Andover

Andover is the setting of the first murder in the sequence that gives the novel its alphabetical pattern. Alice Ascher is found dead in her shop, and the discovery of an A.B.C. railway guide beside the case changes the crime’s meaning: what had seemed a familiar, sordid local tragedy becomes a possible sign of a connected series.

The First Murder

The crime is discovered shortly after one o’clock on the morning of June 22, when Police Constable Dover finds the shop door unfastened during his round. He enters believing the premises are empty, then sees Alice Ascher’s body behind the counter. The initial medical estimate places the death several hours earlier, probably while she was reaching for cigarettes on a shelf behind the counter.

Investigators narrow the likely time of the murder using two visits to the shop: one customer bought tobacco at half past five, and another entered shortly after six and thought the shop empty. The inquiry therefore places the crime between those visits. At this early stage, the police have not found anyone who saw Ascher in the neighbourhood.

An Ordinary Crime Becomes a Pattern

The novel first presents the murder as a grim but apparently conventional crime. The narrator, Arthur Hastings, admits that the anonymous letter’s warning about the twenty-first had seemed to him like a coincidence. He had also assumed that Ascher’s drunken husband might have been responsible. Against those expectations, the A.B.C. railway guide is the detail that makes the case newly significant.

The guide lists railway stations in alphabetical order, and its presence beside the victim prompts Hastings to wonder whether the letter and the murder are connected after all. Andover consequently serves not only as the location of a death but as the first point in a pattern whose meaning is still uncertain. The clue does not yet identify the killer; it changes the question investigators and readers must ask, from who killed Alice Ascher to whether the crime was arranged as part of a sequence.