Everyone Is Guilty...

Agatha Christie has been something of a blind spot for me, one of the most famous writers (and probably the most famous crime writer) I had until recently never read.  So thanks go to the colleague who lent me Murder On The Express to correct this!

Murder On The Orient Express is a famous story, with a famous plot; so much so that I approached it knowing the ending. The plot has been the subject of so many homages and parodies over the years that what must have been on first publication an outstanding twist now seems almost hackneyed. This is not necessarily a criticism and could be taken as the opposite. To write something that enters the cultural consciousness to the extent that it is familiar to people who have not read it is a rare achievement.  Basically, everyone dunnit. Spoiler alert (I did that right, yeah?) It does, however, mean that reading it with fresh eyes 80 odd years later is hard; it also means that the book's main asset, it's big reveal denouement, doesn't have quite the same impact.  So what else is there? 


The premise is simple enough. There has been a murder. On the Orient Express. That's actually really all you need to know, and you probably gathered that bit already. The famed detective, Hercule Poirot, happens to be on the train and heads the investigation, working his way through a cast of colourful characters and using tiny clues to piece together what happened.  The style is economical and readable.  Christie is obviously more interested in people than places, as the train and the outside world are described only in as much detail as they need to be, whereas peoples’' actions and speech are paid a lot more attention. 

The cast of characters is made up of a variety of nations (all of them from Europe or the US), which livens up the proceedings. They are fun to read, although they are shameless racial stereotypes.  The Americans are loud and garish, the English are stiff, the Italian is excitable and passionate and so on. The fact there is such a diverse group of people on board leads Poirot to deduce that everyone must have some connection with America, “"that melting pot”", because there could be no other explanation for having such a diverse group of people traveling together - which seems like a bit of a leap.  The stereotypes are not prejudicial exactly but are ever-present.  Indeed, they are made explicit regularly, with the Italian being suspected because stabbing someone is an Italian way of doing these things apparently.  A jarring moment comes when a character says that such horrific crimes as the murdered man has committed would never happen in Germany, which definitely reminds you that you’re reading a book published in the early 1930s.  However, it would be willful to attack the book for using stereotypes.  Aside from the fact that stereotypes are a trope of genre fiction from all eras, it is true that a lot of people, maybe even a majority of Christie'’s readers thought in this way.  It's the way things were in ye olden days.  That doesn'’t exactly excuse it, but at the same time one can'’t hang something for not having modern sensibilities when it is 80 years old.  The real failing in resorting to stereotypes here is that the characters are quite cartoon-like, making it harder to care about them.  They feel like pieces being pushed around in a game.

The plot is ridiculous, which again is something extremely common in genre fiction and doesn't necessarily count against it.  The fun comes from seeing how the crime is solved.  It’'s a little bit top heavy - a lot of the novel is spent showing the interviewing of the suspects and the collection of evidence, and then the whole thing is wrapped up in about 10 pages.  I felt unconvinced that 12 people, even if they all had a motive, would agree that murder was their best option, especially when their connection to the man is quite tenuous in some cases.  This is where the speed of Christie’'s prose works; it doesn'’t allow you to pause for thought until it is finished, which means that for at least while I was reading it my disbelief was suspended.  Which really does sound like faint praise, but it's a lot harder than it looks, like a lot of conjuring tricks.  The conjuring trick is a good analogy really - everyone knows it's make-believe, and the fun is in the reveal; it's just that as with a conjuring trick the pleasure is transitory (and only really works the once...)

Before reading this book I knew nothing about Poirot aside from the fact he has a moustache.  Most detective novels are successful because of their detective.  Even G K Chesterton’s Father Brown intrigues us because of his drabness.  Perhaps the biggest surprise for me with Murder On The Orient Express was that I didn't actually like Poirot very much. He is clever and cultured but he is aloof and infuriating. He refuses to let his colleagues know exactly what he is thinking, preferring to throw them morsels of information whilst deriding their theories. This is fine; that’s true of most literary detectives.  All of the above criticisms can be levelled at the character of Sherlock Holmes for instance, arguably the only literary detective more famous than Poirot. But, somehow, Holmes is a more likeable character. Perhaps this is because he has a more impish sense of humour; perhaps it is also because while Holmes can be cold. he is also a more colourful character, almost vaudeville (think of his disguises) and more importantly for me, more inclusive. Whereas Holmes can be found slumming it in opium dens and mixing with the Victorian underclass, it is hard to imagine Poirot (based on this novel) undertaking any case which does not involve members of the Edwardian era’s respectable society.

Similarly there were one or two moments were I found Christie's tone unlikeable. The talkative American lady who constantly talks about her daughter is the comic relief in the story, but is not unlikeable. So when on more than one occasion the narrative voice describes photos of her daughter as plain-looking and her grandchildren as "particularly ugly" it seems somewhat cruel - the revelation that ‘Mrs Hubbard’ has been a character-disguise by one of the conspirators in the last few pages doesn’'t excuse this.

Murder On The Orient Express is readable and enjoyable, and doesn’'t aim to do any more than that - therefore it succeeds on its own terms.  But I did feel as I was reading it that it has become a victim of its own fame, and of the over-familiarity with the genre it helped create.  The characters do not linger in the mind, and Poirot himself trades on a reputation one never feels is earned in the novel. Perhaps I should watch o0ne of the film versions, because they always seem to have excellent casts...