Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie

First published: 1934

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Detective and mystery

Time of plot: 1930’s

Locale: Central Europe

Principal characters

• Hercule Poirot, a Belgian private detective
• M. Bouc, the train company’s director
• Pierre Michel, a conductor on the train
• Dr. Constantine, a Greek physician
• Colonel Arbuthnot, an English gentleman
• Mr. Ratchett, a rich American
• Hector MacQueen, his personal secretary
• Princess Dragomiroff, an elderly Russian aristocrat
• Greta Ohlsson, a Swedish nurse
• Mrs. Hubbard, a loud American woman
• Countess Andrenyi, an American-born noble

The Story:

Hercule Poirot finds himself the uninvited guest at the scene of an elaborately planned murder on wheels. The Belgian detective is making his way from Istanbul, Turkey, to London, and he is looking forward to a leisurely trip and a chance to clear his head, a chance to rest his “little grey cells,” as Poirot refers to his brain.

A good friend of Poirot, M. Bouc, is an administrator with Wagon Lit, the train company that operates the Orient Express. Poirot prefers to travel first class. Because it is winter, off season for tourists, the detective is assured by Bouc that finding a first-class cabin on the train will be easy. To their surprise, the car leaving Istanbul, the Calais Coach, is nearly full. There is, however, one no-show, and Poirot finds himself sharing a compartment with Hector MacQueen, the private secretary to a wealthy American, Mr. Ratchett.

Poirot is introduced by Bouc to Dr. Constantine, a Greek physician, traveling in the next car. On the first night of the journey, as they sit in the dining car, Bouc points out to Poirot the variety of travelers in the dining car: the rich and the poor. Some are English, some American, some French, some Italian, some Russian, some Hungarian—an array of passengers from differing socioeconomic backgrounds and different cultures. Where else in the world, Bouc wonders aloud, could one find such an assortment of people beneath one roof? Yes, Poirot thinks to himself, perhaps only in America.

The first night passes peacefully, and Bouc moves Poirot from his shared cabin with MacQueen to a private one next door to Ratchett. During the second night of the trip, Poirot has trouble sleeping, awakened by voices, service bells summoning conductor Pierre Michel, and thumping on his cabin door. At about 1:15 a.m., Poirot sticks his head out of his cabin and sees a woman wearing a kimono with a dragon print walking down the corridor. He hears his neighbor, Ratchett, tell the conductor in perfect French that nothing is wrong and that he had not meant to ring his service bell. The train is stopped, too, as an avalanche of snow covers the tracks.

Ratchett, Poirot has determined, is an evil man. The evil shows on his face, and Poirot has taken an instant dislike in him. Earlier in the evening, Poirot had been approached by Ratchett and was offered a job—to keep Ratchett alive. Ratchett has been receiving hate mail and otherwise threatening letters. Poirot turns down the offer of employment.

The next day, Ratchett is discovered dead in his cabin, and there are many clues. A pipe cleaner belonging to the Englishman, Colonel Arbuthnot, is found on the floor of the murdered man’s compartment. An expensive lady’s handkerchief, belonging to Princess Dragomiroff, also is found on the floor. The dead man’s watch is in the pocket of his pajamas, broken and stopped at 1:15 a.m. The window of the cabin is open. A button from a conductor’s uniform is found near the bed of Mrs. Hubbard, Ratchett’s American neighbor in the connecting cabin, who had complained of a man lurking in her room during the night.

For Poirot, there are too many clues. Too many clues at a crime scene means tampering, Poirot thinks. How does one separate the real clues from the planted ones? One of the best clues, one that Poirot thinks is real, is a piece of burned paper in an ashtray. The tray has two different types of matches in it. One type of match had also been found in the cabin of the dead man; the other type of match had not. Using wire mesh from a woman’s hatbox, Poirot carefully places the burned paper between two layers of wire mesh and lights a match beneath it to reveal the words once written on the paper. These few words on the burned piece of paper become the best clue, leading Poirot to the dead man’s true identity. Ratchett is, in reality, a killer and kidnapper of children. His real name is Cassetti.

Cassetti had been arrested and acquitted in the infamous Daisy Armstrong kidnapping and murder case in the United States. The kidnapping and murder of Daisy Armstrong destroyed her entire family; her father and mother, an unborn child, and her nursery maid all died as a consequence of this hideous action.

