous, mustached Belgian you probably know very well. In fact, in a way "Hannah’s Poirot" feels even more like Poirot than "Christie’s Poirot" since Hannah dwells on certain traits of Poirot that Christie mentioned a few times but never really focused on.
While there is a lot about the solution that I don’t like, The Monogram Murders still presents an interesting crime and lots of neat ideas. The ideas don’t quite come together in the proper shape, but I can still appreciate the cleverness behind them. It feels like Hannah approached the plot as an author, rather than as a criminal. This resulted in a fun and enjoyable book that proceeds at a nice clip, but bites off a bit too much than it can chew. The murder plot feels like it was all done to be unraveled at the end, when a premeditated crime should be designed to do the exact opposite.
If you've been itching for more Poirot in your life, or just want to see some neat ideas in action (but not necessarily such a neat execution), then The Monogram Murders is a fine pick-up, but I doubt it’ll join the ranks of your favorite Christie novels.
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