Murder on the Orient Express
1933
- agatha christie
- private investigator
- p.i.
- hercule poirot
- detective
- murder
- mystery
- juvenile
- humour
- fiction
The story
***While en route from Syria to Paris, in the middle of a freezing winter's night, the Orient Express is stopped dead in its tracks by a snowdrift.*** Passengers awake to find the train still stranded and to discover that a wealthy American has been brutally stabbed to death in his private compartment. Incredibly, that compartment is locked from the inside. With no escape into the wintery landscape the killer must still be on board. ***Fortunately, the brilliant Belgian inspector Hercule Poirot is also on board, having booked the last available berth.*** ***Murder on the Orient Express is one of Agatha Christie’s most famous novels***, owing no doubt to a combination of its romantic setting and the ingeniousness of its plot; its non-exploitative reference to the sensational kidnapping and murder of the infant son of Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh only two years prior; and a popular ***1974 film adaptation, starring Albert Finney as Poirot - one of the few cinematic versions of a Christie work that met with the approval, however mild, of the author herself.***
What it’s like
Snow-muffled stillness and warm lamplit interiors: a sleeper train halted in a white wilderness, its wood-panelled corridors, brass fittings and cramped compartments glowing against the cold dark beyond the glass. The prose is brisk, witty and conversational, carried mostly by dialogue as a crowd of well-dressed travellers is interviewed one by one in a dining car thick with cigarette smoke and gossip. Tone is cool and playful, with a dry comic streak in the fussy, vain character sketches and a steady, orderly rhythm that tightens as the puzzle clicks into place. Its emotional register stays at a tidy remove, so the death is a clinical affair. The violence is a single brutal stabbing, described briefly and without gore, and the tension is a matter of puzzlement rather than dread. There is no sexual content and little cruelty on the page. It suits a rainy Sunday, a long train journey, or an evening with a cup of tea, and it is for readers who enjoy a classic closed-circle puzzle, sharp social observation and an elegant, unhurried sense of mischief.
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