Christie CatchUp: Murder on the Orient Express

 

Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie

published 1934

 

There was a sudden jerk. Both men swung round to the window, looking out at the long, lighted platform as it slid slowly past them.

The Orient Express had started on its three-days’ journey across Europe.

 

Does your heart thrill to those words? Is it just fans of Golden Age detective fiction, or railway nerds, or is it just me? I first read Murder on the Orient Express as a teenager, and later embarked on a lifetime of travelling around Europe on trains. Every time the train has moved off from a major city, I have thought of these words, which describe the moment perfectly. There is nothing I love better than settling into a night sleeper, and waking up in the middle of the night and peering out the window at some empty station (wondering if someone suspicious will climb down or up) or watching us hurtling through cold dark plains (someone might be going to throw a necklace out the window). All the details came from Christie books first (this and The Mystery of the Blue Train) and were so so familiar to me when I started travelling…

There are a few Christie books with very famous solutions, and this is one of them (Ackroyd, Then There Were None, ABC Murders, Crooked House), and re-reading them can be problematic for that reason. With this one, I always enjoy Raymond Chandler’s verdict: he says the solution ‘is guaranteed to knock the keenest mind for a loop. Only a halfwit could guess it.’ This makes me laugh – because it is the classic (dare I say it, male) response to NOT getting it…

The solution is satisfying and works well the first time round. If you re-read, not so much. Every time I try it there are more questions in my mind.

[slight spoiler

There is more than one person involved in the crime. How when where did they meet to conspire?]

But still - it is very short, you can power through it, and it is STILL very enjoyable when you know what is happening. So – time just to enjoy the details.

Robert Barnard, in his splendid Christie book A Talent to Deceive, said his favourite line in the whole of her oeuvre came Orient Express: ‘Poor creature, she’s a Swede.’

I am very fond of this from Poirot:

‘I am an international detective.’

‘You belong to the League of Nations?’

‘I belong to the world, Madame,’ said Poirot dramatically.

I could find illos for this book till the end of time – nothing much is described but still, we know where we are. When I did my recent talk on Agatha Christie, I found that my draft version mentioned the red kimono with dragons three times, and I ended up taking out all the references to it.  Kimonos feature a lot in the books I read and blog on, and there are a lot of pictures of them – but I have found over the years that it is always hard to find one that exactly represents the description in a book.

Her luggage contained only a chiffon negligee so elaborate as to be more of a tea gown than a dressing gown

There is mention of a ‘shingle cap’ – if you look this up, hilariously, you get an awful lot of pictures of roof tiles and ridges. But it was a headwear item too, for keeping your hairstyle nice overnight:

‘After your nightly brush, pin your waves into place and wear your shingle cap’

’No shingled girl’s trousseau is complete without a few of these charming caps.’ In the smartest hairdressers these caps are being sold from ten shillings to a guinea each, but making them at home , they would work out at about five shillings each. Free pattern here!’

The ‘travel wardrobe’ is from the NYPL collection – it’s from a few years before the date of the book, but was obviously too splendid not to use.

The top picture of the dining car is from the Museum of History for New South Wales, so shows an Australian train.  The other one is less luxurious but I liked the people – it’s from the University of Washington collection, so is an American train.

The photo is actually a 1937 steam engine, being used in 2009 for a Christmas special trip. One can only hope – it was the Christmas Carol Special – that it was less incident-filled and at the same time less stationary than the journey in the book. The photo was taken by Evelyn Simak.

And I can’t not use, yet again, my all-purpose Golden Age train departure/fashionable  lady picture. The picture is Woman in Coat and Hat at train station, from a 1920s fashion magazine, from the NYPL. 

This is a CatchUp Christie post – I am filling in gaps in my coverage of her books – but Murder on the Orient Express did feature in a blog list of ‘Choice holidays from Christie Tours’ a few years ago.

James Bond travels on the Orient Express in this post, and Bond and Christie compete for best train fiction in this unlikely post.