RECONSTRUCTING THE CRIME: THE USE OF PAST TENSES IN THE

MONOGRAM MURDERS

Introduction
The novel starts with a woman called Jennie who finds Poirot in Pleasant’s Coffee
House. She announces to him that she might be murdered. Before Poirot can divulge this
information to Catchpool, the latter informs him of three murders that took place in the
Bloxham Hotel on the same evening. Normally, murders are straightforward, but this crime is
different: all three victims were killed in their own rooms on three separate floors at
seemingly the same time. Poirot and Catchpool investigate this crime and seek to reconstruct
it in order to apprehend the culprit. The aim of this thesis is therefore to analyse the past tense
use for their functionality and semantic meaning.
Information that is obtained through the analysis serves to aid the investigation in the
novels to reconstruct the crime which occurred at the Bloxham Hotel. The narrative consists
of the investigation fabula and the crime fabula, although both fabulas are interlinked in one
syuzhet. For the sake of clarity, the syuzhet is the plot which constitutes the manner in which
the narrative is told, i.e. by using specific past tenses and achronological storytelling. Chapter
22 up until the Epilogue of TMM and MeM provide the answer to the reconstruction of the
crime, therefore they are not analysed, as they already contain the entirety of the
chronological projection of events. Moreover, an in-depth examination of the motive of the
murders will not be addressed in its entirety, as this encompasses most of the novels and is
also, for the most part, irrelevant to the physical crime that took place. As such, a graph of the
timeline of these novels is needed to visually represent the sequence of events where the one
fabula (with the help of the overall syuzhet) reconstructs the other fabula.

Discussion
In Nancy Ducane’s case, she knows all of the people involved: the three victims and
Jennie Hobbs, who all come from Great Holling. She has an alibi which consists of her being
at her friend’s house between 18:00 and 22:00. In Samuel Kidd’s case, he finds Catchpool
outside of the Bloxham Hotel to tell him that he might have seen the killer running out of the
hotel. He also provides the clue that Nancy Ducane, whom he saw running away, had two
hotel keys with her. No alibi was given for Samuel Kidd’s whereabouts, as Catchpool and
Poirot saw no connection between him and any of the victims. It has already been noted that
the accounts of Samuel Kidd and Nancy Ducane are juxtapositional. If Samuel Kidd’s
account of Nancy Ducane is true.
Moreover, if Samuel Kidd’s account is false, it implies that Samuel Kidd has a direct
involvement in the murders. In Jennie’s case, it is necessary to note that she, of all three
suspects, has an alibi that can be corroborated by Poirot himself. At the time of the murders,
as established between E3C and E10C, Jennie was at Pleasant’s Coffee House with Poirot.
The reason for her suspicion is the grammatical error in the extract in (38) which implies that
she has first-hand knowledge of the murders. This means that the murders had to have
occurred before she arrived at the restaurant to talk to Poirot. The inaccuracy of the time of
Jennie’s meeting with Poirot and the fact that the murders had to have happened at least 30
minutes before (as it takes no less than 30 minutes to travel between the hotel and the
restaurant) implies that the entire timeframe set out by E7.2I is erroneous. The original
creation of the timeframe was due to circumstantial evidence: the note announcing the
victims’ deaths. If no note had been left, the original timeframe would have been 16:00-
20:30, as established by the police doctor (E6I).
This modification of the timeline can also be proven if the reader takes into account
that the victims did not eat the afternoon tea delivered at 19:15 (E3C). The delivery of the
food in the first place was not for the sake of ordering food, but to have a reliable eye-
witness. In addition to the event of E3C, the three victims are seen by Rafal Bobak, but he is
one of the staff members that saw them only once, alluding to the fact that the man and two
women he saw in the room might not have been the victims. This presents a conundrum as to
who the people were. This is because a large amount of evidence points to the notion that the
victims were killed before the food arrived. Thomas Brignell, who is the only member of
staff to have seen one of the victims twice, has already refused to give a full account of his
two meetings with Richard Negus, as he doubts that he spoke to the same man twice. The
man who thus had a direct involvement in the murders was Samuel Kidd, who impersonated
Richard Negus in order to confuse the staff members into thinking the victims’ murders were
committed later than they were.
He and Nancy Ducane impersonated Richard Negus and Harriet Sippel respectively,
along with an already-deceased Ida Gransbury, to trick Rafal Bobak into believing that the
three people before him are the three victims that will be found after 20:00 by Lazzari. If the
abovementioned case is true, it would mean that the majority of evidence and events gathered
and analysed were in fact done after the murders occurred. In this regard, the murders are no
longer arbitrarily placed in the middle of the crime area timeline after witnesses saw the
victims alive; it is, in fact, the first event that occurs on Thursday which has relevance to the
crime scene in its entirety. In Figure 7, above, the course of events are thus placed in the
order in which they really occurred. For the most part, some events that are time-specific tend
to stay in place, whereas timeless or contextual-specific events are placed in relation to
logical chronology. An example of context-specific events are the murders and the cufflinks.
It is not possible to insert the cufflinks into the mouths of the victims, and then murder them.
Therefore, some events, like the cufflinks and the murders themselves follow a logical
sequence, albeit changed due to the earlier modification to the murder timeframe. Jennie had
arranged for the victims to stay at the hotel and had killed them one by one. As accomplices,
Samuel Kidd and Nancy Ducane sought to produce an alibi for Jennie by manipulating the
timeframe in which the murders were committed, thereby putting her far away from the hotel
and under the eyes of Poirot himself. It is thus through the usage of contextuallybased past
tenses on a timeline that has provided the answer for Catchpool and Poirot. A modified graph
(Figure 8, overleaf) provides the final layout of the crime fabula timeline.

Conclusion
The methodology was used to analyse smaller events in terms of their past tense use
and were placed within the context of larger events, using Reichenbach’s timeline of tenses
as the foundation of the two fabula timelines. The syuzhet that has been analysed in the form
of relevant examples provided the tools to create two distinct fabulas that influenced each
other; the visible investigation was created by the crime that was committed, and the act of
reconstructing the crime, in turn, created the investigation.
The importance of perspective has been shown in the analysis of the novels. The
linear (or sequential) events in the narrative, albeit achronologically, has provided the reader
with enough supplemental information. This information has been, through the analysis of
past tenses on a timeline, sorted to differentiate between contextual and/or relevant clues on
the one hand, and irrelevant and/or false fabula components on the other.

Bibliography
Hannah, S. 2014. The Monogram Murders. London: Harper Collins Publishers.
Meyer-Viol, W.P.M. & H.S. Jones. 2011. Reference time and the English past tenses.
Linguistics and Philosophy 34(3).
Nelles, W. and L. Williams. 2018. Narrative order in the first-person novel. Poetics Today
39(1):131-158.
Walsh, R. 2001. Fabula and Fictionality in Narrative Theory. Style 35(4):592-606.
Nelles, W. and L. Williams. 2018. Narrative order in the first-person novel. Poetics Today
39(1):131-158.
Molendijk A., H. de Swart, C. Vetters, A. Borillo, M. Bras, A. Le Draoulec, L. Vieu, H.
Verkuyl and C. Vet. 2004. Meaning and use of past tenses in discourse. In F. Corblin
and H. de Swart (eds.). 2004. The Handbook of French Semantics. Stanford: CSLI
Publications. pp. 271-308