Murder on the Orient Express

Agatha Christie knew the train. She first rode the Simplon Orient Express in 1928, on her first journey alone after her divorce, on her way to Baghdad and the excavation at Ur where she met Max Mallowan. In 1931 she rode it back from Istanbul through a thunderstorm and a flood. The train stopped in the middle of the night, and she wrote to Max Mallowan describing the passengers around her. The estate says some of them, including the woman who became Mrs Hubbard, went into the book.[1]

Two newspaper stories fed the plot. In 1929 the real Orient Express was marooned in a Turkish blizzard for six days. In 1932 the twenty-month-old son of the aviator Charles Lindbergh was kidnapped for ransom and killed. The kidnapping in the novel, of a small girl called Daisy Armstrong, follows the Lindbergh case closely and was written while that case was still open.[2]

The novel ran first in the American Saturday Evening Post in the autumn of 1933 under the title Murder in the Calais Coach. The Collins Crime Club published it in London on 1 January 1934, and Dodd, Mead published it in New York the following month, keeping the American serial title so that readers would not confuse it with Graham Greene's Stamboul Train. Christie dedicated it to Max Mallowan, dating the dedication from the dig at Arpachiyah in Iraq in 1933.[3]

The coach is the through carriage from Istanbul to Calais. Its route would have run through Milan, Lausanne and Paris before the Channel. The snow stops it between Vinkovci and Brod, in what was then Yugoslavia, and the book never leaves that spot. Paris is where everybody is going and stays off the page.[4]

Hercule Poirot has finished a case in Syria and is travelling home. On the Taurus Express to Istanbul he notices two English passengers, Mary Debenham and Colonel Arbuthnot, who behave like strangers and are not. At the Tokatlian Hotel in Istanbul a telegram calls him back to London at once. His friend Monsieur Bouc, a director of the sleeping-car company, finds him a berth in the Istanbul to Calais coach, which is oddly full for December.

An American called Samuel Ratchett, travelling with a secretary, Hector MacQueen, and a valet, Edward Masterman, offers Poirot a large fee to protect him. He has received threatening letters. Poirot refuses. He tells Ratchett he does not like his face.

The train leaves Belgrade and runs into snow in the night. In the morning it is stuck fast between Vinkovci and Brod. Ratchett is dead in his compartment, stabbed twelve times. The door was locked and chained from inside, and the window is open onto snow that shows no footprints. His watch has stopped at a quarter past one.

Bouc asks Poirot to find the killer before the Yugoslav police arrive. Dr Constantine, a Greek doctor on the train, reports that the wounds make no sense. Some are deep and some are shallow. Some were struck by a right hand and some by a left. In the compartment Poirot finds a pipe cleaner, a woman's handkerchief embroidered with the letter H, and a scrap of burned paper. Heat brings up the words that were burned away: the name Daisy Armstrong.

Poirot knows the name. Daisy Armstrong was a small American girl kidnapped and murdered some years before. Her mother died in childbirth from the shock, her father shot himself, and a nursemaid wrongly suspected of helping the kidnapper threw herself from a window. The kidnapper, a gangster called Cassetti, bought his way out of a conviction and vanished. Ratchett was Cassetti.

Poirot questions every passenger in turn. He starts with the conductor Pierre Michel, the secretary MacQueen and the valet Masterman. Then come the loud American widow Mrs Hubbard, the Swedish missionary Greta Ohlsson, and the Russian Princess Dragomiroff with her German maid Hildegarde Schmidt. After them the Hungarian Count and Countess Andrenyi, Colonel Arbuthnot, the American salesman Cyrus Hardman, the Italian Antonio Foscarelli, and Mary Debenham. Each has an alibi supplied by another passenger. Several saw a small dark man in a conductor's uniform who does not exist. Mrs Hubbard says a man was in her compartment in the night, and later finds a bloody knife in her sponge bag.

The luggage search turns up a conductor's uniform in Hildegarde Schmidt's case and a scarlet kimono in Poirot's own. Poirot sits back, thinks, and asks the passengers to gather in the dining car.