Murder on the Orient Express
Introduction: The Mystery Genre
The mystery genre is fine reading fare for secondary gifted students, including those in the upper middle school grades. The problem with many contemporary adult mystery novels is that they contain graphic violence, sexual situations, and language that is inappropriate for young people. The virtue of the novels of Agatha Christie is that most of the violence, including murders, takes place off the pages of her detective fiction and the language is especially suitable. Despite the fact that Murder on the Orient Express was written in 1933, the novel is surprisingly free of racial, ethnic, and religious stereotypes. The only exception is one character’s disparagement of all things Italian. Readers need to know, however, that in 1933, Italy was ruled with an iron fist by the fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, who was also ruthlessly invading other nations such as Abyssinia (now Ethiopia).
Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie (1890-1976) is universally recognized as the “Queen of Mystery.” Charles Dickens or Jane Austin she is not, but she was remarkably prolific and successful. She wrote at least 80 books and remains incredibly popular. Even though she died in 1976, today her works are outsold worldwide only by The Bible and Shakespeare. One billion of her books have been marketed in the English language and another billion books have been sold in more than 105 foreign languages. Her drama, The Mousetrap, is the longest running play in theatre history, also worldwide. It opened in London in 1952 and is still playing there nightly. She created 19 additional dramas in addition to her detective novels and short story collections. She wrote two memoirs or works of autobiography.
Beyond her writings, Christie was a gifted pianist and vocalist as well as an outstanding amateur archaeologist. She used her talents well. Even her most severe critics gave her credit for devising the most ingenious plots in all of detective fiction. During World War I (also known as The Great War), Christie worked in a pharmaceutical dispensary where she gained a significant knowledge of poisons that she later used in many detective stories. Challenged by her older sister to write a mystery novel, Christie used rare moments of spare time during the war to create her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, which was first published in 1920. Christie classics include Death on the Nile, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Murder in Mesopotamia, Death in the Clouds and Murder at the Vicarage.
Hercule Poirot
Hercule Poirot is Agatha Christie’s most famous creation. The fictional Belgian private detective appears in 33 novels, two plays, and more than 50 short stories. Poirot made his debut in The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) and his final appearance in Curtain (1975). Once a consummate police detective in his Belgian homeland, Poirot escaped to England with other Belgian refugees when their country was invaded by the Germany Army during World War I. Upon his “death” when Curtain was published, Hercule Poirot became the only fictional character ever to receive an obituary on the front page of The New York Times. A man of slight height (5’4”), Poirot possesses a towering intellect. When Murder on the Orient Express was first published in 1934, critics and fans marveled at Poirot’s ability to puzzle out an apparently unsolvable crime.
Background of Murder on the Orient Express
By the time Agatha Christie wrote Murder on the Orient Express, she was an experienced world traveler that enabled her to add exotic foreign locations and glamorous means of transportation to her repertoire of settings in her detective fiction. She and her first husband, aviator Archie Christie, traveled the globe for ten months in 1922, a singular benefit of Archie’s work with a British trade delegation. Agatha was one of the earliest Anglo women ever to be successful on a surfboard, first in South Africa and later in Hawaii. After her first marriage collapsed, she met and married the renowned and later knighted British archaeologist, Sir Max Mallowan. She worked side by side with Mallowan on some of the most important archaeological digs in the Middle East during the middle decades of the 20th Century.
Christie first traveled on the famed Orient Express in 1928 while en route to Bagdad. The Orient Express was then the most famous and romantic train in the world. It was a grand hotel on wheels in the golden age of travel in Europe, Asia, and Africa (particularly Egypt). It became her favorite mode of travel. During one of her Orient Express excursions, Christie and her fellow passengers were stranded aboard an unheated train coach for 24 hours when flooding of the rails prevented forward travel. This experience led to one of Christie’s favorite plot devices, in which travelers are trapped in close quarters. In addition to Murder on the Orient Express, in Death on the Nile (1937) the passengers, including the murderer(s), are confined to a steamer cruising up the Nile in the heart of Egypt. In And Then There Were None (1939) and Evil Under the Sun (1941), the characters are restricted to remote islands. In Death in the Clouds (1937) a small party of passengers, including the murder victim, are restricted to the first-class cabin of a luxury airplane.
Murder on the Orient Express is the only mystery novel that Agatha Christie ever penned that resembles a roman à clef novel, a work of fiction that uses real-life persons and events. The novel’s plot is loosely based on the March, 1932, kidnapping and murder of the son of Charles A. and Anne Morrow Lindbergh. At the time, Charles A. Lindbergh was the most famous person in the world. He was a great American hero who had been selected as Time Magazine’s very first Person of the Year in 1927. The Lindberghs paid an enormous ransom to no avail. The kidnapping was sensationalized by the media to such degree as to then be called the “Crime of the Century.” It provoked the United States Congress to make kidnapping a federal offense.
