The police steadily plough through the process of amassing clues, whilst Poirot focusses on what today's crime novelists would call the forensic psychology aspect of the case, trying to work out what it could be that motivates the killer. So Christie has to play a few tricks here to finagle Poirot into investigating a set-up that rapidly turns into a template for so many later serial-killer stories - victims widely separated in location, social class and personal situation, but linked by a bizarre "signature" element - in this case Alice Asscher in Andover, Betty Barnard in Bexhill, and so on, are all found with an "ABC Railway Guide" next to them. Serial-killer stories and golden-age private detectives don't often intersect, for obvious reasons - tracking down a serial killer normally requires the kind of large-scale teamwork that makes police-procedurals so interesting.
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