Which A.B.C. Murders recording should you buy?
A new star-cast production arrived in late 2025 and now sits directly above the long-standing Hugh Fraser reading — plus a graded reader and a BBC play under near-identical titles.
Agatha Christie · 4 recordings on Audible UK
Short answer
Hugh Fraser for the novel. He read most of the Poirot canon and this is the complete text. The Peter Dinklage production is new, starry and worth hearing, but it is a cast adaptation at three-quarters the length. The 4-hour Roger May listing is a Collins learner's reader, not Christie's text — and at four hours it looks exactly like a normal abridgement.
Every recording, compared
| Narrator | Length | Type | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hugh Fraser Our pick | 6 hrs | Complete novel | Released 2006. Fraser played Hastings on television and reads the largest share of the Poirot novels. |
| Peter Dinklage, Himesh Patel and Sam Claflin, with a full cast | 4 hrs 44 mins | Audible Original, full cast | Released October 2025. The newest thing on this listing and easy to mistake for the definitive version because it is top of the search results. |
| Roger May | 4 hrs 4 mins | Collins graded reader (Level 4, B2) | NOT the novel. Audible's own product slug says "Level-4-Upper-Intermediate-b2". A simplified retelling for learners of English. |
| Full cast with John Moffatt and Philip Jackson | 1 hr 27 mins | BBC full-cast dramatisation | Under ninety minutes. Jackson played Inspector Japp on television. |