Murder on the Orient Express was first published in England in 1934 during the era of what is often described as the Golden Age of Mystery Fiction (1920s and 1930s). The novel was published the same year in the United States under the title Murder on the Calais Coach. It is the most famous mystery novel of Christie’s extraordinary oeuvre.
The Plot
The 17 characters in Murder on the Orient Express are a collection of genuine or disguised strangers representing a wide array of ages, classes, occupations, and even nationalities. They are in the single Calais coach and the dining car of the luxury train bound from Istanbul to Paris when the train becomes trapped in a great snowdrift in a remote part of Yugo-Slavia. On the third morning of the rail journey, a murder victim is discovered. The world’s greatest detective, Hercule Poirot, must initially determine the identity of the victim and examine the true identities and backgrounds of the diverse first- and second-class travelers in the Calais coach. He is amused at the presence of too many clues and red herrings deliberately planted to confuse or mislead him.
The murder victim is the wealthy, yet sinister-appearing, American man who is simply known as Mr. Ratchett. Monsieur Bouc, a director of the railway line, the Greek doctor, Constantine, and Poirot work as a party of three to discover the identity of the murderer or murderers. Whom among the remaining diverse characters has killed Ratchett? The brilliance of Hercule Poirot is first noted when he ingeniously reveals that Ratchett is really Cassetti, the underworld crime boss who was responsible for what Christie reveals to be the Armstrong Case, the kidnapping and murder of an American child.
The mystery is divided into three main parts: “The Facts,” “The Evidence,” and “Hercule Poirot Sits Back and Thinks.” The great sleuth’s case is organized much in the manner of a subgenre of detective fiction labeled as the police procedural. While Poirot is a detective of great renown, he approaches the crime of murder very much as a working policeman would. He is methodical, yet he is also given to stellar leaps of intuition and discovery. He ingeniously sorts through clues that are genuine as well as some that are deliberately misleading. He interviews every character in the Calais coach, ranging from a Swedish medical missionary to a Russian princess, and he discovers their secrets.
Christie keeps her readers guessing the guilt or innocence of the primary characters until the final pages of the novel. Murder on the Orient Express may well contain Poirot’s most original denouement in that his “little grey cells” lead him to offer the Orient Express travelers with not one but two possible solutions to solve the crime of murder on the Calais coach. He presents to the cast of surviving characters a choice of which solution to offer the Yugo-Slavian police. Some of Christie’s critics, past and present, reject at least one of Poirot’s solutions as being morally unacceptable. However, Christie’s rare ending argues that the law and justice are not always synonymous.
Home Activities
Read at least one of Agatha Christie’s other famous works of detective fiction such as Death on the Nile. Compare and contrast two cases solved by Hercule Poirot. Consider utilizing a Venn diagram.
Write a character sketch of one of the passengers on the Calais coach based on the details Christie provides within the text of Murder on the Orient Express.
Using Internet searches, research and write about the famed luxury travel train, the Orient Express, or the Lindbergh kidnapping case. Internet searches may also lead inquisitive students to learn about Agatha Christie’s most famous case, her own real-life disappearance for eleven days in December of 1926. The 95-year-old case has never been solved. Write a sensational news story about the author’s disappearance that might have appeared in tabloids of that era.
Draw a sketch of the rooms and compartments of the passengers aboard the Calais coach. Who slept where?
Create a map of Europe that notes the countries and great cities through which the Orient Express travels en route from Istanbul to Paris.
Enter in a detective journal vocabulary from detective fiction that may be encountered for the first time. Such words and phrases include sleuth, conundrum, police procedural, red herrings, and roman à clef. What is the etymology of these terms?
Enjoy one of at least three movie versions of Murder on the Orient Express. The 1974 British film, starring Albert Finney as Hercule Poirot, is the only cinema treatment of her crime novels that Agatha Christie truly enjoyed. See also the BBC TV version (2007), starring David Suchet, and the most recent treatment, starring Kenneth Branagh (20th Century Fox, 2017). Which film is the most faithful to Christie’s original novel?
Finally, readers may want to pen brand new mystery adventures for juvenile sleuths such as Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys that occur aboard trains, boats, airplanes, or on remote islands.
Christie, Agatha. Murder on the Orient Express. New York: William Morrow, 2017.