As Poirot inspects the body of the dead man, he thinks Cassetti has finally received justice, if not strictly via the letter of the law. The corpse has twelve dagger wounds, the range in severity of puncture wounds suggesting some made by a right-handed killer, others made by a left-handed killer. Some wounds are deep, while others only break the skin’s surface. After interviewing each passenger in the Calais Coach and after examining everyone’s luggage, Poirot learns several facts that seem unimportant and unrelated. For example, there is a spot of grease on Countess Andrenyi’s passport, partially obscuring her first name. A conductor’s uniform with a missing button is found in the luggage of Greta Ohlsson, a Swedish nurse. Even more interesting, the kimono with the dragon print is found in Poirot’s own luggage.

In the dining car of the Calais Coach aboard the Orient Express, Detective Poirot identifies the killer, but only after he details the evidence and slowly puts the proverbial noose around the neck of the guilty. The kicker, the surprise, is that everyone is guilty: They all did it.

Poirot has been an audience of one surrounded by a cast of twelve killers, each suspect playing a role, acting out his or her part, trying to mislead the detective. From Poirot’s vantage point, he is challenged to match his wits against the collected intelligence of a dozen minds bent on revenge.

Poirot, in the end, reveals two truths: what really happened and the agreed-upon truth that Poirot offers to the killers. Poirot, during his big reveal, presents both possibilities to his cast of suspects; the second possibility is deemed fairer and more just and so becomes the official truth. Cassetti, the murdered killer, had received an alternative form of justice at the hands of those he had victimized by his actions. Although he had been intent on solving the crime aboard the Orient Express, Poirot, now, is not as intent on seeing the guilty punished.

Bibliography

Arnold, Jane. “Detecting Social History: Jews in the Works of Agatha Christie.” Jewish Social Studies 49, nos. 3/4 (Summer/Autumn, 1987): 275-282. Christie’s novels are not character driven, and they are often criticized for their lack of character development and for often reverting to stereotypes. Christie wrote works of entertainment and discouraged scholarly study of her work, yet her writing is nonetheless open to study. Twenty-three Jewish characters appear in her stories, including Murder on the Orient Express.

Bunson, Matthew. The Complete Christie: An Agatha Christie Encyclopedia. New York: Pocket Books, 2001. A comprehensive reference volume that contains alphabetical entries on all characters in Christie’s works, cross-referenced to the works in which they appear; plot synopses; listings of all film, television, and radio adaptations of Christie’s works and of documentaries about Christie; a biography; and a bibliography.

Makinen, Merja. Agatha Christie: Investigating Femininity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Sets out to disprove what many critics have asserted: that Christie created her female characters to be weak and inferior to their male counterparts. Emphasizes the ways in which the female characters play vital roles outside the domestic sphere and therefore challenge traditional notions of femininity.

Osborne, Charles. The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie: A Biographical Companion to the Works of Agatha Christie. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001. Presents a chronological listing of Christie’s works accompanied by biographical notes that place the writings within the context of the events of the author’s life. Includes bibliographical references and an index.

Singer, Eliot A. “The Whodunit as Riddle: Block Elements in Agatha Christie.” Western Folklore 43, no. 3 (July, 1984): 157-171. An analysis of the detective novel as a puzzle or riddle, exploring how a puzzle is solved and offering examples from Christie’s novels, including Murder on the Orient Express.

Thompson, Laura. Agatha Christie: An English Mystery. London: Headline Review, 2007. A comprehensive biography, written with the cooperation of Christie’s family and with full access to the author’s unpublished letters and notebooks. Includes information about Christie’s eleven-day disappearance in 1926 and about the novels she wrote as Mary Westmacott.

Vagstad, Kristi. “Yankees on the Orient Express.” Armchair Detective 28, no. 1 (Winter, 1995): 82-90. Golden age detective fiction is known for its xenophobic tendencies, for stereotyping foreigners as outsiders with undesirable traits. This article explores Christie’s treatment of Americans in Murder on the Orient Express. Christie’s father was an American.

York, R. A. Agatha Christie: Power and Illusion. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Reevaluates Christie’s novels, which traditionally have been described as “cozy” mysteries. Asserts that although these works may appear to depict a stable world of political conservatism, conventional sex and class roles, and clear moral choices, this world is not as safe as it appears to be. Notes how Christie’s mysteries also depict war, social mobility, ambiguous morality, violence, and, of course, murder.