Poirot Retrospective #8: Murder on the Orient Express

 

Poirot Retrospective #8: Murder on the Orient Express

Wow, that was good - better than I remembered from this summer even, thanks to all the intervening novels I've read. To be fair, it's probably the most celebrated Poirot of them all (up there with Death on the Nile), and due to the dramatic setting and famous twist ending it's been filmed at least three major times over the years.

Poirot helps out the French army in Syria (part of the infamous French Mandate following the fall of the Ottoman Empire in WWI - Google it) and then boards the Orient Express bound for Calais. He is good friends with a director of the company that runs the Express, yet only barely gets aboard - despite being off season, the train is packed!

Something's afoot...

Of course, as is required, a murder happens - a gentleman that Poirot takes an instant dislike to is bumped off in the night, and the clues and red herrings point every which way. Poirot is stymied at first, but slowly gathers an idea.

This is quintessential Poirot - he sits, ponders, and comes to conclusions rooted in psychology, experience, and circumstance. As he often notes, he begins with a completely blank slate in his mind - anything could be true or false, he assumes people are lying, etc. Sherlock Holmes would approve: Poirot lets the facts decide the matter, without prejudice or premature theory.

The first twist is not a spoiler: the train gets stuck in Yugoslavia by a snow drift across the tracks - as Robert Burns famously said, the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley.

The second twist is really several small twists one after another and I won't say a word to ruin it. Let's just say that they are fairly interesting and ingenious yet make complete sense in retrospect. Yet no reader going in blind is likely to guess.

This novel has a small case of Cabot Cove Syndrome - of allllll the trains that the Orient Express runs, Poirot just happens to get aboard the Murder Train. It's improbable in the extreme, especially when the details of the murder are finally revealed.

But you forgive the book because the setting is so dramatic and constrained, and the solution so interesting.

This is well written, tensely atmospheric, has tons of little details about class, nationality, social station, and so on, and small versions of the Big Messages that Christie occasionally inserts about human nature. I have an idea here that I can't express because it would spoil part of the story, and am hoping to reveal next review.